Dialectical Account Research Articles

Portrait of the Artist as Colonised Subject

This article engages with Frantz Fanon’s writings on different responses by artists among colonised peoples to the fact of their colonisation. Fanon develops a dialectical account in which an initial stage of assimilation of Western techniques and paradigms is followed by a phase of immersion in African artistic traditions. These two phases then function as prelude to a third, combative stage which is presented as the most efficacious and authentic way for artists to play their part in decolonisation. The article problematises the temporal logic and implicit hierarchies of Fanon’s account. It does so by using Jacques Rancière’s redemptive reading of early working class mobilisations in 1830s and 1840s France, prior to the advent of Marxian proletarian politics, as a counterpoint. The article here finds a different, more affirmative, nondialectical and non-historicist way of evaluating the liberatory potential of artistic practices by the colonised prior to combative decolonisation.

Critiquing Jung’s Ethics

ABSTRACTC. G. Jung never offered a formalized system of ethics, but his analytical psychology is teeming with ethical pronouncements. Jung’s ethical theories are introduced and explored in relation to a book written by Dan Merkur centering on the question of morality in human nature, the individuation process, and in psychotherapeutic treatment. Jung struggled to provide a dialectical account of human valuation, yet this is implied in the very process of overcoming oppositions through the negotiation and integration of differences, and in holding balances between internal and external conflicts. The psychologicalization of ethics, particularly the compensatory function of the unconscious, ensures that moral psychology is fraught with ambivalence, uncertainty, and competing dilemmas that are unique to each person, hence no formal or rational system of deontological ethics is possible.

LAUTMAN ON PROBLEMS AS THE CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE OF SOLUTIONS

Albert Lautman (1908–44) was a philosopher of mathematics whose views on mathematical reality and on the philosophy of mathematics parted with the dominant tendencies of mathematical epistemology of the time. Lautman considered the role of philosophy, and of the philosopher, in relation to mathematics to be quite specific. He writes that “in the development of mathematics, a reality is asserted that mathematical philosophy has as a function to recognize and describe” (Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real (London: Bloomsbury, 2011) 87). He goes on to characterise this reality as an “ideal reality” that “governs” the development of mathematics. The relation between mathematical problems as they arise in the historical development of mathematics and the solutions that are provided to these problems by mathematicians, in the form of new mathematical theories, definitions or axioms, are governed by what Lautman characterises as a dialectics of mathematics. The aim of this paper is to give an account of this Lautmanian dialectic and of how it can be understood to govern the development of solutions to mathematical problems.

The Evolution of Management Models: A Neo-Schumpeterian Theory

In the last century and a half, U.S. industry has seen the emergence of several different management models. We propose a theory of this evolution based on three nested and interacting processes. First, we identify several successive waves of technological revolution, each of which prompted a corresponding wave of change in the dominant organizational paradigm. Second, nested within these waves, each of these organizational paradigms emerged through two successive cycles—a primary cycle that generated a new management model making the prior organizational paradigm obsolete, and a secondary cycle that generated another model that mitigated the dysfunctions of the primary cycle’s model. Third, nested within each cycle is a problem-solving process in which each model’s development passed through four main phases: (1) identification of a widespread organizational and management problem, (2) creation of innovative managerial concepts that offer various solutions to this problem, (3) emergence and theorization of a new model from among these concepts, and (4) dissemination and diffusion of this model. By linking new models’ emergence to specific technological revolutions, we can explain changes in their contents. By integrating a dialectical account of the paired cycles with an account of the waves of paradigm change, we can see how apparently competing models are better understood as complementary pairs in a common paradigm. And by unpacking each model’s phases of development, we can identify the roles played by various actors and management concepts in driving change in the models’ contents and see the agency behind these structural changes.

Transgressions: Erich Przywara, G. W. F. Hegel, and the Principle of Non-Contradiction

This article concerns the nature of reason in the work of the Twentieth Century Catholic theologian Erich Przywara and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The discussion centers on three interlocking issues: (a) the question whether proper thinking submits to or transgresses the principle of non-contradiction; (b) the relationship between reason and history; (c) the theological concern with distinguishing the “history of reason” and the divine life. It is argued that both Hegel and Przywara give an account of reason where there are moments of contradiction, and that this is a necessary feature of historical existence. Further, while Przywara and others are concerned with Hegel’s making reason’s reconciliation of contradiction in history identical with the divine life, I argue that although this is a real concern, Hegel’s account is more equivocal than normally admitted. Finally, I argue that the distinguishing feature between Przywara and Hegel is what happens after the moment of contradiction; that is where we see the most important difference between an analogical and a dialectical account of reason.

