b2o: boundary 2 online

  • Christian Thorne–After Jameson

    Christian Thorne–After Jameson

    After Jameson

    Christian Thorne

    Fredric Jameson, who was a member of the boundary 2 editorial board for several years, died on September 22. One wishes to know what we have lost in his passing, and to know, too, something about what comes next, about who to read once we have leafed our way through his Nachlass; about what we had been counting on Jameson to do on our behalf that we will have to figure out how to do ourselves now that he is gone. Did Jameson leave a to-do list? Such questions are, in this case, unusually hard to answer, and this difficulty has something to do with the character of Jameson’s own thought, which, after all, had a lot to say about endings and aftermaths. His most quoted, if often misattributed, sentence concerns What Ends and What Obstinately Refuses to End: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” He was drawn at an early date to the term “postmodern”—not his coinage, of course, but sometimes treated as his contagious invention—which communicates the paradoxical claim that something can come after the definitionally and self-regeneratingly new. The word that he and others came up with for the book series they started at Duke went “postmodernism” one better. “Postcontemporary Interventions” they called it—whatever is later than now, which presumably just means “the future,” as in: interventions from the future. Or for it. One chapter in Jameson’s Postmodernism book offers to identify “Utopianism after the End of Utopias.” The corresponding chapter in The Antinomies of Realism announces a “Realism after Realism.” To this we should add a certain Jamesonian penchant for calling things “late”—late capitalism, late Marxism, late modernism—as well as his repeated claim that there are entire genres that we “no longer know how to read”: literary utopias, Renaissance allegories. Anything we would want to say about the end of this particular thinking life will jostle uncomfortably against that life’s many observations about what it means to perceive a terminus (or a survival or a novum).

    These several threads are best bundled under the rubric of “periodization,” which was itself one of Jameson’s abiding preoccupations. There was an interval of some twenty years when he seemed unable to finish an essay without introducing his 2 x 3 scheme of literary-and-economic periodization: realism, modernism, postmodernism; national capitalism, monopoly capitalism, late capitalism. (The only thing that changed over that span was that Giovanni Arrighi got swapped in for Ernst Mandel, as the argument’s catch-all citation for economic history.) The tributes and callings-after that have appeared since Jameson’s death themselves all flirt with periodizing claims. It is hard not to feel that theory has, in his person, died another of its serial deaths. Terry Eagleton’s After Theory was published all the way back in 2003; Jameson outlived that “after” by a handsome one-and-twenty. Along the way, in 2015, Rita Felski tried to bury the “critical” part of “critical theory,” with Jameson as its avatar. Jameson himself, in a book published after his death, said that theory came to an end with the election of François Mitterand in 1981, though anyone who has read 1994’s Seeds of Time or 2005’s Archaeologies of the Future knows that this can’t be true.

    But those multiple and contending dates are enough to remind a person of one of Jameson’s most consequential insights into periodization: that periods are not facts, not realia there to be discovered in the historical record; that they have to be posited and can always be posited otherwise. Exactly when do you think “the years of theory” ended (if, indeed, you do think they’ve ended)? When the University of Minnesota retired its Theory and History of Literature series in 1998? When Edward Said died in 2003? When Derrida died in 2004? When dissident thought got routinized in dozens upon dozens of tenure-track positions across North America, codified in C.V.-ready certificate programs and European prizes? Or when that one generation of theorists retired and the English departments decided they didn’t need replacing? Jameson was always quick to concede that the periods to which he dedicated some eight published books were devices or even contrivances—the mind’s way of organizing miscellaneous historical materials to particular (and nameable) ends. The history journals are crammed by the hundredfold with articles naming this or that previously unknown revolution—the Second Scientific, the Third Industrial, the antibiotic, the cybernetic, the “civil rights revolution”—all of them countered by an equal number of essays insisting that x turning-point in history “wasn’t really a revolution,” that 1789 (or 1917 or the fall of the Roman Empire) didn’t change anything we would care to call fundamental. Jameson always held to the entirely commonsensical position that in any historical conjuncture, some things will have withered away or been replaced and other things will have persisted, and he enjoyed rolling his eyes over the historians who argued as though the archive could tell you which it was really. The members of the AHA stand in opposite wings of the conference hotel yelling the words “Continuity!” and “Rupture!” across the bewildered lobby. This aspect of Jameson is most fully on display in A Singular Modernity, which argues that “modernity” is neither a date nor a datum; that it is a concept, rather; or, no, not a concept, but a narrative template, a story form. He then sets out to enumerate the features of the modernity narrative, as though it were just one more entry in the list of recognized genres, alongside the historical romance and the legal thriller, before scanning the ranks of theorists in order to show that they were all actually telling the kind of Big Stories about History that postmodernism officially disavowed.

