Abstract
There is a paragraph right at the beginning on the fragility of social life, which I like very much.
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Rodrigo writes: Social life is a delicate and complex achievement. Normally, the everyday surface of social institutions and practices makes us forget that the seemingly unitary and durable character of the social world is inherently fragile, without fixed and ultimate foundations. This sense of fragility circulates discretely, almost silently until something breaks and, like a seismic event, disturbs the common sense of order […] This is the moment of crisis: the moment at which the world around us becomes problematic and loses its character as a unitary and natural phenomenon. The sense of distress, discontinuity and uncertainty all concur for crisis to become a moment ripe for questioning the conventional character of social norms and the intelligibility of social facts […] This is the moment of critique: the moment at which subjects claim the right to interrogate the normativity currently in place, and perform actions that contribute to reveal society’s inner fissures and contradictions.
The book is written in a socio-theoretic style that is somewhat timeless and dispassionate. It is addressed to the constants of social life itself. Its meaning, however, eludes us if we do not also pay attention to its more timely qualities. On the more subjective side of life, it expresses a certain sensibility, an attitude to life, which Cordero is communicating to his readers and at the same time developing within himself. It is one that is prepared to face up to the fragility, the precariousness, the vulnerability of human institutions and associations. On the more objective side, the book offers a timely depiction of a fragility that is currently visible in some or many of the major institutions and movements of the current period.
There is a qualification Cordero makes to his initial statement about the movement from fragility to crisis to critique. It is that crisis situations do not always lead to critique or to processes of questioning that open vistas for social transformation. On the contrary, he argues that the experience of crisis may be normalised through technocratic responses that jeopardise the possibilities of normative innovation, and may be dissolved into what he provocatively calls (drawing from Hegel) ‘the inwardness of pure subjectivity’, that is to say, if I understand him correctly, into a subjectivism or obsession with subjectivity that is separated from the practical struggles of life. Indeed much of Cordero’s book is actually about the divorce between the experience of crisis and the practice of critique. This is, for me, where his work becomes most absorbing.
It is difficult not to situate this book in the current crisis of institutional and social life being expressed in the rise of right wing populism in many parts of the world, including the USA and Europe, and in the corresponding decline of socialist, social democratic and centre parties. When someone like myself reads this book today – a British citizen whose immigrant father was ‘naturalised’ British in the 1950s, a European citizen with a right both to a European passport and to a bundle of other rights (civil, political, social, cosmopolitan) that flow from European citizenship, and perhaps too a world-citizen whose consciousness is partly shaped by the framework of universal rights and responsibilities which has unevenly but determinately evolved in the postwar global era and by the patchwork of protections that has accompanied and made possible this framework, the book seems so contemporary. Sociology’s classical analysis of and protest against the violence and misery caused by capitalism has never for one moment lost its pertinence, but the development of half-way civilised institutions at the levels of civil society, the rule of law, the nation state, the transnational federation of states and world society has provided us with the sense that the fragility of social life does not always have to be raw and unmediated. Today, however, there is a crisis of social institutions and movements, manifest not least in the emergence of centrifugal forces breaking up the coherence of ‘the West’, that is bringing the experience of fragility to the forefront of our minds. Some welcome this evolving sense of fragility on the grounds that at least it makes another world, a better world, possible; some like myself fear it on the grounds that the beneficiaries of the new fragility are likely to be forces of barbarism and not of enlightenment; but denial – that is, denial that fragility is any more pronounced today than it was yesterday – is looking like an ever more counterfactual, bizarre and perplexing position. The replacement of nation states by agents of communal violence who show no respect for international prohibitions on war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of torture is but one instance of the crisis of institutions of which I speak.
From this standpoint, I see the publication of Cordero’s book in 2016 not only as a contribution to the critique of social theory, but also as a referent to the current fragility of postwar civil, legal, political and social institutions and movements under whose protective covering – sometimes real, sometimes merely promissory – we have spent much of our adult lives. I am thinking of institutions and movements like those that have consolidated social democracy, constructed welfare states, enabled the formation of the European Union and given body to the ‘human rights revolution’.