The dialectics of Paul: on exception, grace, and use in Badiou and Agamben

ABSTRACTThe remarkable philosophical present-day turn to Paul pays a lot of attention to the particular role played by the famous distinctions that structure Paul’s rhetoric such as the distinction between faith and law, life and death, and spirit and flesh. These distinctions lead to the question of whether Paul (or the philosophers’ Paul) endorses a dualism or not. In this essay, the author investigates Badiou’s and Agamben’s readings of Paul and asks whether one cannot find a form of dialectics rather than dualism in these readings. The concept of the exception seems to corroborate this suggestion. To examine whether this suggestion makes sense, the author first discusses Badiou’s focus on the antidialectics of death and resurrection as well as the dialectical remnants in Badiou’s reading of Paul. Subsequently, the author analyses Agamben’s dialectical account of the Pauline terms katargein (to deactivate), chrēsis (use) and charis (grace).

UNDERSTANDING ASSERTION TO UNDERSTAND SILENCING: FINDING AN ACCOUNT OF ASSERTION THAT EXPLAINS SILENCING ARISING FROM TESTIMONIAL INJUSTICE

ABSTRACTRae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby provide accounts of how pornography silences women by appealing to J.L. Austin's account of speech-acts. Since their accounts focus only on instances of silencing where the hearer does not grasp the type of speech-act the speaker intends to perform, their accounts of silencing do not generalize to explain silencing that arises from what Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice.” I argue that silencing arising from testimonial injustice can only be explained by what we shall call the dialectical account of assertion, according to which assertion is the undertaking of a commitment in reasoned discourse. In doing so, I show that accounts of assertion based on speakers' intentions, proposals to common ground, and constitutive norms do not provide the necessary framework to explain silencing within the context of testimonial injustice. Having shown the strength of the dialectical account in explaining silencing, I conclude that the dialectical account also provides a way to remedy some instances of silencing arising from testimonial injustice providing further evidence that the dialectical account is the correct account of assertion.

Adorno reading and writing sociology

In the context of recent attempts to more adequately engage with Adorno’s approach to sociology and social theory, this article argues that such a project requires a more complete understanding of the philosophical basis of Adorno’s critical material perspective on knowledge and language. In particular, the interpretation of Adorno within sociology has been hampered by a fundamental misunderstanding regarding his methodology of critique and composition, which prioritizes the content of Adorno’s claims regarding sociology and social theory, over their rhetorical and performative character. This character is identifiable in Adorno’s prose, and grasped through a close attention to his account of the negative dialectic. Using Bernstein’s articulation of the ‘complex concept’ as an analytical framework, and Adorno’s introduction to Durkheim as its material, the article argues that the inability to grasp the rhetorical character of Adorno’s critical interpretive approach prevents an understanding of his potential relevance for sociology and social theory.

Pynchon’s California ed. by Scott McClintock, John Miller (review)

