This summer I’ve written about the conditions of intellectual production across three different pieces. In the first, I reflected on my personal history with Woodbine and its role as a refuge from recurring difficulties in my institutional life as a graduate student. Next I connected this account with preliminary structural diagnoses of two social crises: the problem of ‘brainrot’ and the ‘loneliness crisis’. What emerges is less a structural analysis than a pattern of interconnected themes.
The setting of contemporary theory is threefold: an ‘exhausted’ individual psychology; a social life disrupted and fragmented by loneliness and codependency; and a public sphere suffering context collapse. My text on ‘brainrot’ traced a specific, digitally mediated form of cognitive confusion to the rent-seeking strategy of large platforms. My discussion of loneliness aimed to critically reflect on the concept aiming to turn the discussion away from a generic discussion of deficient social relations to a specific demand for enlivening or intellectually meaningful sociality.
The implicit ideal here is a certain kind of intellectual life, one that brings together classical theoretical aspirations – truth, rigor and so on – with a broader understanding that these aspirations can only be realized if theory is put to work to achieve ethical and political aims. But put this way, this ideal is unhelpfully abstract. What does the ‘unity of theory and practice’ mean for us?
The natural reference point here is the traditional socialist conception. The addressee of this theory was the party – a group of people with a singular class position oriented around a political programme. Here theory aims to be the theoretical consciousness of an emancipatory interest organized in the party-form. The ‘agenda’ of theory was to provide an ‘algebra of revolution’ – an understanding which enabled the class to contest the class character of the state.
Whatever its historical virtues, this conception is not immediately relevant to us. Despite many interesting aspirants, there is no ‘class for itself’ to address, nor is there a class party. There are many struggles to be concerned with, but none are best interpreted as a Manichean totalizing struggle between two class entities acting ‘for themselves’. Even if you think – or hope – conditions will revert at some future point, in the meantime we must conceive of the intellectual’s project in some other way.
If we reject the traditional Marxist conception, what about ‘post-Marxism’? This is a loose ideological tendency thinkers, united less by shared doctrine than by their rejection of certain Marxist precepts. Beyond this, there is no ‘ready-made’ post-Marxist model for intellectual life. Readers are forced to examine the lives of individual exemplars – Laclau, Said, Foucault, Butler, Said and so on – each of which can only inspire successors indirectly, and often posthumously.
Where does this leave us? In a fragmented place. The dominant models of intellectual practice force us to choose between fragments of these older ideals. The academic option gives a thinker social legitimacy and institutional resources, but does not encourage the development of a larger social vision for thought, nor does it have any organic link to political practice. Furthermore, academic specialization encourages one to speak to an ever narrower audience, depriving one even of the ability to frame the value of one’s concerns.
Another model is the ‘policy researcher’. Here there is an organic link to practice. The policy researcher is directly connected to the state, at least in an advisory capacity. In the right political conditions, good policy thinking leads to good policy outcomes. Nevertheless, there are important limitations here. Policy thinking is often guided by an ideal of ‘productiveness’ – it conceives of itself as helpful advice to an existing bearer of political power.
This makes policy thinking reactive, especially when the advisee is often the group which holds state power. This implicitly reconciles it to a state-centric model of political power and agency. It has a natural tendency to be more institutionally conservative than, for instance, activist modes of thinking. A corollary is that policy thinking is unreflective and cavalier about its basic ethical and metaphysical assumptions.
We can turn next to the model of the ‘independent activist-intellectual’, who attaches themselves to the pedagogical and educational output of a pre-existing activist group or movement. ‘Activist group’ is a term of art: implied in it is a reference to ‘insurgent’ or ‘militant’ political groups which are outside traditional politics, either in their familiar electoral or trade union forms. Think less of the UAW and more about mutual aid hubs that sprung up in the aftermath of Covid.
