{"id":2140,"date":"2015-02-14T00:00:32","date_gmt":"2015-02-14T05:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2140"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:57:10","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:57:10","slug":"review-of-andrew-feenberg-the-philosophy-of-praxis-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2140","title":{"rendered":"Review of Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis (2014)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review of Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Luk\u00e1cs and the Frankfurt School<\/em> (London and New York: Verso, 2014) <\/p>\n

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

Originally published in <\/em>Marx & Philosophy Review of Books<\/strong> (February 14, 2015<\/a>). Re-published by <\/em>Heathwood Institute<\/strong> (September 7, 2015<\/a>). <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man.\u201d
\n— Walter Benjamin, \u201cTo the planetarium,\u201d One-way Street<\/em> (1928)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Andrew Feenberg\u2019s new book The Philosophy of Praxis<\/em> is a substantial revision of a much earlier work, Luk\u00e1cs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory<\/em> (1981). If one were to sum up Feenberg\u2019s main point it would be to recover Marxist Critical Theory\u2019s ability to recognize technology as a social relation, and to thus grasp the crisis of capitalism expressed through the crisis of technology. Feenberg arrives at this recognition of Marxism through an investigation of critical theory as the self-reflection of social and political practice, \u201cpraxis,\u201d with its roots in the origins of social theory in Rousseau and the German Idealism of Kant and Hegel that had followed upon Rousseau\u2019s breakthrough. The sources of Critical Theory are thus critical theory\u2019s origins in the critique of society. Society, indeed, is a modern invention, in that only modern society recognizes social relations as such, as part of the emancipation of those social relations. The new, modern concept of freedom beginning with Rousseau — Hegel had written that \u201cthe principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite\u201d (The Philosophy of Right<\/em>) — originated in the revolution of bourgeois society: a new consciousness of social relations came with the experience of their radical transformation. As Adorno, one of the subjects of Feenberg\u2019s book, put it pithily, \u201cSociety is a concept of the Third Estate\u201d (\u201cSociety,\u201d 1966). <\/p>\n

Technology as a social phenomenon, specifically as a phenomenon of social relations, or, technology as a social relation, is Feenberg\u2019s way into political questions of capitalism. His new title for the revised book takes its name from Gramsci\u2019s term for and description of Marxism (in The Prison Notebooks<\/em>), the \u201cphilosophy of praxis,\u201d which Gramsci took over from Croce\u2019s Neo-Hegelian concept of self-reflective practice. The question for politics, then, is the degree of social reflexivity in the recognition of technology. In this, Feenberg follows from Marcuse\u2019s writings from the 1960s, which were concerned with the post-WWII world\u2019s exhibiting what Horkheimer and Adorno had earlier called the \u201cveil of technology,\u201d or, \u201ctechnology as ideology.\u201d There was a deliberate attempt to overcome the prevailing Heideggerian critique of technology, in which humans became victims of the tools they had fashioned. As Heidegger succinctly phrased it in a barb directed against Marxism, \u201cThe laboring animal is left to the giddy whirl of its products so that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate itself in empty nothingness\u201d (\u201cOvercoming Metaphysics,\u201d 1936\u201346). Feenberg asks, what would it mean to overcome this reification of technology? And, what would it mean to overcome the political pessimism that the problem of technology seems to pose in capitalism? <\/p>\n

The \u201cphilosophy of praxis,\u201d then, is Feenberg\u2019s attempt to recognize technology as self-alienated social practice, or to use Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s term, \u201creified\u201d action that engenders political irresponsibility, the false naturalization or hypostatization of activity that could be changed. Feenberg traces this problem back to the origins of social theory in Rousseau\u2019s critique of civilization, the inherently ambivalent character of social \u201cprogress\u201d in history. Feenberg locates in Rousseau what he calls the origins of the \u201cdeontological\u201d approach to society: a new conception of freedom which is not merely a \u201cright\u201d but is indeed a \u201cduty.\u201d What Feenberg calls the \u201cdeontological grounds for revolution\u201d in Marx, then, is the Rousseauian tradition that Marx inherited from Kant and Hegel, if however in a \u201cmetacritical approach.\u201d <\/p>\n

Why \u201cmetacritical?\u201d Because in the Rousseauian tradition followed by Kant and Hegel, there remains the possibility of a theoretical affirmation and justification of society as being free already, where it would need to become<\/em> free through radical transformation. Hence the peculiarity of \u201ccritical theory\u201d in Marx. According to Feenberg, it was necessary for Marx to transcend the post-Rousseauian \u201cutilitarian\u201d framework of maximizing happiness through addressing \u201ctrue needs.\u201d For Feenberg, Marx overcomes the \u201csplit between reason and need,\u201d or between freedom and necessity, precisely because freedom is understood by Marx as the transformation of necessity. Marx thus followed upon the most radical implications of Rousseauian recognition of \u201csecond nature.\u201d <\/p>\n

This bears on the centrality of the problem of \u201ctechnology\u201d in capitalist utilitarianism, which is subject to a precipitous lowering or narrowing of horizons through concern with needs that are falsely naturalized: what is \u201csecond nature,\u201d a social product, is mistaken for \u201cfirst nature,\u201d or what Marx considered a \u201cfalse necessity.\u201d Such critique of ideology is how Marx overcame the potential conservative implications of how Kant and Hegel regarded \u201cnecessary forms of appearance\u201d of social reality. Social practices such as those reified in \u201ctechnology\u201d seem responsive to necessities that can actually be transformed. <\/p>\n