Consider, for example, the June 2016 referendum in the UK over so-called ‘Brexit’ – the vote to withdraw from the European Union. Viewed from an ideal point of view, the EU is an institutional framework designed to put an end to hostilities between individual European nation states, to totalitarianism in its fascist and (post-) communist forms, to European colonial conquest non-European peoples and to the biting poverty that afflicted many European societies (especially those in the South) in the postwar period. More positively the EU sets itself the goals of defining and forming its so-called four freedoms (capital, services, trade and labour), of constructing its own peculiar and multi-layered political constitution and defining its own place within world society. Critique of the EU has been relatively weak over the years, not least in the UK, but it has always been an essential part of the democracy of the EU. Contrasting its ideals to its ‘grubby’ practices has been an essential component of critique. Of course, the EU does fall short of its ideals but we recognise that it has become part of ‘the world spirit’ of our own time – something objective, external, concrete – that for all its weaknesses has served to restrain the ‘god-like’ ambitions of the European nation state.
What Cordero calls the ‘dissolution of critique into pure subjectivity’ may be exemplified by the dissolution of critique in this area of social and political thought. What we witness today is not only a crisis of institutions but also a crisis of critique itself. Such a crisis of critique begins when we measure the EU against an abstract notion of what it ideally ought to be that only exists in the head of the critic and has little or no existence elsewhere. We witness this abstract form of criticism arising both from the left and the right. From the point of view of the left, the abstract ideal the EU fails to meet is that of being a socialist or social or social democratic Europe or democratic Europe. From the point of view of the right, the abstract ideal the EU fails to meet is that of being a Europe of sovereign nations or a Europe of neo-liberal markets or a fortress Europe that knows how to keep out immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees. From either point of view, what is real is not what the EU actually is (about which there may be a huge lake of ignorance), but only what it is not. What is real is the abstraction and what is abstract is the reality. The ‘dissolution of critique into pure subjectivity’ does not occur merely when we discover that the practice falls short of the ideal, for that is in the nature of the application of all concepts, but when the ideal is subjectively conceived in isolation from the phenomenon and the idea of what it ought to be is given absolute primacy over what actually exists. In this case, the gap between ideal and actuality is not treated as grounds for critique, reform and reconstruction but rather for abolishing, destroying and trashing the institution itself. Nothing is then easier than to devalue an institution because it does not live up to one’s notion of what it ought to be; nothing harder than to understand its own rationality. The road to perdition that mimics critique but does not practice it is one in which devaluation of a concrete institution goes along with overvaluation of an abstract ideal.
The quintessential form that the ‘self-dissolution of critique into pure subjectivity’ has taken in this case is that of a populism that translated the ‘will of the people’ into a unitary and fixed ideal which the individual is not permitted to reflect upon and still less to challenge. Populism is the practice of turning the people into an ‘ism’; that is, into the supreme authority rather than recognise it as one moment in a larger and more complex totality. It can be an extremely radical force when it comes to attacking rights, laws, associations, protections, institutions and all the other ‘guarantees’ that enter into the making of a modern political community. Populism may appear as a simulacrum of democracy but is not to be confused with democracy. It knows far better how to diminish what has taken a lifetime to build, whatever sweet-sounding pretext it gives for its act of destruction, than to engage with others in collaborative acts of critique. Today we do not yet know where the departure of the EU’s second largest economy will lead either for the UK or the EU – or indeed whether it will actually take place – but there can be no doubt that it illustrates in its own ways the fragility of modern social life. The temptation to kick a body when it is down – and to feel empowered by the experience of the kicking – is unfortunately not one that has been overcome with the development of modern civilisation. The self-dissolution of critique has its own dynamic. There are signs that the fragility of the institutions of the EU is being matched by other core institutions of the postwar era from the European Court and Convention of Human Rights to the parties of social democracy and even to the mechanisms of seeking truth through political argument. The crisis of critique contains within itself the capacity to spread like an aggressive cancer. Just as there was much more to Karl Marx’s critique of political economy than trashing Adam Smith as ‘bourgeois’ – the ‘more’ consists of a huge collective endeavour of scientific understanding – so too there is much more to the critique of the existing capitalist world than declaring it ‘alien’ to our subjective will. While the underlying fragility of social life is manifest in a crisis of institutions, the fragility of our thinking is manifest in what Cordero calls the crisis of critique itself. It occurs when the actual world appears to count for nothing and the subject is made to count for everything.