The activist-intellectual faces less pressures towards methodological normalization than the policy researcher. They are often more philosophically curious, and their theorization is also directly tied to a practice, which, in its grassroots militancy, is less obviously beholden to the political baggage of institutional organizations.
The trouble here is the lack of intellectual rigor and political heft. The curiosity of the activist group can often be unguided by any intellectual standards, or any ambition for lasting intellectual output. Furthermore, the activist intellectual has little or no institutional resources, and the work is harder as a result. Finally, an independent activist intellectual can often degenerate into familiar actionist political forms, with ideologies ‘off the shelf’.
One way of mitigating these problems is to form ‘para-academic research projects. These can be entrepreneurial attempts to form new schools, or the creation of online communities of academic refugees. Of course, intentionality does not substitute for institutional resources. Having had some experiences with para-academic spaces, there are recurrent problems about continuity, setting aside the time and energy to perform long-term research projects, and about adequate gatekeeping.
The prospects for a DIY life of the mind look daunting. You can have resources and legitimacy, but you lose a broader social vision and direct connection to political practice. You can acquire a relationship to political practice, but at the cost of implicitly taking on the institutional commitments of particular forms of state power/governmentality. You can acquire freedom in both these respects, but at the cost of resources, legitimacy, and relevance. The best way that para-academic spaces like Woodbine can mitigate against these is by having a longer-term vision. We can militate against short-termism and turnover by having larger goals to pursue. We can militate against slack intellectual standards by committing ourselves to concrete ones ahead of time.
The Anti-Institutional Moment
Woodbine’s central principle is ‘autonomy’. The clearest institutional manifestation of that is our independence from political organizations: we are not institutionally affiliated with any socialist, anarchist, or progressive groups. There are of course historical and ethical reasons for this, but I have always read this as an intellectual ethos which is important and resonant in contemporary conditions.
Institutional autonomy can give us a vital analytical lens on our anti-institutional moment. In the United States, majority political institutions are facing crises of trust, where even radical political institutions go through constant changes of programme, membership, caucus composition, and ideology. The cliches of modernity as ‘liquid’, ‘ashen’, quicksilver’ and so on seem to apply. The precondition for interrogating these transformations is institutional distance. Thus, my first analytical precept is institutional independence for an anti-institutional moment.
Strategic Pluralism
At Woodbine, we are committed to strategizing ‘from the appearances’. We are faced with a range of political struggles at multiple levels, simultaneously – some concern the internal politics of large trade unions; others the architecture of large tech companies; some the complex logistics of shipping and cargo of consumer goods; and still others the politics of the climate and resilience. Each offers different types of social power, and different levers of social control.
This commitment guides the strategic vision of Woodbine’s programming. The idea is to take moments in the collective discourse – ‘AI’, ‘the loneliness crisis’, ‘the crisis of pedagogy’ and so on – and then use them as ‘keys’ to understand the underlying social structure. The point is not that the discourse has gotten the framing right, but that the collective focus on certain issues and concepts is indicative, if in a distorted way, of some important part of our underlying social life.
The traditional claims of the priority of the workplace, or the priority of the electoral, seem to have exhausted or at least complicated themselves. While there has been a significant uptick in the politicization of various aspects of American society, it is also clear that this politicization has not resulted in uniform, substantial forms of political organization.
This is not to reject traditional conceptions out of hand. Society has an underlying structure, and ultimately the old sources of power remain – state, capital, empire, what have you. Nevertheless, it is pointless to make grand strategic claims about them in the present moment, in either direction. Critics – post-Marxists, post-Anarchists etc. – prematurely repudiate structure for political appearances. Defenders of orthodoxy tilt at windmills, insisting on the ultimate validity of traditional categories without any political recommendations.
Speaking to a Fragmented, Exhausted, Atomized Subject
What of the ‘revolutionary subject’? Given what I have written above, it should be unsurprising that I am unable to identify one. Nevertheless, I do have an audience in mind. I begin, perhaps inevitably, with my own perspective: the set of emotional, intellectual, and political needs that generalize the most. Given Woodbine’s position in Lower Manhattan, I imagine this subject to be cosmopolitan, often cultural capital-rich but asset-poor, and disillusioned both with mainstream American society and characteristic forms of opposition to it.