Reviewed by: Pynchon’s California ed. by Scott McClintock, John Miller Casey Shoop Scott McClintock and John Miller, eds., Pynchon’s California. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014. 228pp. Paper, $45; e-book, $45. As the proverbial “end” of the nation’s manifest destiny, California has long been overdetermined in the historical imagination: from the land of milk and honey to the land of millenarian last hours. No writer is perhaps more attuned to this ambivalent destiny than Thomas Pynchon, whose novels have repeatedly field-tested its prospects and possibilities. To date he has situated three novels in that fertile territory (The Crying of Lot 49 [1966], Vineland [1990], and Inherent Vice [2009]) and brought two others to rest there (Gravity’s Rainbow [1973] and Against the Day [2006]). The publication of Scott McClintock and John Miller’s edited collection of essays is thus an overdue and much-needed critical exploration of this connection between Pynchon and the place where history is so often presumed to end, for better or worse. Taken together, the essays argue for what Margaret Lynd in the volume’s lead essay calls the “situated knowledges” of Pynchon’s California fiction over against what the editors see as the prevalent critical tendency to read “in the microcosm of California any ‘totalizing’ order of domination by postmodern, late ‘Capital’” (9). The essays demonstrate a wide-ranging and vital attention to the specific historical and regional contexts of Pynchon’s engagement with California. Hanjo Berressem, for example, offers a free-spirited reading of the state’s peculiar ecology in the “California trilogy.” Bill Millard insightfully tracks the sordid political history of land use and real estate through Inherent Vice, while Stephen Hock pursues the emblematic modernity of roads and freeways in Pynchon’s novels toward their ultimate expression in the California highway system. And Lynd finds in the smaller, more character-driven plots of the California novels a modicum of “situated hope” and agency against the rectilinear course of historical catastrophe that propels [End Page 260] Pynchon’s larger world-historical novels (22). In a manner that both complements and diverges from the concerns of those contrapuntal epics, Pynchon’s California makes a persuasive case for the intimacy of historical experience in the California trilogy (the 1960s through the 1980s), the felt-sense of an epoch lived through in tones both promissory and elegiac. At the same time, this attention to the “local, regionally specific and ‘situated’ features of Pynchon’s California fictions” has its limits (9). Writing about California is challenging precisely because of the perceived conflict between the regional and historical specificities of place on the one hand, and the allegorical leveraging of that place into national and international meanings that far exceed it on the other. Rather than privileging one side of this opposition, Pynchon’s California would have benefited from a more dialectical account of the connections between the local and the global that California stages in the period Pynchon’s novels traverse. Posing questions about the relationship between periodization and place in his work makes this need clear: how do Pynchon’s novels imagine the growth of the California information economy that so deeply altered the US labor market? What is the link between Pynchon’s fascination with Hollywood image-culture and the dream-life of capitalism more generally? How does the California rise of Reaganism that so preoccupies Pynchon augur a crisis of faith for the legacy of sixties radicalism not only at Berkeley but also around the world? How do Pynchon’s California novels help us reconceptualize the global phenomenon of postmodernism, a concept that seems so indelibly Californian in its articulation? On this last question, the editors are loath to rehearse the “by now all-too-familiar portrayal of California as a postmodern space of superficiality” and eager to “offer an alternative to the construction of Pynchon as postmodern ironist” (8, 9). I see this reduction of postmodernism to an aesthetic category as something of a lost opportunity for Pynchon’s California: when postmodernism is conceptualized as a periodizing term for the postwar economic and cultural transformations in the capitalist world-system, as in the influential accounts of Fredric...

Exclusive Legal Positivism and Legal Autopoiesis: Towards a Theory of Dialectical Positivism

In spite of a relatively short period of popularity in the 1980s–1990s, legal autopoiesis is not amongst the most debated theories in contemporary jurisprudence. On the methodological side, this loss of interest was, to some extent, predetermined by its sociological origins, metaphorical apparatus, the complexity of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems and its stylistic density.1 From the normative perspective, the gist of criticism and disapproval among legal scholars could be narrowed down to their scepticism towards the autopoiesis’ motto: law as a self-referential system. Taken superficially, the self-referential character of law breaks the ‘taboo of circularity’,2 endangering in some sense the very idea of democratic governance. It would be a trivial task, however, to demonstrate that the closeness of the system of legal norms has an operational character and is intrinsically connected to its openness. This issue has been explicitly articulated by the founders of legal autopoiesis in their reply to accusations that autopoiesis is a revival of some type of autarchic solipsism of law I do not intend in this paper to trace the evolution of autopoiesis in law and its eventual decline. My primary objective is to offer dialectical account of the discussion about the essence of law, as takes place between legal positivism and non-positivism using autopoietic analysis of law as a means in support of legal positivism. I develop my arguments in 4 sections. After the introductory notes, which set the overall tasks of the paper, Section II provides a brief description of the theory of social systems, analysing the principle of autopoiesis and its repercussion on the system of law and highlights the main research agenda of exclusive positivism (I will also use the term exclusivism). Section III articulates in more details the main problems related to law’s incorporation of morality, providing a theoretical background for the theory of dialectical positivism (I will address the meaning of dialectics and dialectical positivism in Section IV), which is subsequently applied in Section IV to the issues of the indeterminacy of the law, legal interpretation and argumentation.

Dialectical Activity, Ritual, and Value: A Critique of Talbot Brewer

AbstractTalbot Brewer has argued that contemporary philosophy of action and ethics are hampered by a picture of human agency as essentially consisting in bringing about states of affairs – a “production‐oriented” conception of action. From classical sources, centrally including Aristotle, Brewer retrieves a different picture – of human activity as fundamentally “dialectical”. Ritual activity, including a ritual dimension of many dialectical activities, affirms and deepens our human presence in and to the world, and to other human beings. I argue that this aspect of ritual activity cannot be adequately recognised in the terms of Brewer's dialectical account of human activity.

