Reflections on the method of the dissertation

If the goal of this blog is to open my project up to collective production in some way, then laying bare the methodology of the project becomes crucial.  Otherwise, the “collective” work touches only on superficial elements of the project—the specifics of how I deal with certain ideas or authors—and leaves untouched the infrastructure: the very way in which ideas are generated.

To lay out the methodology it is helpful to summarize the goals of the project, since the method largely flows from these goals:

(a) A critique of the nature of academic practice and a certain, dominant discourse about revolution developed within that practice as these relate to recent movements

(b) A reappropriation of elements lost within a dominant academic discourse about revolution that could be used to identify its limits, rupture it, and recover occluded but potentially useful alternative concepts

(c) In that reappropriation, a generation of concepts which, in other contexts and through other means, could be taken up by certain revolutionary practices, within the zones of their autonomous production of theory and practice, to further their projects of autonomy.  In other words, to liberate forgotten conceptual wreckage from the past—alternative understandings of revolutionary time—for use in the present.

As point (c) suggests, the ultimate goal of the project, in critiquing a dominant discourse and in attempting to liberate certain repressed elements contained in it, is to generate an experimental vocabulary which could provide some raw material for recent movements to productively analyze themselves and their practices by a reappropriation towards a nearly-forgotten heritage.  Recent movements like Occupy constitute, at least in important part, attempts at constructing antagonistic, autonomous social relations against prevailing economic and political systems.  That project entails the often tacit rupture of prevailing economic and political temporalities, and so the disruption of the basic times of “work” and “leisure” critical to captial’s reproduction.  The creation of concepts for analyzing the rupture of such time through the identification of traditions left out of certain dominant academic discourses is done with the hope that it could offer means for further, and more consciously, developing an aspect of those movements, the rupture of time.  In other words, the goal is very simply to generate potential tools for the autonomous development of these movements.

The goal is not to “teach” contemporary movements anything.  Such a goal presupposes the heteronomous determination of movements aimed at autonomy—a basic contradiction of their project.  It is very nearly certain that the official dissertation will have no relation to contemporary movements at all.  The work done in the dissertation will always already remain a failure in a certain sense, a result of the dissertation-form itself (see my post “A Gesture Towards Another Kind of Revolutionary Theory…” for more on this).  The work of the dissertation is therefore a gesture towards other, better practices that must be pursued, and a generation of concepts which, within other, less restrictive forms, could be material useful for autonomy-production.

The dissertation’s method flows from these goals.  I represent the method as a series of tasks.  As always, keep in mind this is a methodology which is in flux—open to the possibility of collective development.

First, recognizing a dominant discourse in Western Marxism about revolution which contains problematic presuppositions about time.  In the work of contemporary thinkers influenced by Marx, even if not operating within Marxist discourse proper—Zizek, for instance, or Butler—one finds an attempt to grapple with revolution as an event taking place in fixed and determined temporal frameworks (a presupposition, in other words, that time is an aprioristic “envelope” [Negri, Time for Revolution]in which events are contained).  This attempt is often framed as “useful” to contemporary movements in some way.  Academics presuppose that, as experts, they have something to “teach” social movements, and those movements would be wise to listen (that is, to passively learn).  This is a deeply problematic attitude, not just because of the excellent critiques of it by people like Freire and hooks, but also because these movements are constituted precisely as movements of autonomy-generation.

Second, identifying within some of these contemporary authors, and so in the dominant discourse mentioned above, the potential, variegated survival of ideas that dominate the Western Marxist tradition’s thought on time and revolution (in the work of Althusser, Balibar, Negri, etc.)

Third, tracing within these ideas a certain reflection of a basic move inhering within the work of Marx and Engels themselves.  Marx’s Capital in particular analyzes revolution in terms of a fixed framework of historical dialectical development.  And yet their work also attempts to analyze the production of time within capitalism, and so tacitly gestures towards the notion that a rupture in the capitalist mode of production will necessitate a different temporal production.  Chapter 10 of Capital vol. 1 is crucial for this—it offers a very different conception of time than that reflected in the passages on revolution littered throughout the text.  Capital, then, is to be identified as a site of the repression of the concept of revolutionary time, a repression which takes on inertial force in within and as the (Western) Marxist tradition.

