What’s Left of the Dialectic?: A Polemic

Abstract

WHAT'S LEFT OF ENGLISH STUDIES? We want to address this question in an oblique way--not by thinking about the state of the discipline, but by thinking about the conditions of and for thinking today. We present here a set of theses that we hope might help to re-imagine the role and scope of philosophy or theory in the age of finance capitalism; the links between these theses and (the politics of) literary studies will be left open. The sources of these theses are as eclectic as a music collection: they bear with them the traces of broken relationships, misdirected enthusiasms, the inevitable, short-lived fascination with the new, the enduring influence of old favouritas that one cannot get past. These theses should not be taken as prescriptive. They might be read in the light of Friedrich Schiegel's conception of his philosophical fragments--as scraps or remnants of a total system that could never really exist. Fredric Jameson has recently described his own critical practice as a translation mechanism, a theoretical machine that makes it possible to convert other discourses into the central political problematic that animates Marxism (Zhang 365-66). We conceive these theses in much the same spirit: as grasping towards a mediating code rather than as a set of truth-claims. The utility of these theses will thus be determined by their ability to help produce a philosophy politically rather than conceptually adequate to finance capitalism--a philosophy or theory that takes up the political challenge of the present without thereby failing to become anything more than an expression of (an adequation of) the dynamism of finance capitalism itself. 1 MORE HASTE, LESS SPEED Though it belongs to a different era, Minima Moralia is a handbook for conducting philosophy in the age of finance capitalism. One cannot avoid reflecting on the temptations and limitations of bourgeois intellectual thought, and indeed, of the temptations of reflecting on these temptations. The concept of lately championed in the social sciences by Ulrich Beck and by the architect of the Third Way, Anthony Giddens, seems to represent an advance over a modernity that has no prefacing adjective. But just as being against capitalism doesn't imply that one is a socialist, so being reflexive doesn't mean the problems of modernity are magically solved. Adorno reminds us again and again of the institutional settings out of which thought grows, and the constraints and expectations these settings produce. there are no longer, for the intellectual, any given categories, even cultural, and bustle endangers concentration with a thousand claims, the effort of producing something in some measure worthwhile is now so great as to be beyond almost everybody (Minima 29). Is it possible that Totality has been rejected not because it is specious or Eurocentric but because to think it takes too much time? It might as well be admitted: far from having been slowly co-opted by a shift from a university of culture to a university of excellence (as Bill Readings suggests), intellectual labor is the very model for production in the age of finance capital. Long before high-tech firms plopped pool tables down in the middle of their high-ceiling, reconverted factory-buildings, the professoriate was working twelve-hour flex-time days on gothic campuses and hanging out at the faculty club. As for us: guilty as charged. The lesson here is to leave behind even the lingering idea of intellectual purity vis-a-vis the contaminated state of the rest of the world. And to think with less speed, but more urgency. 2 THE ECLIPSE OF SO-CALLED TRADITION For Gramsci, intellectuals are connected to one another across time. Since traditional intellectuals experience through an 'esprit de corps' their uninterrupted historical continuity and their special qualification, they put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group (7). …