    Those narratives were, of course, many and varied. A genre spins many stories—and not just one. The next point to grasp, then, is that Jameson did not just collect multiple modernity narratives—Heidegger’s and Foucault’s and Weber’s and de Man’s. His own efforts at periodization were themselves multiple. Even the most ardent readers of Jameson were slow to realize that he thought of most of his writing as so many volumes in One Big Book, a Hegelian world history of narrative types that we have come to know as The Poetics of Social Forms. That title itself went through stages, creeping into print in an early ‘80s footnote (“I discuss x in my forthcoming…); slowly worming its way onto the copyright pages of late-career monographs, where it hugged itself into the fastness of eight-point font (“The present book constitutes the theoretical section of the antepenultimate volume of….”); before finally breaking forth into reference-book entries and scholarly reviews and Verso promotional copy. The second surprise, after the initial awe of watching this narratological epic accrete surreptitiously and out-of-sequence over the course of forty years, arrives with the realization that Jameson was not in its pages telling the story that you might have thought he was always telling: from realism to modernism to postmodernism. Those stages were still there, each in a virtual volume, plus two more—a volume on post-capitalist narrative and a presumably unfinished volume on pre-capitalist narrative—but his characterization of those familiar literary-historical periods had begun to shift and multiply.

    Whenever Jameson inserted his threefold scheme into an essay on the fly, in that one compressed paragraph that he must have composed in fifteen or twenty variants, his position was always fundamentally Lukacsian: 1) The work of literary realism was to make complex social systems experientially intelligible. 2) Modernist literature pulled the plug on this intelligibility, letting the socius fog back over—or, if you prefer, faithfully replicating the opacity of everyday life—while offering as compensation a set of writerly and stylistic experiments that the sensitive reader would experience as so many “intensities.” 3) Postmodernism then neutralized these intensities in turn, withdrawing into flat affect and mimeographed irony while allowing opacity to spiral into full-blown spatial and temporal disorientation. Anyone who suspected that Jameson’s Marxism was finally a tad vulgar could see that he had, for an instant, vindicated Adorno and Brecht at the expense of Lukacs—reprieving modernism from its banishment by the Party—only then to reinstate the Lukacsian verdict against the newer art of the 1970s and ‘80s.

    Except this isn’t at all what we read in The Poetics of Social Forms, which went out of its way to scramble his beloved three-stage progression. The difference is clearest in the cycle’s two volumes on realism: The Political Unconscious, which traces the survival of the pre-modern romance across the entire body of nineteenth-century realist fiction (a fiction whose realism accordingly comes to seem less steady); and The Antinomies of Realism, which describes the swelling of literary affect across the same decades and in the same canon of novels. Realism thus preserves the storytelling impulses of its predecessor and rival (the magically heroic adventure story), while also undertaking in advance the very production of “intensities” that Jameson elsewhere told us was the work, distinctively, of modernism. What Jameson did not write is the one volume you might have expected from his hand—that neo-Lukacsian tract in which he enumerated all the vanished techniques of Balzaco-Dickensian cognitive mapping. The closest thing we have to that missing disquisition is his short book on Chandler, The Detections of Totality, which explains how one modernist-era writer was able in some fresh way to do the very thing that modernist writers were supposedly unable to do any more.