For Feenberg, there is a recurrent problem of neglect but also a red thread of rediscovery of this problem from Marx up to the present, with Luk\u00e1cs and the Frankfurt School providing key moments for recovery along the way. <\/p>\n

This is a problem specific to capitalism precisely because of the centrality of labor. Marxism\u2019s point of departure was to regard capital not as a \u201cthing\u201d in terms of the means of production or as \u201ctechnology\u201d but rather as a social relation, specifically as a social relation of the commodity form of labor. Marx regarded capital as labor\u2019s own product in order to demystify the capitalist estrangement of social relations in technologized production. What Marx called the \u201ccapitalist mode of production\u201d was a \u201ccontradiction\u201d between the \u201cbourgeois social relations\u201d of production in labor and their unrealized potential beyond themselves, or \u201cindustrial forces\u201d that had yet to be mastered socially — that is, politically<\/em>. <\/p>\n

The danger lay in accepting false limits to politics seemingly imposed by technology which poses \u201cnature\u201d as static where it is actually the existing social relations that are recalcitrant obstacles to be overcome. <\/p>\n

However, capitalism is not only a problem of false static appearance, but also a \u201creified\u201d or self-alienated dynamic, in which concrete practices or \u201ctechnologies\u201d change, but without adequate social-political awareness and agency. This is why the dynamics of technical change and its invidious social effects appear deus ex machina<\/em> (literally a theodicy for Heidegger; techne<\/em> as a god), and why it makes sense at all to characterize the problem in Marx\u2019s terms as capital<\/em>-ism. It is not a problem of \u201ccapitalist-ism,\u201d that is, a problem of society subject to the greed and narrow interests of the capitalists, but rather a deeper and more endemic problem of overall participation in social practice. <\/p>\n

This brings us back to the original Rousseauian problem of society and political sovereignty: the unlimited, free development both collectively and individually that Rousseau apotheosized in the \u201cgeneral will.\u201d What does it mean, following Marx, that the \u201cgeneral will\u201d appears in the form of \u201ccapital,\u201d and, in the 20th century, in the even more alienated form as the imperative of \u201ctechnology?\u201d It means that the problem of capitalism deepened, and social freedom became even more obscure. <\/p>\n

Feenberg provides an important Appendix to his book that addresses the history of Marxism as a phenomenon of this problem. There, Feenberg discusses the issue of Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s \u201cself-identical subject object\u201d of the proletariat in the form of the Communist Party. For Feenberg, Luk\u00e1cs followed both Luxemburg and Lenin\u2019s approaches to the problem of political party and social change. In Feenberg\u2019s formulation, for Luk\u00e1cs, following Lenin and Luxemburg, the political party for proletarian socialism, or the Communist Party, was not only or even especially the \u201csubject\u201d but was at least as if not more importantly the \u201cobject\u201d of the working class\u2019s political action in trying to overcome capitalism. <\/p>\n

In this sense, the problem of \u201creification\u201d was not merely an economic or even \u201cpolitical-economic\u201d problem (in the sense of the workers versus the capitalists), but was indeed first and foremost for Luk\u00e1cs a problem of politics<\/em>. The party was objectified political practice. The question was its critical recognition as such. What had motivated Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s recovery of Marx\u2019s original point of departure, what Feenberg calls the \u201cdeontological grounds for revolution,\u201d was precisely the phenomenon of how Marxism itself had become reified and thus went into political crisis by the time of WWI and the revolution — the civil war in Marxism — that had followed in Russia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, etc. It was Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s attempt to explain the underlying problem of that crisis in which Luxemburg and Lenin had been the protagonists that led to his rediscovery of Marx, specifically in the form of the \u201csubjective,\u201d \u201cconscious\u201d or \u201cHegelian\u201d dimension of Marxism that had fallen out as Marxism had degenerated or become \u201cvulgarized\u201d as a form of objectivistic economic determinism. The crisis of Marxism had led Luk\u00e1cs following Lenin and Luxemburg to a rediscovery of the potential for freedom concealed in capitalism. <\/p>\n

The subsequent reification of Marxist politics in Stalinism presented a new problem that the Frankfurt School following Luk\u00e1cs had tried to address. This was paralleled by others, according to Feenberg, such as Merleau-Ponty and Lucien Goldmann. There were problems and some stumbles along the way, however, as Feenberg addresses in discussing the recently translated and published (2011) conversation in 1956 between Horkheimer and Adorno regarding the crisis of official Communism in Khrushchev\u2019s (partial and abortive) attempt at de-Stalinization, which Feenberg finds them to have failed to adequately pursue, an opening only taken up by the 1960s New Left, encouraged not by Adorno and Horkheimer but rather by Marcuse (167\u2013171). <\/p>\n

Thus the New Left was another such moment of recovery for Feenberg, motivating an attempted further development of Marxist Critical Theory under changed historical conditions of society and politics. Feenberg\u2019s book, both in its original and its newly revised form, is an ongoing testament to that moment and its continued tasks up to the present. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review of Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Luk\u00e1cs and the Frankfurt School (London and New York: Verso, 2014) Chris Cutrone Originally published in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books (February 14, 2015). Re-published by Heathwood Institute (September 7, 2015). \u201cThe mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37,18,35,19,16],"class_list":["post-2140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-37","tag-adorno","tag-lenin","tag-lukacs","tag-marxism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2140"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3171,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions\/3171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}