The Dialectical Biologist, circa 1890: John Dewey and the Oxford Hegelians

The Dialectical Biologist, circa 1890:John Dewey and the Oxford Hegelians Trevor Pearce (bio) 1. introduction john dewey is rarely discussed in mainstream analytic philosophy nowadays. Looking only at the Philosophical Review, a journal in which Dewey himself published twenty-two articles, it seems that he is no longer viewed as an important interlocutor: his name has been mentioned in only two book reviews and one article since 2000.1 This apparently low opinion of Dewey’s work among analytic philosophers may be related to Richard Rorty’s claim, in his American Philosophical Association presidential address of 1979, that for the pragmatist “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones.”2 This characterization of pragmatism is controversial. Susan Haack, for one, is vehemently opposed to Rorty’s account.3 Nevertheless, his vision of pragmatism—focused on community, conversation, and history—has been dominant. Rorty’s emphases, unfortunately in my view, have obscured one of the central features of Dewey’s thought: his biology-inspired naturalism. Anyone reading a substantial cross-section of Dewey’s works is struck by the constant references to organism and environment. Even his aesthetic theory, where such biological ideas are perhaps least expected, began with a discussion of experience as organism-environment interaction: “The first great consideration is that life goes on in an environment; not merely in it but because of it, through interaction with it.”4 Rorty, [End Page 747] of course, did not simply ignore Dewey’s connection to biology: following James Kloppenberg, he viewed Dewey as occupying the conceptual space “between Hegel and Darwin.” But Rorty rejected Dewey’s own understanding of these thinkers as engaged with biology and evolution, choosing instead to link them with historicism and relativism.5 On this reading, Dewey’s philosophy is not truly biological even when it explicitly refers to biology. Running counter to Rorty, recent champions of Dewey’s naturalism—and especially his approach to ethics—tend to think that his idealist ancestry only detracts from his views. Cheryl Misak, in her book The American Pragmatists, writes, “Dewey’s attempt at bringing Hegelian insights to the empiricist or naturalist picture seems always less than satisfactory.” As Misak indicates, following recent scholarship, Dewey’s philosophy retained key aspects of idealism even after his biological turn. For those seeking a naturalist Dewey, however, these Hegelian traces are an embarrassment—responsible for muddled metaphysics. As Peter Godfrey-Smith once put it, modern naturalists tend to see Dewey “as someone with good instincts but a lack of rigor and a Hegelian hangover.”6 In this paper, I suggest that these two perspectives on Dewey’s philosophy present a false choice. Rather than viewing Dewey as either a historicist (inspired by Hegel) or a naturalist (inspired by biology), we should see him as strange but potentially fruitful combination of both.7 My strategy is primarily historical: I demonstrate that the notion of organism-environment interaction central to Dewey’s pragmatism stems from a Hegelian approach to adaptation; his turn to biology was not necessarily a turn away from Hegel. I argue that Dewey’s account of the organism-environment relation derives from the work of Oxford Hegelians such as Edward Caird and Samuel Alexander, who were attempting to reconcile evolutionary ideas with a critique of Herbert Spencer’s environmentalist account of human thought and action. These British Idealists insisted that adaptation or adjustment results from the reciprocal action of organism and environment: just as the environment affects the organism, the organism affects the environment. They also claimed that organism and environment were best seen as two aspects of one thing—life. This dialectical account of organism-environment interaction played a key role in Dewey’s philosophy from the 1890s to the 1940s, despite other shifts in his thinking. [End Page 748] “Reciprocal action” sounds reasonable to most, but organism and environment as “aspects of one thing” tends to raise eyebrows. Godfrey-Smith locates both ideas in the work of Richard Lewontin, co-author of The Dialectical Biologist. Lewontin insists that “the environment is a product of the organism, just as the organism is a product of the environment.”8 As Godfrey-Smith suggests, Lewontin seems to go beyond this...

Dialectics and World Politics: The Story So Far …

The question ‘What is dialectics?’ is notoriously difficult to answer. Theoretical obfuscation and ideological baggage have fostered widespread misunderstandings of the concept. This article is intended to go some way in providing an answer, though one offered as a heuristic in which further developments can be made, rather than as doctrinaire statement of first principles. This introductory account of dialectics proceeds in four steps. It begins with a basic definitional and conceptual outline of dialectics before offering a brief philosophical history of dialectics in Eastern and Western philosophical traditions; its re-emergence from scholasticism through Kant and Hegel; its vivification in Marx’s thought (and subsequent decline under ‘Diamat’); and its development in Western Marxism and on into contemporary political philosophy. The third part then explores the more modest engagements with dialectics that have taken place within IR theory before closing with a discussion of some of the ongoing tensions and key themes in dialectical thought. These center on the question of understanding dialectics as a process of reflection and an objective logic traceable in human praxis, highlighting the ongoing critical and revolutionary essence of dialectics.