    Jameson’s writings are full of phase shifts of this kind, which we can conceptualize in a few different ways. The easiest approach would be to say that Jameson was unusually committed to the Raymond-Williamsite categories of the “residual” and the “emergent”: We must make the effort to discern historical periods, while also insisting that periods are never clean and discrete, that they all come before us bearing contamination and articulation and overlap. At the same time, Jameson’s variously romantic and modernist realisms are clearly dialectical figures, since one of the theorist’s more obviously Hegelian tasks will be to trace the incubation of a new mode in whatever seemingly inimical form preceded it—and then to trace its survival, as Aufhebung, even after its apparent obsolescence. If, meanwhile, you prefer your dialectics more negative than this, you could get away with saying nothing more than that Jameson seemed to prefer realism when it was least itself—and that he consistently looked to other literary modes to do the realist work that realism could no longer convincingly do.

    The issue, for now, is this: Measuring Jameson’s achievement (and our loss) requires us to periodize, and it was Jameson himself who did more than any other theorist to insist that periodization was both a) necessary, unavoidable; and b) a complex, non-empirical operation. So let’s reach back two paragraphs and say again: Periods are not realia; they have to be posited. Once you’ve grasped that point, it should be easy enough to make it, iteratively, for pretty much all of Jameson’s other master concepts. He was committed to periodization, but insisted over and over again that all periods were devices or mental constructs. Similarly, he was committed to thinking in terms of totality—to detailing what an anti-totalitarian thinking gives up when it tries to do without the very category of totality—while making it clear even so that the totality cannot be known, that all totality-talk is thus a conceit and model and more or less ingenious attempt at Darstellung, at representing a hyper-object about which we can properly say nothing. (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must tell stories.) This makes it harder than one might have thought to distinguish Jameson from the post-structuralists with whom he kept company and who are typically regarded as his adversaries. For Jameson was as much an anti-foundationalist as any other left-wing Francophile writing in the ‘70s and ‘80s: a philosophical skeptic and resolute anti-positivist, careful not to get caught making strong knowledge claims, quick to point out that what one had all along thought to be things were actually fictions or arbitrary categories or discursive contrivances. His erudition was legendary: It was Jameson who, in reply to some visiting Spinozist, would have remarks at the ready about Jan de Witt and the fate of seventeenth-century Dutch republicanism; Jameson, too, who would sit up front at the Pacific historian’s sparsely attended talk and toss off questions about modernist architecture in Hawaii. And yet Jameson’s general conception of history was itself more or less skeptical. For to say that “history is what hurts” is to ask us to think of history above all as failure and limitation—our failure and our limitation—as the world’s recalcitrance, its hard check on our desires. This is a materialism, no doubt, but of some traumatic and non-cognizable kind, a materialism of the Real, in which history announces itself only in the occasional and crushing realization that we had history all wrong.

    What was it, then, that distinguished Jameson from any old literary Lacanian? We can come at the matter this way. Your run-of-the-mill anti-foundationalist typically makes two moves in quick succession: First, they declare all grand narratives (or what have you) to be fictions; and then they withdraw belief from all such fictions, retreating into a wary and disabused agnosticism, embarrassed by their former gullibility. It is this stance of negation that Jameson, in this respect entirely unlike Adorno, dispensed with. Enthusiastic about fiction in all its forms, he set out to catalog all the grand narratives; and he proved deft at reconstructing the Big Stories about History that subtend even those philosophical systems that thought they could do without them; and, crucially, he devised two or three Big Stories of his own, to place alongside these others, constructions among constructions. This stance, of course, separated him from more than just the skeptics. If even Marxist readers have sometimes struggled to get the hang of Jameson, then this is surely because he extended his attitude of affirmation even to historical materialism’s most fearsome bogeymen, the things you might have thought that no Marxist could make friends with: ideology, say, which Jameson told us was just the other side of utopianism, and even reification, without which, he concluded, no politics was possible. (The lesson of a lifetime spent thinking about allegory boils down to: If you want to fight it, you have to reify it.) The post-critical types who have nominated him the paranoid taskmaster of Kritik have to that extent got him exactly wrong. Hegelianism is that peculiar point of view from which you can look out over a field of contention and see that everyone is right.

