The Politics of Critical Theory: Language/Discourse/Society. (Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 2004).
This book offers itself as an intellectual chart, its territory of reference the vertiginous streams and valleys of “Western Marxism.” This tradition has often been too easily dismissed by marxists, Snedeker argues, and Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism provides him a central example of this tendency. At the same time, he also urges the case for revising its canon. To this end, the author dedicates his final chapter and concluding remarks to a forgotten American theorist, Oliver Cox, and his long attempt to have reconciled marxist thought and the political urgency of the civil rights moment. As a theorist, Cox strove to dispel any simple moral understanding of racism by contextually theorizing racism’s relation to capital and class struggle. As such, his work proves illustrative for the problems Snedeker discusses in his own project, as does the mournful fact of Cox’s eventual intellectual reversals.
The tone of regret betrayed in the account of the latter is particularly important. Snedeker portrays Cox’s final theoretical recuperation into a more liberal, reformist position as the product of growing frustrations, both with more conservative strains in the civil rights movement itself but also with the violent, confrontational strategies of the black power movement. From the pantheon of thinkers touched upon in its introductory breadth, this book nevertheless seems to find in Cox’s particular experience-in particular the anxiety it generates for marxist political projects-the predominant motivation for its theoretical engagements. We will expand on the substance of the latter below, but there is enough indication of this purpose to be drawn from Snedeker’s title: to describe and evaluate a critical theory that could be distinguishably marked as leftist. This is a book about the way intellectuals can make a difference in contemporary struggles for social redress and radical change.
Snedeker’s expository is thus dedicated to the several intellectual movers within “Western Marxism.” In addition, he broaches an advanced and pressing discussion for the left and uses it as the red thread for his often condensed remarks and critiques of Lukacs, Lefebvre, Althusser, Adorno, Habermas, and others. Snedeker finds that what must be said about all these thinkers assembled in this book is that they fail to think the problem of ontology, in all its enormous bearing we may suppose it to have on questions of organization, discipline, and liberatory struggle.
It comes as a paradox within this argument then that these figures were also those who opened that same problem in the most radical manner, specifically by rigorously theorizing the perils of the “timeless” bourgeois subject. This emphasis has something to do with why Anderson’s rebuttals to this tradition are junked so early in the book. Anderson’s objections to “Western Marxism” as a kind of elitist sandbox for excessively opaque prose stylists, its “theoreticism,” rest on a simplistic assumption about human beings in their ability to make judicious political choices. Anderson casts their observations on subjectivity as a political feint and this tradition of marxist thought as irresponsible. Consequently, says Snedeker, he suffers from precisely what he does not want to read. It is all well and fine to press for the pragmatic dimensions facing a contemporary radical, but the “Western Marxists” were not wrong in stressing how subjectivity might prove a block to radicalizing a radical in the first place.
Or, they were not entirely wrong. Snedeker has a tendency to put his arguments like this, with mild qualifiers. He mollifies because he finds these same thinkers falling in a similar trap as Anderson’s. For him, their concern with the subject causes them to put out at too great a distance from the valuable insights of a more orthodox marxism and its analysis of political economy. In a certain sense, the latter analysis, in describing the systematic, blindly operational quality of a society organized around capitalism, already begged for clearer explanations as to how subjectivity participated in similarly systematic ways. By failing to marry their insights with the earlier tradition, the collective gesture of “Western Marxism” produces a serious collective failure: another version of an untheorized, unhistoricized-bourgeois-and, thus, universal subject. Here is then also an acknowledged recuperation, to a degree, of Anderson’s position.
Doubtless, this is an argument for a middle ground, revolving about Snedeker’s earnest interest to describe the proper limits of a theory and practice that would be, politically speaking, reciprocal. As a gesture toward these ends, the second chapter discusses George Lukacs, the default forefather of “Western Marxism.” Now, it would not be a stretch to suggest Snedeker feels great affinities with Lukacs, more than any of the other marxists, and thus wants to blow off the dust that’s gathered round the thinker’s great books (now not just the forgotten post-1930s work, one fears). From where comes this proclivity for the oldest of the “Western Marxists”? Not a little uncannily, Lukacs’ “subject-object dialect,” which Snedeker invokes variously and explains-briefly-shares in design and spirit with the major claims we have presented as Snedeker’s major charge to critical theory. Lukacs’s “reflective” allegiances, that is to say, stage a useful confrontation between subjectivity and the violent matrix of forces by which society reproduces itself.
