refusal to utilize experience for state-based political change allows the politically savvy far-right to eradicate any chance of progress or reduction in violence

(Gregory, “The Treason of Intellectual Radicalism and the Collapse of Leftist Politics,” LOGOS, Winter edition)

What we are calling here a “treason of intellectual radicalism” can be seen to consist of several impulses that have had a deep and debilitating effect on progressive politics. First has been a shift toward a radical “non-foundational” or even “anti-foundational” thought. According to this philosophical view, in its more radical forms, the social world (and even the natural world) is constructed by subjects no longer possessing any kind of foundations for knowledge. The “myth of the given,” or the proposition that the social world is essentially constructed by subjects and discourse, is a basic starting point. There is no longer a need to rely on foundations for knowledge nor need we possess universal or rational justifications for political or ethical propositions and ideas. Political reality is the product not of concrete mechanisms of resource control and the organization of social structure, but instead the product of discourse. On this view, the site of politics becomes the struggle between and over the discursive narratives of the political and social. Now, political subjectivity is to be created, indeed, even “invented” and pushed against the state. The constructivist epistemology adopted by these thinkers is seen as liberating politics from the “realities” of class and social structure. As one advocate of this thesis argues, political subject-formation “cannot be articulated in relation to a pre-given socio-economic identity like that of the proletarian, but has to be invented or aggregated from the various social struggles of the present.”[4] These discourses and subjectivities are particularist in nature, even as they assert themselves as universals. This kind of thinking “is bound to discourse, literally narratives about the world that are admittedly partial.”[5] The politics that follows from this necessarily eschews formal political institutions, even as it becomes an increasingly abstract affair for academics only. Even more, it no longer sees exploitation and domination in concrete, material terms. As Robert Meister has insightfully argued, “As soon as the paradigm of language supplants the model of production, exploitation appears as merely another way of being misunderstood.”[6] The result is not political resistance in any meaningful sense of the term, but the “spectacle” of a political demonstration or some puerile display of public “art.”[7] In the meantime, more politically mature and reactionary forces have been able to roll back the welfare state, consolidate economic and political power, and help craft a neoliberal social order.[8] A second feature of alienated theory is its emphasis on anti-rational, anti-Enlightenment and anti-science as an epistemological and political stance. Knowledge, now seen as inherently braided with power, is recast as an interpretive activity; impartiality is a myth of scientific rationality, one premised on the power of exclusion. The perspective of the marginalized now becomes the central focus of how knowledge ought to be constructed. Dispensing with objectivity, theorists are now able to transform theory, properly understood as the search for the explanation of facts, into a kind of aesthetic enterprise where the boundaries between politics and culture blur.[9] New theoretical languages and vocabularies have been invented where the aim is not the explanation of reality or the construction of rational argument, but the exploration of some alternative perspective that has been repressed. Universalist principles and categories are anathema, on this view, to radical politics because of their tendency to crush difference and privilege exclusion. Now, we are told to privilege experience, the phenomenological dimensions of power over its structural causes. This results in a collapse of politics into culture. It displaces politics in its “dirty hands” manifestation where realizable ends are sought and fought for and instead insists on the “utopian” as an impossible goal. As Stanley Aronowitz argues, “utopian thought seeks to transform the present by articulating an alternative future, its power lies in its lack of respect for politics as the art of the possible, in its insistence that realism consists in the demand for the impossible.”[10] Power is now to be grasped through the elusive terrain of culture, the non-empirical sources of which can no longer be located and are hence “overdetermined.”[11] No longer can we look to class, to the power of privilege, but rather to the ways that power and knowledge are entwined. All objective points of reference have been abandoned. With the academic victory privileging the discourse of identity, the “unreal” has taken precedence over the real.[12] A third salient feature of this nouveau radicalism is its emphasis on spontaneous, disruptive and localized struggle as the means of politics. Taking their cues from the legacy of anarchism and third-world indigenous struggles such as the Zapatistas, these tactics are seen as the essence of a democratic politics of resistance. The basis for new movements is now seen to be the emergence of new identities, themselves created from the exaggerated subjectivity of the modern, narcissistic self.[13] Rejecting the state and conceiving of a post-state politics is now a central dogma of the new “radical” theorists. Since the state is seen to be inherently despotic, only the spontaneous, autonomous collection of groups who act against the state and outside of it are viewed as vehicles of political change. The absence of domination is now cast as the freedom to explore narcissistic lifestyles as well as expand an already exaggerated subjectivity where participatory and direct democracy become the political ideal. In the end, they valorize the individual’s resistance to the state and the power of localism. Here left and right touch in their extremes: it is precisely a libertarian ethos of freedom that dominates their vision, as David Harvey has insightfully pointed out: “This is the world that libertarian Republicans construct. It is also the view of individual liberty and freedom embraced by much of the anarchist and autonomist left, even as the capitalist version of the free market is roundly condemned.”[14] Now, it is a “multitude,” a disruptive demos, that commands the political imaginary of the new radicals. Instead of a rational radical position which seeks to democratize the state and its powers and to transform it in order to enhance and protect public goods, the new interpretation of radical democracy “is only intelligible once it is thought as being against the state – and once the term ‘democratic State,’ which appeared so naturally from Tocqueville’s pen, is by the same stroke rejected.”[15] In turn, claims like these have been used to legitimize the use of violence; to pit the violence of the state against “emancipatory violence.”[16] Further, it has been used as a pretext for reviving left-wing totalitarian traditions, such as Jacobinism, Leninism, and Maoism, and reconsidering their significance for the modern left.[17] Of course, these claims are made cautiously and a modern Maoist like Alain Badiou easily slips into patent misapplication of mathematics to obscure his politics.[18] Finally, in opposition to the universal and the concrete, the new radical politics and its advocates in the academy have come to celebrate the uncertain and unstable as a principle both for conducting politics and pursuing research. Hence, for example, the history of feminist thought has “only paradoxes to offer.”[19] The effort to understand mechanisms of domination and oppression is itself a manifestation of ideology.[20] Any recourse to normative judgments or empirical claims is hopeless. “In vain do we try to break out of the ideological dream by ‘opening our eyes and trying to see reality as it is,’ by throwing away the ideological spectacles: as the subjects of such a post-ideological, objective, sober look, free of so-called ideological prejudices, as the subjects of a look which views the facts as they are, we remain throughout ‘the consciousness of our ideological dream.’”[21] Ultimately, for the new radical intellectual, everything is a form of ideology. This does not mean that critique should become more rigorous, but, rather, that we should celebrate indeterminacy. Au courant theories of emancipation start with the premise that there is no “real.” We become free when we are disabused of the notion that critique can reveal truths that are obfuscated by social relations. We are liberated from definitions and categorizations. Such thinking has had its strongest effect among radical theorists discussing race and gender. Racial and gendered oppression is supposedly combatted when we recognize these categories as ideological constructions. However, the consequence of such thinking leaves the systemic and institutionalized forces that perpetuate oppression unaddressed. Both society and individual are constructed by incommensurables. This means that any political struggle that would seek to establish a freer, more just society would fall prey to merely creating new ideologies.