    But then what about postmodernism, which is, after all, the word with which Jameson’s name will permanently be linked? Did he affirm that? We would do well to remind ourselves here of a remark he made frequently around 1990, at the height of the postmodernism debates, which is that he had grown weary of interlocutors asking him whether he liked postmodernism. Did he think it was a good thing? Or was he, when all was said and done, calling for the revival of a Left modernism? Postmodernism, he said, was not the sort of thing that could be either celebrated or condemned. It was—and here we can refine our formulation a bit—the bad thing that had to be affirmed. This position has everything to do with Jameson’s implicitly Hegelian ethics—with Hegel’s resolve not to be alienated, with his warnings against the romance of marginality and the heroics of total refusal; and this, in turn, leads directly to a Hegelian political orientation, which holds that any future we might build will have to go by way of the dominant. The better society will not be a fresh start; we will get there only by traversing the most powerful institutions, the most public discourses, the most official culture and by transposing these where possible. Postmodernism might mark the epochal victory of consumerism and media society on the terrain of art and inward experience—that, too, was Jameson’s claim—but the task in front of is nonetheless to figure out what else can be built with its materials.

    It becomes possible to wonder, at this point, whether Jameson wasn’t himself a postmodernist—not just a student of postmodernism, but a postmodern writer in his own right, to be ranked alongside Ballard and Barthelme and Calvino. The jumbling of high and low? When you are done reading his article on Proust, you can queue up his essay on The Godfather and Jaws—or on Spenser or on spaceships or on Conrad or on a Stephen King story. Flat affect? Has ever a Marxist written with more equanimity, without the tones of indignant sarcasm and subaltern pathos that mark the entire tradition from the Communist Manifesto onwards? The triumph of the image and the canceling of the referent? It was Jameson who pointed out that Doctorow had given us, in Ragtime, a historical novel in which history seemed blocked and unknowable, in which “real history” had given way to mirages and animatronics, a “hologram” of the past that differed from the fictions of Walter Scott in that it wanted you to know that it was a hologram. But then didn’t Jameson re-do Marxism to Doctorow’s specifications, preserving all the old historical materialist schemes while confessing upfront that these were and always had been stories? Wasn’t it Jameson who gave us Marxism with a buried, never appearing, thoroughly mediatized historical referent?

    And with that, it becomes possible to explain why it is so hard to say what comes after Jameson or where his leaving leaves us. His thinking was so intertwined with postmodernism that to imagine a time after Jameson is to imagine a time after postmodernism. His passing thus compels us to ask: Are we still postmodern? Or are we now after postmodernism? And the answers to those questions are surprisingly uncertain. That ours is no longer the moment of Robert Venturi and John Barth and Terry Riley seems clear enough. And yet doesn’t the Berlusconi-Trump era of Western politics strike you sometimes as Baudrillard’s bad joke? Aren’t memes an intensified and grassroots postmodernism for the Internet age? Brian de Palma may not be making movies anymore, but Quentin Tarantino sure is. Should one therefore propose the term “late postmodernism” and see if it sticks? But then what do we make of the rise of “world-building,” as both a term and a narrative practice (in blockbuster film and video games and long-form television), so different from the discombobulated worldlessness of high postmodernism? Or what do we make of radical philosophy’s ontological turn, which has traded the epistemological skepticism of the post-structuralist decades for a downright neo-scholastic metaphysics? Or again, if we conclude that postmodernism is or was art in the age of neoliberalism, then what do we make of the breakup of the neoliberal consensus? Equally, though, if we are really beyond postmodernism—if we have passed through it and out the other side—shouldn’t we be able to describe the present and maybe even name it and then say in some detail how the 2020s are not like the 1980s? Are we still postmodern? If that question has gone largely unasked—if the very formulation is perhaps a bit embarrassing—this is precisely the sign of the Jamesonian intelligence that has gone missing. The good thing is not yet here. But can we name at least the new bad thing and say how we plan to affirm it?