The great benefit of such a model has to do with its unique fidelity to marxian political economy. Snedeker is completely forthcoming about what he means by the latter: Kapital, “the most complete and authoritative statement of Marx’s mature position” (5). And Lukacs’ scions, it seems, create problems in scrapping this analytical tradition down to little more than background noise-or ominous and obscure causal machinery-leaving its critical insights relatively unintegrated into their research on capitalist subjects. Of course, Lukacs is not free from fault himself, and Snedeker acknowledges in particular his unclarified overvalidations of rationalist programs inspired by that same forgotten scientific analysis to put in effect a radical practice.
This should not, adds Snedeker, be held against him, but rather we should remember the historical moment in which Lukacs responded, formulating and defending his ideas, but also reconsidering and criticizing them in the defining gesture of a critical theorist (A methodological history of this practice, rich despite its brevity, appears in the introduction by Michael E. Brown). And it is valuable that we remember the particular historical problems in which Lukacs anxiously but valiantly brought his elaborations of Marx’s thought to light. One would ask no less for Althusser, Adorno, or even Marx, if only for our deserved resentment at the facile way in which cults of personality distract from the awesome responsibility of engaging with the actual intellectual work (and here the great test case must be Martin Heidegger, as Snedeker seems to recognize in his emphasis that Lukacs condemned the work rather than the member of the Nazi party).
Nevertheless, that Snedeker goes no further than this in discussing the limits of Lukacs’ work does seem an odd silence. The gray areas surrounding the traditions of the Enlightenment and the left’s participation in that tradition would appear from Snedeker’s representations to be the very issue between Lukacs and the bearers of his intellectual inheritance. But alongside Lukacs’ ire for what he termed an “irrationalism” in the left’s philosophical engagements-including thinkers such as Adorno and Sartre-there is little complimentary consideration of what these same thinkers may have grown to suspect about Lukacs’ work. This part of Snedeker’s commentary then seems most notable in what it passes over. This is to say, in other words, that little or no explanation exists for how Lukacs’ subject-object dialectic could answer the most devastating political assaults on rationalism conceived in the twentieth century.
But perhaps this problem is of lesser moment for a work whose theoretical interests are largely analytical. In Snedeker’s own words, his project involves “building analytic links [from theories of subjectivity] to the contradictions of the existing forces and relations of production, with a focus on the relations of commodity production and capitalist accumulation” (6). Most admirable in this assessing of the intellectual’s work and responsibility, Snedeker carefully tries to grant them as much license as is politically feasible. And thus he again writes:
I want to show, for the same theorists listed as members of the tradition of Western Marxism, the intellectual basis of their practical irrelevance. The value of this inquiry lies, beyond its disclosure of a fundamental meta-theoretical problem, in its capacity to make a case for the relative autonomy of theoretical work within the epistemological requirements of an adequate relation of theory and practice. (4)
Also, in the struggle marked by these assertions we are wise to read that same anxiety which causes Snedeker to visit Cox’s career at the book’s end. And no less of this persuasion is the odd caesura that is the chapter discussing Edward Said. Here, Snedeker reiterates not only the value of Said’s work but turns particularly on the problems of Said’s belief that the critic’s alienation from society was a guarantor of his anti-hegemonic insight. This argument is, of course, quite romantic in its appeal to the value of intellectual isolation, a notion that remains fearlessly beholden to a humanism that undermines radical (because) collective praxis.
Does Snedeker’s work then avoid these problems? This is not clear from the “adequate relation” he promotes by contrast, a mysterious measure governing “practical” epistemological concerns. For what is this relation which he arrests, as Derrida might have put it, in his assurance to designate theoretical activity that is “adequate” to a marxist project? Or, put more bluntly, what determines this adequacy in such a way as to leave the intellectual’s position a responsible one and, perhaps different from Said’s viewpoint, a “relatively autonomous” one?
To address suitably these questions seems only too likely to return us to our prior confusion surrounding the account of Lukacs’ reflective theory and the classical model of thought which provides its basis.
The uncertainty attending this aspect of Snedeker’s presentation may have to do with the ambitious task he has at least begun to set himself in this book. Again, that task would be to give the left a place within critical theory. And certainly his account wants to recognize the socio-historical complications through which such a purpose never ceases to be inflected. But is it not also the case that the stolid mechanisms of rational thought are inevitably bound to the ontological assumptions which prove so intolerable, so bourgeois? Would this susceptibility adhere not only to the hallowed resources of explanation and analysis but-equally inevitable-to their subspecies such as critical, self-reflective explanation? Though Snedeker’s own argument would testify to this very difficulty, he leaves the distinct impression that there is a privileged because “adequate” political approach to choose all the same, one that can therefore only be, ultimately, a rational one.
But this theoretical quibble should not detract from the book’s lucid illustration of and earnest engagement with a difficult and rich tradition. This critique provides convenient breadth in its engagement and, as argument and method flows together, in its staging a radically challenging consideration of critical theory.