Constructing contexts, (re)defining immigrants: Mental models and social representations in immigration policy defense

This article examines two different instances of policy defense as a means to show how a socio-cognitive approach to contexts can help develop a dialectical account of the relationship between societal processes and our communicative practices. Based on such analysis, I argue that comparative analyses within a socio-cognitive theory of context can offer new insights into how, first of all, mental models control the process of discourse production and interpretation in important ways, and second, how they are intrinsically related to ideologically based understandings of particular groups and/or situations. Such an approach allows us to account for and explain the potential effectiveness of the discursive moves that emerge from this co-constitutive relationship between contexts and communicative practices.

Listening to the avant-garde

In her book Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency , Lea Ypi revisits the debate over the scope of justice between cosmopolitans and statists, which has been constitutive of the field of international normative theory. Against statists, Ypi defends the global scope of egalitarian principles of justice, deriving them from a causally fundamental relationship between relative and absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she demonstrates that associative political relations play an essential role in implementing egalitarian principles of global justice and that condemnations of the state by cosmopolitans are both unnecessary and ill-advised. Advocating what she calls ‘statist cosmopolitanism,’ whereby domestic ‘avant-garde’ agents intervene politically so as to constrain and motivate fellow-citizens to support cosmopolitan transformations, the book offers a dialectical account of political theory in an activist mode. (Published: 4 July 2013) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 6 , No. 2, 2013, pp. 101107. http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/egp.v6i2.21317

Towards a social-relational dialectic for world politics

Dialectics remains an underutilized methodology in contemporary IR theory, which represents a significant limitation to the study of world politics, particularly in under-standing processes of transformation and change — an oversight that this article intends to redress. This article has two primary goals. First, it aims to reconstruct and build upon the small but robust debate concerning the validity of dialectics in IR that has been championed previously by Alker and Biersteker, and Heine and Teschke, respectively. Second, it contrasts dialectical and deterministic approaches to IR, as exemplified in Coxian Critical Theory and neo-realism, as a means to showcase the merits of the former as an approach to the study of social change in world politics. The ultimate aim of the article is to offer the groundwork of a social-relational dialectical approach to world politics that is focused on the intersubjective engagements between human beings, which can be developed in future research. Through such an analytic, the dialectical processes in social life are shown to be open-ended and the article rejects any understanding of ‘inevitable’ progress/regress or teleological end point. On the one hand, this account of dialectics promises greater analytical potential for understanding processes of change in world politics but, on the other, indicates the potential for the irrational toleration of contradiction and antagonism as an accepted feature of social life. Ultimately, the article argues that the skilled dialectician should emphasize human agency and intersubjectivity within a social-relational dialectical approach to world politics.

Wittgenstein's Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§243-315 (review)