  • William Clare Roberts—Three Varieties of Misunderstanding

    William Clare Roberts—Three Varieties of Misunderstanding

    This essay is published in response to Jensen Suther’s “Marxism as Idealism? Response to Roberts’s ‘Ideology and Self-Emancipation’.”

    Three Varieties of Misunderstanding

    William Clare Roberts

    Every author struggles against three varieties of misunderstanding. There are some misunderstandings for which authors themselves are culpable from lack of due care in writing. There are other misunderstandings for which readers are culpable from lack of due care in reading. Finally, though, there are misunderstandings for which no one is culpable, misunderstandings that arise from the conceptual impasses inherent in a given field of discourse or the ambiguities and treacheries of the common ground.

    I find all three kinds of misunderstandings in Jensen Suther’s response to my essay. I should have been more careful in how I discussed the relationships among the theories I survey so as to avoid the impression that mine is an idealist dialectic in which Habermas is contained already in Lukács and Althusser redeems Marx. Suther should have been more careful in how he characterized my development of the Lenin-Gramsci-Althusser tradition of ideology theory, so as to avoid the false claim that it amounts to “a form of institutional determinism.” Most crucially, Suther’s essay gives voice to a collective misunderstanding concerning freedom, a misunderstanding that conflates freedom as a political and social condition with freedom as self-determining agency. My response here will address each of these three misunderstandings in turn.

    Mea culpa

    According to Suther, I claim that Adorno and Horkheimer inherit Lukács’s account of false consciousness, and that Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality is merely a development of this inheritance. As a consequence, according to Suther, I make out Habermas to be the “endpoint” of a developmental story that leads from Destutt de Tracy’s project of ideology through Lukács and the early Frankfurt School. I can certainly see where Suther is getting this picture from my essay. I do say that the Frankfurt School “turned Lukács’s theory … into a generic theoretical practice of ideology critique,” and that Lukács inspired the Frankfurt School’s “conception of false consciousness as normative error,” which “finally petered out in the Habermasian notion of performative contradiction.”

    Suther also thinks that I portray Gramsci and Althusser as “the true inheritors of the Marxist project of the critique of ideology.” Again, I can see why Suther would take this impression away from my essay. I emphasize Gramsci as an alternative to Lukács, and tie the Sardinian Marxist’s understanding of ideology to his careful interpretive reading of Marx.

    However, I did not intend and do not believe either of these inheritance claims. The Frankfurt School’s reception of Lukács is decidedly partial and one-sided, and Habermas is only one possible resolution of the theoretical multivalence of Adorno and Horkheimer’s work. I certainly do not believe that Habermas is the logical telos of Lukács’s work. Nor do I believe that Gramsci is straightforwardly continuing the critique of “the German Ideology” texts, nor that Althusser’s theory continues Gramsci’s. Althusser’s account of ideology is discontinuous with Marx and Engels’s dismissive attacks on the ideologists. Indeed, Althusser and Therborn are not engaged in – do not even supply support for – a critique of ideology.

    I think responsibility for these misapprehensions lies with the manner in which I presented my argument. My goal was to identify the problems that both motivated and emerged from decisive mutations in the conception of voluntary servitude and ideology. However, because I identified and analyzed those problems as they appeared in the texts of the authors I examined – with only an occasional nod to the political context – my presentation took on the physiognomy of an idealist dialectic. Each author or cluster of authors seems to respond to the one before, inverting, negating, or recombining the elements of their predecessor’s theory. The reader understandably forms the impression that the history of ideology theory is a single argument developing across the centuries, with the failings of each theory corrected by its successor, at the cost of some new fatal error. The comprehension of the past leads to the sanctification of the present, with the Gramsci-Althusser-Therborn theory standing in the place reserved for Absolute Knowing.