Brian Meredith is a PhD student at the University of Florida working in Critical Theory and 18th-Century English, Modern Irish, and Scottish literatures.
The Politics of Critical Theory
The Politics of Critical Theory: Language/Discourse/Society. (Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 2004).
This book offers itself as an intellectual chart, its territory of reference the vertiginous streams and valleys of “Western Marxism.” This tradition has often been too easily dismissed by marxists, Snedeker argues, and Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism provides him a central example of this tendency. At the same time, he also urges the case for revising its canon. To this end, the author dedicates his final chapter and concluding remarks to a forgotten American theorist, Oliver Cox, and his long attempt to have reconciled marxist thought and the political urgency of the civil rights moment. As a theorist, Cox strove to dispel any simple moral understanding of racism by contextually theorizing racism’s relation to capital and class struggle. As such, his work proves illustrative for the problems Snedeker discusses in his own project, as does the mournful fact of Cox’s eventual intellectual reversals.
The tone of regret betrayed in the account of the latter is particularly important. Snedeker portrays Cox’s final theoretical recuperation into a more liberal, reformist position as the product of growing frustrations, both with more conservative strains in the civil rights movement itself but also with the violent, confrontational strategies of the black power movement. From the pantheon of thinkers touched upon in its introductory breadth, this book nevertheless seems to find in Cox’s particular experience-in particular the anxiety it generates for marxist political projects-the predominant motivation for its theoretical engagements. We will expand on the substance of the latter below, but there is enough indication of this purpose to be drawn from Snedeker’s title: to describe and evaluate a critical theory that could be distinguishably marked as leftist. This is a book about the way intellectuals can make a difference in contemporary struggles for social redress and radical change.
Snedeker’s expository is thus dedicated to the several intellectual movers within “Western Marxism.” In addition, he broaches an advanced and pressing discussion for the left and uses it as the red thread for his often condensed remarks and critiques of Lukacs, Lefebvre, Althusser, Adorno, Habermas, and others. Snedeker finds that what must be said about all these thinkers assembled in this book is that they fail to think the problem of ontology, in all its enormous bearing we may suppose it to have on questions of organization, discipline, and liberatory struggle.
It comes as a paradox within this argument then that these figures were also those who opened that same problem in the most radical manner, specifically by rigorously theorizing the perils of the “timeless” bourgeois subject. This emphasis has something to do with why Anderson’s rebuttals to this tradition are junked so early in the book. Anderson’s objections to “Western Marxism” as a kind of elitist sandbox for excessively opaque prose stylists, its “theoreticism,” rest on a simplistic assumption about human beings in their ability to make judicious political choices. Anderson casts their observations on subjectivity as a political feint and this tradition of marxist thought as irresponsible. Consequently, says Snedeker, he suffers from precisely what he does not want to read. It is all well and fine to press for the pragmatic dimensions facing a contemporary radical, but the “Western Marxists” were not wrong in stressing how subjectivity might prove a block to radicalizing a radical in the first place.
Or, they were not entirely wrong. Snedeker has a tendency to put his arguments like this, with mild qualifiers. He mollifies because he finds these same thinkers falling in a similar trap as Anderson’s. For him, their concern with the subject causes them to put out at too great a distance from the valuable insights of a more orthodox marxism and its analysis of political economy. In a certain sense, the latter analysis, in describing the systematic, blindly operational quality of a society organized around capitalism, already begged for clearer explanations as to how subjectivity participated in similarly systematic ways. By failing to marry their insights with the earlier tradition, the collective gesture of “Western Marxism” produces a serious collective failure: another version of an untheorized, unhistoricized-bourgeois-and, thus, universal subject. Here is then also an acknowledged recuperation, to a degree, of Anderson’s position.
Doubtless, this is an argument for a middle ground, revolving about Snedeker’s earnest interest to describe the proper limits of a theory and practice that would be, politically speaking, reciprocal. As a gesture toward these ends, the second chapter discusses George Lukacs, the default forefather of “Western Marxism.” Now, it would not be a stretch to suggest Snedeker feels great affinities with Lukacs, more than any of the other marxists, and thus wants to blow off the dust that’s gathered round the thinker’s great books (now not just the forgotten post-1930s work, one fears). From where comes this proclivity for the oldest of the “Western Marxists”? Not a little uncannily, Lukacs’ “subject-object dialect,” which Snedeker invokes variously and explains-briefly-shares in design and spirit with the major claims we have presented as Snedeker’s major charge to critical theory. Lukacs’s “reflective” allegiances, that is to say, stage a useful confrontation between subjectivity and the violent matrix of forces by which society reproduces itself.
