Introduction, Part 1: The Aim of “Time and Revolution”

Welcome to “Time and Revolution.”

The purpose of this blog is to open my dissertation project to a process of collective theoretical engagement.  In doing so, I aim to both call into question the limits of the dominant forms of theoretical practice of which the project is a part, as well as develop my work in ways that at least attempt to exceed those limits.

That project is tentatively entitled “A Theory of Revolutionary Temporality: Marx, Bloch, Benjamin,” and consists of two, asymmetrical aspects: an investigation of revolutionary temporality (the main focus of the dissertation), and a reflection upon the academic analysis of revolutionary praxis and theory (a secondary but crucial element).  In order to introduce the blog and my vision for it, I’ll first offer a broad overview of these two aspects, which will eventually be fleshed out in later posts.  Then, in light of the project as a whole, I’ll say more about the nature and goal of this blog.

Aspect 1: A Theory of Revolutionary Time

My dissertation investigates the temporality of revolution: the ways revolutionary praxis transforms the “economy of time” (Grundrisse) in capitalist society.  The question of revolutionary time is occasioned by recent revolutionary movements like  Occupy, the Indignados protests in Spain, events composing the Arab Spring, and so on.  Those movements created spaces of partially autonomous and collective political and economic practices; in doing so they also generated zones in which prevailing modes of economic and political temporality were ruptured and reconfigured—what John Holloway provocatively terms “temporal crack[s] in the patterns of domination.”[1]  While the Marxist tradition offers some of the most important resources for analyzing the emergence of revolution within capitalist social and economic structures, the relation of revolution to time has not often been subjected to analysis within the Marxist tradition (I focus in particular on the Western Marxist tradition).  When it has been thematically studied—most notably in the work of Negri, Althusser, and Balibar—that treatment has been deeply problematic for reasons I will discuss in later posts.

The inadequacy of this tradition to engage the question of revolutionary time echoes and so reproduces Marx and Engels’ own dismissive treatment of the theme.  Capital in particular serves to occlude the question of revolutionary time (more on this later).  Nonetheless, it also contains a highly complex and provocative set of insights into the capitalist production of time, and into the centrality of that time for the capitalist mode of production, lacking in much of the tradition flowing from it; I suggest that those insights could be used as leverage to interrogate revolutionary time.  I therefore turn towards Capital to analyze its often contradictory treatment of time and of time’s relation to revolution.  More than this, however, I suggest that the Marxist tradition also contains nearly-forgotten resources directly engaging the problem of revolutionary time.  Some of the major early works of the German Marxist Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) in particular provide an extended, albeit convoluted, account of the relation of revolution to time.  I therefore attempt to mobilize from out of those resources raw material for the construction of a new set of concepts by which to analyze revolutionary time.

Aspect 2: A Reflection on the Limits of Academic Practice

The project also intends to critically reflect on the structure and nature of the academic philosophical praxis to which it belongs.  Georg Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness, notes that in capitalism, philosophical practice inhabits a corner of the division of labor which is separated from the forces which generate and transform society.  As a result, academic praxis is “reified”: it tends to view its world as fixed, static, natural, and unchanging, and to relate to that world through the imposition of purportedly neutral, distinct conceptual frameworks upon it.  Building on Lukács’ work, I mean to recognize the implications of theory’s reification for the analysis of revolution.

The project’s aim is an analysis of the new forms of collective autonomy generated within emerging revolutionary movements—in particular, an analysis of one dimension (time) of those new forms.  But this project is embedded within a set of academic institutions, themselves incorporated within the capitalist division of labor.  The nature of the mental labor required reflects that incorporation.  It is, in its traditional form, meant to be private labor: the work of the aspiring academic acolyte, a version of the atomized worker (a hallmark of capitalism).  The product itself, in accordance with the ever more sharply defined division of labor required by capitalism, is to be a highly specialized contribution to a very limited sphere of knowledge.  The labor and the product both contribute to the reproduction of the academic institutions to which they belong.  On the one hand, the mental labor of generating a dissertation is possible only on the condition of teaching several courses as an adjunct, that is, as a temporary employee in precarious, low-paying work conditions.  That precarity constantly reinforces within the adjunct-student the necessity of fulfilling the preestablished criteria for academic writing, publishing, and so on, as a means of escaping precarity (although, in the current situation, the possibility of such escape is rapidly diminishing, and is reserved only for a few).  In this way, the economic position of the adjunct-student reinforces the institutional frameworks, within which those criteria are embedded.  The teaching itself by the adjunct-graduate student props up a situation in which low-paid, precarious teaching is fast becoming the norm at colleges across the country.  On the other hand, the product of labor—published or delivered papers, dissertations, and so on—(ideally) becomes raw material within the academic division of labor, opening up specialized areas of research to be pursued or commented upon within the profession.  As Lukács (in History and Class Consciousness) notes, insofar as theoretical praxis becomes ever more highly specialized, it is distanced from the material production and reproduction of its world.  It thereby comes to relate to the political, economic, and social world via its expertise in systems of knowledge grasped in separation from the conditions of that world’s generation.  Fluency in such expertise, and the capacity to apply it, form essential components of academic labor and often constitute basic criteria according to which its products are judged.

The questions I wish to ask are these: as part of the division of labor just described, in which academic labor constantly reproduces the conditions in which it must work, how can a dissertation do justice to problems of revolution, revolt, and the construction of autonomous, collective practices?  Mustn’t the pursuit of specialized knowledge within ready-made theoretical fields and with established theoretical schemata fix revolution as an “object of study” subsumable within the existing world?  Aren’t the objects of such theory—social movements which threaten the existing society with transformation—thereby deprived of their genuine challenge to the existing social order and to the categories by which it is currently understood?  And don’t the private, atomized conditions of labor, emphasizing not autonomy but heteronomy (inherited criteria, severe economic constraints, etc.), threaten to taint the analysis of such phenomena?

The Project of the Blog

This blog therefore has two aims.  First, I intend it to serve as a space in which a collective theoretical practice revolving around the material on which I am writing (but of course open to other ideas and topics as well) can begin.  To that end, I will be posting portions of my project, revisions, and so on, as well as responding to comments, questions, and critiques.  A second and related goal of this blog is to thereby engage in a form of theory which exceeds the boundaries of the division of labor in which the dissertation is embedded.  In that experiment, the question of the limits of academic theory must be central.  It is critical that the blog not become simply a space in which I advertise my work.  It is equally critical that it not become a site devoted solely to academic argument (although such argument has its place here)—that is, a means by which to simply increase the academic quality of my project.  Rather, this blog is designed to serve as a site at which the forms and criteria of theoretical production  must be called into question.