    This impression is contrary to my actual beliefs and argument. I meant it when I wrote that the history I tell is one of “reasonable local interventions half-remembered and misappropriated, inserted into new contexts, and mutating further with every reinsertion.” Although I follow one set of branching paths in my essay, there are other paths not explored, some of which I am confident have not even been broken yet. What I find promising in Gramsci-Althusser-Therborn is not a redemption of everything lost on those winding paths, but a set of analytical tools for articulating ideologies with configurations of social power.

    Sua culpa

    In order to grasp the utility of those tools, however, one must clear away some confusion that Suther has introduced into the discussion. Suther believes that my account is a form of “institutional determinism” according to which human actions are reduced to “effects of dispositional regularities, which are themselves functions of structure.” He admits that I am “sensitive” to this danger and that I try to meet it by claiming that there are many, competing ideologies. However, Suther rejoins that, “given the basic understanding of the relationship between agent and structure, the pluralization of ideology would just entail more possibilities for being functionalized, not fewer. Social change would still not depend on the actions of agents qua agents […] but depend rather on the ‘chemical’ interaction among institutions which interpellate their members.”

    This is confusion entirely of Suther’s own making. He is foisting his own “understanding of the relationship between agent and structure” onto me, and then accusing me of being trapped in the aporias of his understanding, despite my explicit rebuttal of both structuralism and functionalism. He assumes that structure and ideology are opposed to agency, that structure and ideology are dominating, and that agency is the source of “social change.” All of this is foreign to the framework I am outlining in my essay.

    Agency is not opposed to structure or to ideology. Ideology elicits agency, and structure is comprised of action. Suther realizes that social change depends on human action, but doesn’t seem to grasp that social stasis depends on human action to exactly the same extent. Agency is not specially keyed to change, rupture, or emancipation. The enslaved are agents, too. So are cops. So is your conservative uncle who buys the same jeans and polo shirts he’s been wearing for thirty years.

    Suther is here trying to force me – together with Gramsci, Althusser, and Therborn – back into the mode of ideology critique, and back into the model according to which social structures are the outcomes of alienated human activity that have slipped from our control and now dominate us as something external.

    Long paragraphs of Suther’s response are therefore devoted to expounding matters about which we are in agreement and defending positions that I never attacked. I am accused of “assimilating the space of reasons to the space of causes” when that distinction is crucial to my account; it is precisely because ideology comprises “the space of reasons, the terrain where agency happens,” that ideology is not a set of “dispositional regularities” or other causal determinations, acting on us from outside. I am accused of rejecting “normative self-governance” and “the idea that norms are self-determined.” I would challenge Suther to indicate where I perform these rejections, as I cannot seem to locate any such rejections in my essay.

    Suther writes, “The space of reasons is precisely not just a structure of interdependently defined roles but the normative process of mutual struggle to determine how we live.” I completely agree. I only want to add one simple point: that is the field of ideology! “We can maintain ourselves as animals,” Suther notes, “only through initiation into the social space of reasons.” Yes, I agree, we are the ideological animal. It is tempting to go through sections II and III of Suther’s response in this manner, quoting him back to himself in agreement, and then adding “and that’s ideology!” at every juncture. I will stop though, my point hopefully being made.

    Sua sponte

    Underlying Suther’s confused accusation of determinism – and helping to motivate it, I think – is a misunderstanding that is not Suther’s per se, but is embedded in the conceptual heritage that we all use to try to think through our situation. We have inherited a word, freedom, that we use to name both one of our highest political aspirations and a basic aspect of human being – that we act “on our own.” This encourages us to think there must be some continuity between the two, that political freedom must realize or perfect our freedom to act.

