Abstract
I first attended the renowned course in ‘Philosophy of Social Science’ in 1978. I was just beginning to write my dissertation and was more than a little lost. Richard Bernstein, who had taught me as an undergraduate, suggested I join him at the annual gathering in Dubrovnik. Perhaps he intuited that I might find my footing there, amid the assembled international body of critical theorists. If so, he was very wise. That network became my ‘imagined community’, the existential and intellectual reference point that has oriented me as a philosopher ever since.
The reason was largely generational. I belonged to the cohort of ‘68ers’ who returned to academia following the disintegration of the New Left. Testing the waters in graduate school, I found plenty of intellectual interest, even in an ‘analytic’ philosophy department, but nothing that could match the intensity of ‘movement’ discussions. Nor did I find anything resembling a ‘project’ that could infuse philosophical work with practical social significance or a sense of community. While the then-nascent network of feminist philosophers provided welcome intimations of sisterhood, its near-exclusive orientation to gender could not satisfy my desire to grasp the relation of that social fault-line to other dynamics of oppression and emancipation in modern capitalist society.
The Dubrovnik gathering seemed to offer such a prospect. Its ‘elders’ (for example, Bernstein, Jürgen Habermas, Agnes Heller and Gajo Petrovic) belonged to the generation that had directly experienced the Stalinist deformation of their democratic-socialist hopes. But unlike many others in their cohort, they had refused to abandon those hopes in favor of straightforward liberalism or economistic social democracy. Intent on retaining a critical perspective on capitalism, as well as an orientation to emancipation, they treated the course as a philosophical laboratory for reconstructing critical theory in a form adequate to the times. The result was a ‘discourse community’ that was the equal in intellectual rigor of any academic conclave I had known, but that reflected the intensity of a collective historical project.
That ‘community’ was just what I needed to orient myself as a reluctant academic. Determined to maintain my identity as a ‘radical’, I drew on the spirit of Dubrovnik as I completed my PhD and embarked on life as a philosophy professor, first in the wilds of Georgia, and then in the buttoned-down professionalized precincts of Northwestern University. Uneasy in those environments, I looked forward to returning each spring to my ‘critical-theoretical home’. When I could not attend in person, I nevertheless wrote for an ideal readership modeled in my head on the assembled body of course participants. And after the Yugoslav war put an end to the idyll on the Adriatic, I continued to carry ‘my own private Dubrovnik’ inside me for many years.
I did not return to the actual course, now relocated in Prague, for quite a few years. By then, I had become a tenured professor at the New School for Social Research and co-editor of Constellations. As a ‘senior figure’, I felt the obligation to model what I thought of as the critical theory ethos for the younger participants, just as the Dubrovnik ‘elders’ had modeled it for me. But a lot had changed. The relatively compact ‘community’ had become a sprawling academic ‘network’; and its animating engagement was no longer firmly centered on the critique of capitalist society. In this context, I tried as a ‘course director’ to promote the visibility of women, to encourage participation from further afield, including China and Latin America, and to ensure the inclusion on the programme of some capital-critical interventions, including my own.
Today’s Prague is a far cry from the (undoubtedly idealized) Dubrovnik that resides in my memory. And that is exactly as it should be, given that 2016 is a far cry from 1978. Gone are both of the two poles that defined the earlier epoch: authoritarian state communism, on the one hand, and social democracy, on the other. Our signposts today include a mass revulsion against neo-liberal financialization and the associated hollowing-out of democracy, shadowed by the looming prospect of ecological devastation. Also present, amid the wave of surging chauvinisms, are an expanded understanding of equality and a hunger for emancipation that has yet to discover either its proper vision or its practical path. It will fall to the current (and by my count, third) generation of course participants to reinvent a ‘discourse community’ that can rise to the occasion and clarify this situation.
My personal response is to return to the project of interdisciplinary critical social theory. Like the Frankfurt School original, my version aims to diagnose the crisis tendencies and conflict potentials of contemporary capitalist society – now financialized, globalizing and neo-liberal. More than the original, however, it seeks to incorporate, in a systematic way, the problematics of democracy, ecology and feminism, as well as anti-racism and anti-imperialism.
That path is not for everyone, to be sure. But my hope is that Prague remains (or becomes) a place where it and other proposals will be discursively tested against the demands of the times. In that way, the second city and the third generation could simultaneously continue and reinvent the magic I first experienced in Dubrovnik in 1978.