A gesture towards another kind of revolutionary theory …

In this post I’ll expand on the critique of theoretical practice found in my previous posts; I mean what follows to serve as a preliminary set of remarks to a larger argument which ultimately gestures towards some possible alternative forms such practice might take.  I hope this forum can provide space for a collective project of critique, challenge, and collaboration relative to that argument.

1. One of the most problematic features of contemporary philosophical academic praxis for the study of recent revolutionary movements is its tendency to mobilize pre-determined theoretical models, by means of which a completed theoretical product aimed at analyzing those movements is generated.  I will first outline the tendency, and then suggest why it is so problematic.

Since I have gone into more detail on this front in the previous post, I will simply note that in the work of Zizek, Butler, and others analyzing contemporary movements, the tendency of academic philosophers has been to utilize a ready-made set of concepts (“history,” “progress,” “capitalism,” “revolution,” etc.), set within established theoretical frameworks (Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxism, etc.)  generated either by the author or inherited from others, as the tools of analysis.  Thomas Nail’s recent text on Zapatismo and Deleuze is a particularly clear example of this tendency: it is an attempt to explain Zapatismo in relation to a Deleuzian philosophy of revolution (almost completely eschewing the question: Why are we turning to Deleuze?).  Regardless of the provenance of the concepts or the frameworks mobilized, the danger is precisely that the object of study—social movements—tends to become a fixed object to be studied.  That is to say, the movements studied are denied, to at least some degree, the possibility of subjective engagement in the study insofar as they are incorporated into an “interpretation” of their actions and significance set over against them. (I would also suggest that the sociology of social movements is also largely guilty of this move, but this claim requires its own space in which to be expanded.)

The problem I am outlining lies in the particular way social movements find themselves determined within literature about them.  Academic praxis requires the generation of intellectual property by an “expert” whose specific job it is, within the existing division of labor, to define, interpret, and analyze, and who is identified as an “expert” precisely in terms of her mastery of existing sets of theoretical frameworks.  The very act of analysis therefore requires a separation of “subject” and “object”–and therefore requires the establishment of what is being studied as object (rather than as fully active subject), since what is being studied is defined, to some extent as what is not expert.

2. This division of “subject” and “object” is problematic in analysis of recent social movements because of the latter’s transgressive pursuit of autonomy and the collective expressions of that pursuit in the generation of new, immanent conceptualities (the work of Jerome Roos and Marina Sitrin attests to the importance of the pursuit of autonomy within these movements).  These movements have been extremely productive in simultaneously rupturing and rethinking social, economic, and political conditions, generating, within protest, new forms of social subjectivity (“the 99%,” the “Indignados,” etc.), new conceptions of the course of capitalist development (the demand for a “commons,” the frequent references to a better, different future as well as to a recapitulation to certain elements from the past, etc.), the creation of new distributions of and relations between political, social, and economic practices (in the zones of protest), and so on.  In other words, these movements, in challenging the social order, do not simply take place within a definite social-political frame; they challenge that frame altogether.  In rupturing and reconfiguring social conditions, as well as in developing new concepts relative to them, these movements do not entirely belong to the existing social framework, and are therefore not entirely reducible to established categories for analyzing that framework.  To some degree, then, the theory adequate to their concepts and practices does not yet exist.  Indeed, social movements constitute an open-ended innovation in theory and praxis not oriented towards some final product but rather constantly subject to perpetual revision and challenge from within.  (These movements require a further analysis of their “autonomous” practices, to which I will devote a later post.)  To this extent the application of established theoretical frameworks to these movements in academic practice is deeply problematic, akin to pouring new wine into old wineskins.  The questions that remain unasked in much academic work on these movements are: “What are the immanently developing concepts and practices at work in these movements themselves?  In what ways are such movements irreducible to existing theoretical frameworks in which they might be captured?  Do they challenge the theoretical and socio-political frameworks in which they are found, and therefore also the capacity of theory to ‘analyze’ them?”  Traditional academic practice such as I am describing here denies the movements being studied their open processes of theoretical autonomy: their capacity to generate new theoretical models and frameworks which do not entirely coincide with those with which they might be analyzed.

Of course, corporate authorship is possible. More than this, one can envision research in which the subjects studied contribute in significant ways to the final product.  (The practice of conrecerca seem to gesture in this direction, but—and again, much more must be said here—I am profoundly suspicious of conrecerca as a methodology, insofar as it seems to recreate the distance between subject and object I am objecting to here.)  While this may mitigate the danger I’m describing, it often does not eliminate it.  This is because analysis tends, at the end of the day, to remain the purview of the “expert”; that expert stands in the relation of “subject” to an “object,” precisely insofar as the expert is the one qualified to analyze, determine, draw out, validate, and recognize what is important from what the “object” says and does.

The possibility also exists of gearing theory within the academy precisely towards an appreciation and recognition of the immanent conceptual productions of recent movements.  But again, the basic problem remains: the exclusion of the objects of study from the co-creation of theory.

3. The danger here inheres not simply in the process of producing an academic philosophical product, but also in the form that product must ultimately take.  A key component of the academic product is its finality: it is often closed off, completed, and confronts its audience as a finished product (as “intellectual property”) in the publication, and often times in the conference presentation as well (insofar as a single hegemonic author who may or may not decide to utilize the contributions of the audience still prevails).  As such, it shuts down collective theoretical practices not only insofar as it applies set theoretical frameworks, but also insofar as the product stands in contradiction to the ongoing, open, fluid theoretical production process that takes place within social movements.  In this way, hegemonic conceptualities are generated—even if derived from social movements themselves—which capture social movements in theoretical forms ready for academic consumption.  The interpretation of those movements thereby “frees” them from their immanent contexts for the sake of perpetuating the structure of the academic system: they are transformed into raw material for the application of fixed frameworks for analysis, in order to generate the closed, finished theoretical products required for the expert to make a living in conferences, papers, books, the classroom, etc.  Thus, the problematic nature of the product of academic theory is necessitated by the very nature of academic labor, which must reproduce itself in the form of “intellectual property”.

4. A gesture towards something else.  Based on the above critique, it might be possible to envision a theoretical product that neither makes use of established theoretical frameworks imported to analyze social movements, and so to fix them as object, nor creates a finished product.  Such a practice could perhaps be constituted by the collective constitution of both theoretical form and content without any central, mediating subjectivity to establish the process as “object”.  There would be no real distinction between the “expert” and the object viewed: the voices of the movement would exist in dynamic relation to that of the expert, and so to whatever frameworks might be imported by her.  Such theoretical praxis was recognizable within recent social movements precisely in the kinds of art generated, often as graffiti in which multiple, anonymous artists built on one another’s work; the creation of unruly, decentralized public spaces of debate; and in the spontaneous generation of various “schools” within zones of protest.