This imagined addressee is overwhelmed with political information, exhausted with their existing patterns of political involvement, and in search of a place where they can reflect on questions of belonging, as well as their ultimate social identity. These are questions that are not directly addressed in our sphere-differentiated society, where platforms allow you to meet your basic social and emotional needs without any treatment of the bigger stuff.
Beyond my personal perspective, there is a broader fragmentation in high culture. This is a familiar theme of Marxist cultural critics like Jonathan Crary and Anna Kornbluh, but it is recently emerging in the work of more mainstream economic historians like Adam Tooze. The demands of the moment force on us an imperative to host events which speak to this fragmented exhaustion, both at the theoretical level as well as at the level of personal experience.
To that extent, this vision is a partial inheritor of the Lefebrvian project of ‘investigating everyday life’. The aim is not to be marginal for marginality sake’s, but to speak to structures of feeling that do not yet have institutional articulation. Here I am not interested in everyday life as a residue or a remainder, but as a way of trying to get at the arms-length, disillusioned relationship people have with contemporary institutions.
Commitment to Skill-Building and Self-Determination
One pathology of our fragmented condition is a pervasively passive relationship to political forms. This is not simply about declines in membership of political organizations, but about their inability to give their members skills to meaningfully participate in the group’s exercise of political power. Within orthodox workerist conceptions – the idea of the Gesamtarbeiter, the Lukascian claim about the worker who knows all and sees all – the power is the knowledge of the mode of production structurally required by the proletarian subject-position. The ‘skill-building’ criteria for classical proletarian forms of political organization was thus the further development of ‘proletarian skills’ – workplace organizing, knowledge of exploitation, larger political intervention, and the like.
The Lukacsian conception cannot be mine, but nevertheless there is something laudable in its insistence on connecting the concepts of structural knowledge, productive skill and political power. This set of ideas is particularly significant in our moment of demobilization, where the sorts of subjects with which I am concerned feel disembedded. This manifests in a variety of ways, but I will highlight three of them here.
First, many are unemployed and underemployed. They have no job from which to gain structural knowledge. Second, even those who have a job are often in service industries where their broader structural importance is obscured and downplayed. Their relationship to ‘choke points’ in the classical sense is left unclear, and may in principle be so complex as to rule out direct intervention at a workplace level. Finally, patterns of automation continue to function to obscure or suppress the transparent quality of production. These social foundations lead to a political discourse ungrounded in detail and institutional concreteness.
While I have not adequately been able to practice this, I think any emancipatory political practice must aim to push against these conditions. This means that intellectual production must involve imparting skills that matter politically, from the rudiments of first-aid to the basics of organizing. Perhaps the new working slogan would be a mix of ‘every cook can govern’ and ‘a semiconductor in every backyard’.
Politics as Spiritual Practice
As some have pointed out, the classical socialist conception of theory owed a lot to the tradition of Western Metaphysics. Despite important empiricist and positivist strands, the tradition never entirely forsook its entanglement with the ancient project of philosophical inquiry into the good life. Somehow, socialist political practice was intended to respond to the quasi-Platonic question about how one ought to live, given one’s idealized ‘place in reality as a whole’.
This sort of connection has become increasingly fraught as the decades pass, and as the original project is derided as ‘humanistic’, ‘idealist’, and ‘rationalistic’. But the spiritual, cosmological dimension of politics has come into focus even more in the post-financial crisis upheaval. Consider, in this context, the rise of ‘DIY religions’, and the recent uptick in American belief in psychic and paranormal phenomena. A politics that stands up to all of this must be spiritually engaged – aiming, however provisionally, to take steps forward on the ancient quest for the good life.