Fourth, attempting to appropriate out of and against Marx and Engels those repressed resources which challenge the dominant discourse about revolution and time which Marx and Engels, at least in part, helped to structure.  In particular, attempting to read Chapter 10 of Capital against the overall framework of the text.  In this way, indicating the critical juncture points at which the limits of a dominant discourse on revolution can be seen, as well as possibilities for alternative conceptions of revolution which have been lost.

To put the point another way: the basic methodological move is to note oddities within the text which don’t entirely belong within its framework, which challenge it, and which therefore are “non-contemporaneous” to it—that is, to recognize elements which, from the perspective of this moment in history, can be used to rupture and reconfigure the theoretical framework within which they had been embedded.

Fifth, identifying other elements within the Marxist tradition which do not fit within the dominant discourse about revolution and time; which have been largely repressed or forgotten; and which develop and extend those ruptural elements discovered in Marx and Engels.  The work which Ernst Bloch originally published early in his career (Spirit of Utopia and Heritage of Our Times in particular) represents a source for thought about revolution and time that has been largely occluded, and which could be mobilized against the dominant discourse in order to rupture it and open it for reconfiguration.

To do this, the project will: (a) identify a contemporary, dominant discourse about Bloch occluding his  thoughts and revolutionary time; (b) trace this to certain elements of Bloch’s work itself, since Bloch censors his own work to a degree and in a certain way later in his life; (c) note a contradictory structure within certain Bloch texts, in which repression of the conception of revolutionary time occurs; (d) and mobilize the repressed elements against the dominant discourse on Bloch.

Finally: calling into question the relation of the very dissertation project itself to the contemporary revolutionary movements emerging.  Asking, in other words: what is, and what could be, the relation of the concepts reappropriated from out of Bloch and Marx to those movements?  What are the limits of academic praxis itself, and in what ways does such praxis naturally militate against contemporary revolutionary movements?  (Again, see my post “A Gesture Towards Another Kind of Revolutionary Theory …” for more.)

Concluding Remarks on Method:

The overall methodological approach to the texts being used (Capital, Heritage of Our Times, etc).  I view these texts as novel conglomerations of various conceptual elements cobbled together within certain organizing frameworks.  Those texts are seen as often contradictory wholes containing elements inherited from various traditions (religious, theological, philosophical, utopian, etc.), some assemblages of which don’t properly fit within the organizational framework being deployed.  Those contradictory assemblages, insofar as they threaten the discourse being constructed and offer possibilities for contemporary theory beyond that discourse, can be called “non-contemporaneous.”  I’m looking for a very particular kind of non-contemporaneous assemblage or element: a concept of the revolutionary production of time, simultaneously suggested and repressed within these texts.

Therefore, the texts are viewed as inheritances to be disruptively reappropriated in the present.  I am suggesting that Marx and Bloch must not be taken at their words; that reading them in the 21^st century requires a mode of reading which would rupture and reconfigure the very theoretical frameworks in which they operate, in order to liberate elements repressed within those frameworks for the political/theoretical tasks of the present.

 A further question: Is the method outlined above, relying as it does on discovering “non-contemporaneities” (a term developed in Heritage of Our Times) in inherited texts, “Blochian”?  The answer to this question requires another post, since the issue is a complex one.  But in sum: the method is Blochian only insofar as it inhabits Bloch’s work while transforming, rupturing, and reconfiguring it in various ways.  I understand my method to operate, relative to Bloch and Marx, in a way similar to how coral colonizes and invades the wreckage of a sunken ship.  The wreck and the coral are, in a way, inseparable; and yet the wreck, in a process of decay assisted by the coral that invades every fissure, has become something quite new, too.