This brings me to the especially relevant section in Cordero’s book on Reinhart Koselleck’s monograph Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cordero draws our attention to the ‘utopian surplus’ within Enlightenment thought, which the young Koselleck saw as self-destructive of Enlightenment itself. He cites Koselleck’s own formulation of the danger it posed to Enlightenment from within; that it has to do with ‘the pledge of a tomorrow in whose name today could in good conscience be allowed to perish’ (p. 83, emphases added). The utopian surplus of Enlightenment has to do with the spirit of critique failing to free itself from the religious and political discourses to which it is opposed, isolating itself from the actual historical forces of the day, and subsuming these forces to a singular and overpowering ‘ought’ – that is, to a sense of what ‘ought’ morally to be. Koselleck’s claim was drawn from Carl Schmitt: it was that the separation of private consciousness from state power under ‘absolutist’ rule allowed not only state politics to work regardless of moral considerations but also allowed bourgeois morality to unfold in the space that absolutism had left unoccupied. According to Cordero, what Koselleck discerned was the rupture that can emerge between the bourgeois ‘space of experience’ and its ‘horizon of expectations’, the effect of which was to devalue the past as a source of knowledge and learning and overvalue the future as the ‘new time’ in which the contingent and unexpected continually happens. The false utopia contained within Enlightenment philosophy was one that relieved the practice of critique of political responsibility and transformed the moral point of view into a universal principle of political rule.
Koselleck challenged the self-presentation of Enlightenment critique as an unequivocally emancipatory power and illustrated the pathological potential of subjectivism inter alia through a historical study of the displacement of Enlightenment critique by freemasonry. Cordero relates Koselleck’s critique of Enlightenment to Hegel’s call for philosophy to engage in ‘the comprehension of the present’, not simply in ‘the setting up of a world beyond’, and to his critique of a form of radicalism that substituted the aim of ‘demolishing the whole existing social order’ for critique (Fine and Vazquez, 2006). He also draws parallels between Koselleck’s critique of critique and Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the self-destruction of reason in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1997 (1944)). Another pertinent analogy Cordero pursues is with Hannah Arendt’s analysis in Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) of the dangers of abstracting the moral point of view from instrumental reason and the ultimate realisation of these dangers in the totalitarian command that, on the pretext of creating a morally superior world, this or that category of people must be eliminated. Here lies perhaps the terminus ad quem of modern subjectivism. Some commentators read the young Koselleck’s Crisis and Critique as conservative and uncritical (Lara, 2012: 125–140), but Cordero leads us to think again about the premature application of these labels and more indirectly about its urgency under current conditions.
The practical question we raise having read Cordero’s book is how the phenomena of which he writes so carefully and thoughtfully are playing out in the here and now. What he does show, following Marx, is that the critique of concepts – that is, of the prevalent ideas social actors employ to make sense of their world – is a key component of the critique of society (p. 80). We do not forget that social life is more fragile for some than for others. To cite Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy (1957) ‘the fragility of having things’, when you have little and live on the edge, can be a fraught experience for those who live it. Sociology reveals much about the anxiety of those who feel they never have the right sort of body or voice or taste, who are taught to be inarticulate and ignorant, and who are told that the best thing they can do is accept their lot. Cordero’s work prompts us to pay attention to those who escape this destiny and for whom fear of falling back constitutes an acute experience of fragility. It calls out for the liberating power of critique rather than for simply lashing out against the existing establishment on behalf of a still worse establishment.