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Mare BV's List: Critical Theory
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Defined in this way, by invariants, identity is doubly related to difference: on the one hand, identity is that which is different from the rest; on the other, it is that which does not become different, which is invariant. The affirmation of identity has two further aspects. The first form is negative. It consists of desperately maintaining that I am not the other. This is often indispensable, in the face of authoritarian demands for integration, for example. The Moroccan worker will forcefully affirm that his traditions and customs are not those of the petty-bourgeois European; he will even reinforce the characteristics of his religious or customary identity. The second involves the immanent development of identity within a new situation—rather like Nietzsche’s famous maxim, ‘become what you are’. The Moroccan worker does not abandon that which constitutes his individual identity, whether socially or in the family; but he will gradually adapt all this, in a creative fashion, to the place in which he finds himself. He will thus invent what he is—a Moroccan worker in Paris—not through any internal rupture, but by an expansion of identity.
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In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.
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Aug 02, 09
In this article the author examines the intimate connections between utopia and\neducation in Frankfurt School critical theory. Although substantial links have been made in\nthe critical pedagogy tradition between education, critique, and utopian dreaming, an indepth\nanalysis of the utopia-education matrix in the works of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor\nAdorno, and Fredric Jameson enriches our current understanding of this topic in several key\nways. Marcuse enables us to envision play as a possible praxis for revitalizing utopian\nlongings while Adorno's focus on anxiety offers a sound corrective to the overemphasis on\nhope in utopian scholarship. Finally, Jameson mediates many of the differences arising\nbetween Marcuse and Adorno to fashion a post-utopian utopianism for late capitalism.
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