    This is a mistake. To be politically free one must enjoy a common social status and the institutions that protect that status. But this does not enhance or magnify our ability to act in any metaphysical sense. Individuals are equally norm-directed, and their acts are equally undertaken on the basis of reasons, regardless of the social and political institutions under which they live. (Note that I am not saying that these norms and reasons are equally good regardless of the social and political institutions that encode them; bad reasons motivate action, however, in the same way as good reasons.)

    Reflecting the inherited confusion of political freedom with the freedom to act, Suther’s response conflates these two senses while not noticing that my essay tries to distinguish between the two. I reserve the word “freedom” for political freedom, and use “agency” to name the capacity to act in the space of reasons. The collision between these two ways of talking about freedom litters Suther’s response with glittering shards of incomprehension.

    “The space of reasons,” Suther claims, “is unintelligible except as a realm of freedom.” I agree – but only if we are clear that “freedom” here means agency. The space of reasons is not necessarily a space free from domination, however, and hence is not necessarily a realm of political freedom. The social fact that cops have the legal power to arrest and detain, and have broad latitude to use deadly force, is a reason to avoid them and to be cautious around them. Especially if you are a member of a marginalized or racialized group, who cannot be reasonably confident that the legal system will protect you from the police power; hence, this power is dominating, compromising your political freedom. Nonetheless, it operates entirely within the space of reasons: what you know about the norms governing actions in your society gives you reasons to act according to your own norms of caution and deference. Even coercion and direct threats operate within the space of reasons; as Hegel rightly notes, you must let yourself be coerced.

    Once we appreciate the fact that people are equally agentic – hence, equally “free” in the terms of “Hegel’s logical-metaphysical account of willing” – in every form of human society, we are forced to look elsewhere for guidance for our political aspirations and struggles. I propose looking to universal and equal freedom from domination for this guidance. Suther objects that this is a purely instrumental conception of freedom, which reduces freedom to “a mere means to the fulfillment of my actual end, my satisfaction of my contingent interests.” This objection, however, rests on the same substitution of agency for political freedom.

    Enjoying political freedom does not dictate to people what their actual ends must be – the whole point of being politically free is that you are free to live your life – but this does not at all entail that our agency is indifferent to the ends we choose for ourselves or the norms of action we adhere to. (Every author who writes about autonomy or self-determination recognizes that we can undertake practices that undermine our own agency; drug use and addiction are the favorite cases.) Nor does it entail that our commonly-enjoyed political freedom is indifferent to the ends people pursue. Some ends can only be pursued either by having or by seeking dominating power over others.

    Suther is incredulous. He asks, “what is to prevent my ends from including dealing heroin, polygamy, or anti-Black propagandizing?” Well, can you deal heroin, marry multiple women, or carry on racist propaganda without making others subject to a power they cannot control? If not, then my conception of political freedom certainly rules out the pursuit of those ends. If those ends can be pursued without using or accruing dominating power, however, then, while they might be ethical failings,[1] they do not rise to the level of being threats to anyone’s freedom. Kwame Ture’s distinction is a good guide: “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem.” What people want may very well pose a problem for their own happiness and flourishing; what they have the power to do, on the other hand, is the question for politics.

    But Suther is still not satisfied. Isn’t my conception of freedom “indifferent to content”? Don’t we have to rule out “obviously abhorrent, historically obsolete practices like slavery, vassalage, indentured servitude, and so on”? Once we do that, isn’t it obvious that “our interest must lie in mutually justifiable practices, that is, practices in which we mutually regard ourselves as the authors”? Every Rawlsian liberal will be nodding along at this point. I, however, want to be more cautious.