The great benefit of such a model has to do with its unique fidelity to marxian political economy. Snedeker is completely forthcoming about what he means by the latter: Kapital, “the most complete and authoritative statement of Marx’s mature position” (5). And Lukacs’ scions, it seems, create problems in scrapping this analytical tradition down to little more than background noise-or ominous and obscure causal machinery-leaving its critical insights relatively unintegrated into their research on capitalist subjects. Of course, Lukacs is not free from fault himself, and Snedeker acknowledges in particular his unclarified overvalidations of rationalist programs inspired by that same forgotten scientific analysis to put in effect a radical practice.
This should not, adds Snedeker, be held against him, but rather we should remember the historical moment in which Lukacs responded, formulating and defending his ideas, but also reconsidering and criticizing them in the defining gesture of a critical theorist (A methodological history of this practice, rich despite its brevity, appears in the introduction by Michael E. Brown). And it is valuable that we remember the particular historical problems in which Lukacs anxiously but valiantly brought his elaborations of Marx’s thought to light. One would ask no less for Althusser, Adorno, or even Marx, if only for our deserved resentment at the facile way in which cults of personality distract from the awesome responsibility of engaging with the actual intellectual work (and here the great test case must be Martin Heidegger, as Snedeker seems to recognize in his emphasis that Lukacs condemned the work rather than the member of the Nazi party).
Nevertheless, that Snedeker goes no further than this in discussing the limits of Lukacs’ work does seem an odd silence. The gray areas surrounding the traditions of the Enlightenment and the left’s participation in that tradition would appear from Snedeker’s representations to be the very issue between Lukacs and the bearers of his intellectual inheritance. But alongside Lukacs’ ire for what he termed an “irrationalism” in the left’s philosophical engagements-including thinkers such as Adorno and Sartre-there is little complimentary consideration of what these same thinkers may have grown to suspect about Lukacs’ work. This part of Snedeker’s commentary then seems most notable in what it passes over. This is to say, in other words, that little or no explanation exists for how Lukacs’ subject-object dialectic could answer the most devastating political assaults on rationalism conceived in the twentieth century.
But perhaps this problem is of lesser moment for a work whose theoretical interests are largely analytical. In Snedeker’s own words, his project involves “building analytic links [from theories of subjectivity] to the contradictions of the existing forces and relations of production, with a focus on the relations of commodity production and capitalist accumulation” (6). Most admirable in this assessing of the intellectual’s work and responsibility, Snedeker carefully tries to grant them as much license as is politically feasible. And thus he again writes:
Also, in the struggle marked by these assertions we are wise to read that same anxiety which causes Snedeker to visit Cox’s career at the book’s end. And no less of this persuasion is the odd caesura that is the chapter discussing Edward Said. Here, Snedeker reiterates not only the value of Said’s work but turns particularly on the problems of Said’s belief that the critic’s alienation from society was a guarantor of his anti-hegemonic insight. This argument is, of course, quite romantic in its appeal to the value of intellectual isolation, a notion that remains fearlessly beholden to a humanism that undermines radical (because) collective praxis.
Does Snedeker’s work then avoid these problems? This is not clear from the “adequate relation” he promotes by contrast, a mysterious measure governing “practical” epistemological concerns. For what is this relation which he arrests, as Derrida might have put it, in his assurance to designate theoretical activity that is “adequate” to a marxist project? Or, put more bluntly, what determines this adequacy in such a way as to leave the intellectual’s position a responsible one and, perhaps different from Said’s viewpoint, a “relatively autonomous” one?
To address suitably these questions seems only too likely to return us to our prior confusion surrounding the account of Lukacs’ reflective theory and the classical model of thought which provides its basis.
The uncertainty attending this aspect of Snedeker’s presentation may have to do with the ambitious task he has at least begun to set himself in this book. Again, that task would be to give the left a place within critical theory. And certainly his account wants to recognize the socio-historical complications through which such a purpose never ceases to be inflected. But is it not also the case that the stolid mechanisms of rational thought are inevitably bound to the ontological assumptions which prove so intolerable, so bourgeois? Would this susceptibility adhere not only to the hallowed resources of explanation and analysis but-equally inevitable-to their subspecies such as critical, self-reflective explanation? Though Snedeker’s own argument would testify to this very difficulty, he leaves the distinct impression that there is a privileged because “adequate” political approach to choose all the same, one that can therefore only be, ultimately, a rational one.
But this theoretical quibble should not detract from the book’s lucid illustration of and earnest engagement with a difficult and rich tradition. This critique provides convenient breadth in its engagement and, as argument and method flows together, in its staging a radically challenging consideration of critical theory.
Brian Meredith is a PhD student at the University of Florida working in Critical Theory and 18th-Century English, Modern Irish, and Scottish literatures.