Reviewed by: Wittgenstein's Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§243-315 Marie McGinn Wittgenstein's Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§243–315, by Stephen Mulhall; 160 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, $23.95 paper. The primary concern of Stephen Mulhall's book is to investigate an interpretation of Wittgenstein's remarks on private language, associated paradigmatically with Norman Malcolm. On this reading, the grammar of our ordinary concepts of language, reference, meaning, rule, etc. is held to prohibit or exclude the idea of a private language. The attempt to give expression to the idea is held to result in a violation of the grammar of these concepts, which connects them essentially with the idea of public criteria that are accepted as establishing that a [End Page 265] word has been correctly used. Something that philosophers have been inclined to regard as a possibility is shown to be excluded: the attempt to describe it results in philosophers' using words in ways that are essentially nonsensical. Mulhall calls this reading of Wittgenstein's remarks a "substantial reading." He questions whether its advocates have missed the fundamental point of Wittgenstein's remarks, even while they remain fundamentally convinced that they have grasped it. He opposes to this style of reading a "resolute reading," as outlined by Diamond and Conant in relation to the Tractatus, which holds that Wittgenstein's central philosophical purpose is to overcome our attraction to the idea that there is something that we cannot do, that the grammar of our language is a limitation on the thoughts we can express. Thus, the suggestion is that one should not see the grammar of our concepts as a limitation, or as a pre-established restriction, on the projection of words into new contexts. Rather, Wittgenstein's aim is to exploit our everyday mastery of language in the investigation, in particular cases, of what we might mean by our words. In the case of the idea of a private language, the aim of the investigation is to show that attempts to give meaning to words which, in a philosophical context, we feel compelled to utter cannot give them a content that succeeds in expressing what the philosopher had it in mind to describe. This description of Mulhall's aims does not, however, do justice to the singular nature of his text. Many interpreters would dissociate themselves from Malcolm's reading of Wittgenstein's remarks on private language. Many would also see the idea that the grammar of our everyday concepts can be used to prohibit the philosopher's use of words as committed to a view of language that is completely rejected in the Investigations. Yet a concern to find a reading of Wittgenstein's remarks on privacy and private language that avoids the suggestion of constraint, and which does better justice to his rejection of philosophical theorizing, would not on its own guarantee sympathy with Mulhall's treatment of them. The fundamental principle of Mulhall's approach is the need to be attentive to Wittgenstein's voice, and to resist substituting assertion for something that is essentially more interrogative and exploratory in tone. The principle is clearly undeniable, and much of what Mulhall says in this book does clear and careful justice to it. However, there are also points in his discussion where his account of Wittgenstein's dialectic is unconvincing or unclear, and, more significantly, places where his discussion imports concerns that seem remote from the remarks he has focused on. For example, Mulhall presents the dialectic of §§243–270 as one in which the idea of a language in which the expressions refer to the immediate private sensations of the person speaking, so that another person cannot understand it, is put forward by Wittgenstein's interlocutor, as something to which he—the interlocutor—is committed. Wittgenstein is held to respond to the interlocutor's idea by exploring how the notions of " refer," "immediate," and "private" might be used to give sense to the interlocutor's words. This, it seems to me, [End Page 266] makes matters more straightforward than they are and preserves—in this respect if in no other...

The Reification of Consciousness: Husserl's Phenomenology in Lukács's Identical Subject-Object

Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness has suffered the peculiar indignity of being criticized by its admirers for the very theory they take from it. Like Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy, also published in 1923, Lukacs’s book explored the proletariat’s stubborn refusal to rise in support of revolutionary regimes in Germany and Hungary; eschewing allegedly scientific analyses of the supposedly necessary collapse of capitalism, Korsch and Lukacs focused on what happened in consciousness, not behind it, to understand society. Korsch’s dialectical account of the relationship between philosophy and society and Lukacs’s attempt to ground the very structures of subjectivity of individuals in their society are now seen as the foundations of “Western” Marxism. Yet while many have adopted Lukacs’s account of the reification of consciousness, few have accepted his argument that this very problem produces a revolutionary subjectivity in those most affected by it. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is a case in point: though inspired by Lukacs in criticizing the total rationalization of society, epitomized by the “culture industry,” they reject his optimistic

Kierkegaard and Aristophanes on the Suspension of Irony

In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard aims to show the inadequacy of an ironic standpoint not through a generalized dialectical account of its failure on its own terms but through an empirical examination of the actual life of Socrates. Crucial to his methodology, I argue, is his use of the term (svœve). Socratic irony is not overcome, superseded, or annulled, but rather suspended in its incomplete connection to its community. In both his depiction of Socrates as hanging in a basket and his deification of insubstantial clouds, Aristophanes provides a model for Kierkegaard's conception of suspension. By bringing Socrates into direct engagement with the Clouds, Aristophanes shows Kierkegaard not just the tendency of Socratic irony to suspend itself, but a way of approaching irony that does not reduce it to a moment of a greater totality.

The Synthesis of Rhythms: Form, Ideology, and the “Augurs of Spring”

ABSTRACT At the time of the premiere of The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky suggestively described its first dance, “Augurs of Spring,” as a “synthesis of rhythms.” Later, he characterized the whole ballet as an “architectonic” work. Richard Taruskin, in arguing for the ballet's overall aesthetic of “primitive simplicity,” polemically rejects this latter adjective as a typical formalist lie. But detailed analysis demonstrates the architectonic intricacy of the rhythmic synthesis in “Augurs” alone. Not only are the composer's labors toward such local intricacy clearly evident in the sketches, but a dialectical account of formalism and immediacy in this one dance confirms both the documented “neonationalist” background and initial reception, while pointing to a finer understanding of this ballet's position in the stylistic development of Stravinsky's Russian period.