    Freedom from domination certainly rules out slavery, vassalage, indentured servitude, and so on, since those are all forms of domination. However, they are not ruled out as historically obsolete, since obsolescence does nothing to prevent them from persisting or returning. Only social relations and political institutions – arrangements of power – that make them impossible can prevent them. And we cannot be so sure that “our interest” excludes them, either, since they have very clearly served the interests of some wherever they have existed – that is precisely why they existed. Preventing them from recurring requires making sure that no one develops a powerful enough interest in making them recur.

    What’s more, mutually regarding one another as the authors of our social practices is far too capacious to serve as a criterion for picking out decent political institutions and practices. The dominant love nothing more than regarding the dominated as the authors of the social practices of domination. Israeli spokespeople, both paid and volunteer, will proclaim at great length that the Palestinians have brought everything on themselves, that the only way to stop the slaughter is to surrender completely, that the institutions of Gaza and the government of Hamas reflect the will and the voluntary action of the people of Gaza, and that, therefore, all Gazans must be held responsible for the – often imaginary – deeds of Hamas.

    This is not exceptional. The powerful intone breathless encomia to the moral agency and responsibility of those they enjoy power over. Police officers tell us that someone they shot created a dangerous situation and was responsible for their choices and for the outcome. Politicians tell voters we are obligated to vote for them, regardless of the substance of their campaigns, since we are otherwise choosing the worse. The poor are responsible for their poverty. The sick are responsible for their illness. The downtrodden, excluded, and oppressed – why do they make it so easy by being so unlikable? And to this monotonous chorus, the metaphysics of agency chimes in with its aria: “because you must always act on the basis of reasons, you are responsible for your actions and beliefs and called to account, asked to provide not exculpations but justifications.” Never mind that, in the empirically given world of grossly palpable human beings, there are some who – lucky duckies! – are never actually, legally and corporeally, called to account for their actions and beliefs, despite having immense power to compel others relentlessly to explain and justify themselves. Metaphysical responsibility is spread evenly over all of us. Empirical responsibility is not, but falls instead upon individuals and groups in inverse ratio to their social power.

    Generally, I think any account of freedom that leans on the metaphysics of agency will, for just that reason, perform this same counterpoint echo of the ideology of the dominant. It will tell the individual worker that their “immediate interest cannot be satisfied on its own terms” – i.e., that they are irrational for trying to earn a higher wage or to save up for a down payment on a house – and that their true interest lies in the good of all. It will tell workers who are organizing a union that “‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ is structurally impossible under capitalist conditions” – the obvious implication being that cynicism and cheating are the only options available.[2] Selflessness or crime – being the devoted servant or the guilty enemy – are the only options available. Descended from the metaphysical realm into the world of power relations, the agent’s self-legislating freedom can comprehend only innocence or guilt.

    Political freedom is ethically indeterminate – Suther is right about that. Political freedom does not prescribe ends for people or societies. But metaphysical freedom – agency – is politically indeterminate. It does not differentiate domination from non-domination. It proscribes direct violence, which turns its targets from agents into patients – and which, conveniently, is often the only recourse of the powerless. But it cannot provide agents on the ground with any criteria for differentiating enabling from dominating forms of power. Because it focuses on rules and their enactment, it cannot see unexercised power at all, or tell us anything about its effects. For this reason, Hegel can provide us with a rich phenomenology of human existence, but he cannot guide us at all in our projects of emancipation.

    Don’t take my word for it. Hegel told us himself that philosophy always comes too late to tell us what to do. Maybe we should listen to him on this point.

    [1] Or they might not. Why should we be aghast at someone supplying opiates for medical and recreational purposes, or engaging in polyamory, where neither of these exploit or impose relations of domination?

    [2] Far from arguing what Suther attributes to him, Marx argues that “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s labor” is the immanent norm of the capitalist system and the standard of justice for both worker and capitalist. Wages are not exchanged for labor, however, but for labor-power. And this exchange takes place, on average, as an exchange of equivalents. The problem with the capitalist mode of production is not that it makes a fair exchange impossible, but that it pumps labor out of workers, using them up, under the cover of a fair exchange.