This essay is published in response to Jensen Suther’s “Marxism as Idealism? Response to Roberts’s ‘Ideology and Self-Emancipation’.”
Three Varieties of Misunderstanding
William Clare Roberts
Every author struggles against three varieties of misunderstanding. There are some misunderstandings for which authors themselves are culpable from lack of due care in writing. There are other misunderstandings for which readers are culpable from lack of due care in reading. Finally, though, there are misunderstandings for which no one is culpable, misunderstandings that arise from the conceptual impasses inherent in a given field of discourse or the ambiguities and treacheries of the common ground.
I find all three kinds of misunderstandings in Jensen Suther’s response to my essay. I should have been more careful in how I discussed the relationships among the theories I survey so as to avoid the impression that mine is an idealist dialectic in which Habermas is contained already in Lukács and Althusser redeems Marx. Suther should have been more careful in how he characterized my development of the Lenin-Gramsci-Althusser tradition of ideology theory, so as to avoid the false claim that it amounts to “a form of institutional determinism.” Most crucially, Suther’s essay gives voice to a collective misunderstanding concerning freedom, a misunderstanding that conflates freedom as a political and social condition with freedom as self-determining agency. My response here will address each of these three misunderstandings in turn.
Mea culpa
According to Suther, I claim that Adorno and Horkheimer inherit Lukács’s account of false consciousness, and that Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality is merely a development of this inheritance. As a consequence, according to Suther, I make out Habermas to be the “endpoint” of a developmental story that leads from Destutt de Tracy’s project of ideology through Lukács and the early Frankfurt School. I can certainly see where Suther is getting this picture from my essay. I do say that the Frankfurt School “turned Lukács’s theory … into a generic theoretical practice of ideology critique,” and that Lukács inspired the Frankfurt School’s “conception of false consciousness as normative error,” which “finally petered out in the Habermasian notion of performative contradiction.”
Suther also thinks that I portray Gramsci and Althusser as “the true inheritors of the Marxist project of the critique of ideology.” Again, I can see why Suther would take this impression away from my essay. I emphasize Gramsci as an alternative to Lukács, and tie the Sardinian Marxist’s understanding of ideology to his careful interpretive reading of Marx.
However, I did not intend and do not believe either of these inheritance claims. The Frankfurt School’s reception of Lukács is decidedly partial and one-sided, and Habermas is only one possible resolution of the theoretical multivalence of Adorno and Horkheimer’s work. I certainly do not believe that Habermas is the logical telos of Lukács’s work. Nor do I believe that Gramsci is straightforwardly continuing the critique of “the German Ideology” texts, nor that Althusser’s theory continues Gramsci’s. Althusser’s account of ideology is discontinuous with Marx and Engels’s dismissive attacks on the ideologists. Indeed, Althusser and Therborn are not engaged in – do not even supply support for – a critique of ideology.
I think responsibility for these misapprehensions lies with the manner in which I presented my argument. My goal was to identify the problems that both motivated and emerged from decisive mutations in the conception of voluntary servitude and ideology. However, because I identified and analyzed those problems as they appeared in the texts of the authors I examined – with only an occasional nod to the political context – my presentation took on the physiognomy of an idealist dialectic. Each author or cluster of authors seems to respond to the one before, inverting, negating, or recombining the elements of their predecessor’s theory. The reader understandably forms the impression that the history of ideology theory is a single argument developing across the centuries, with the failings of each theory corrected by its successor, at the cost of some new fatal error. The comprehension of the past leads to the sanctification of the present, with the Gramsci-Althusser-Therborn theory standing in the place reserved for Absolute Knowing.
This impression is contrary to my actual beliefs and argument. I meant it when I wrote that the history I tell is one of “reasonable local interventions half-remembered and misappropriated, inserted into new contexts, and mutating further with every reinsertion.” Although I follow one set of branching paths in my essay, there are other paths not explored, some of which I am confident have not even been broken yet. What I find promising in Gramsci-Althusser-Therborn is not a redemption of everything lost on those winding paths, but a set of analytical tools for articulating ideologies with configurations of social power.
Sua culpa
In order to grasp the utility of those tools, however, one must clear away some confusion that Suther has introduced into the discussion. Suther believes that my account is a form of “institutional determinism” according to which human actions are reduced to “effects of dispositional regularities, which are themselves functions of structure.” He admits that I am “sensitive” to this danger and that I try to meet it by claiming that there are many, competing ideologies. However, Suther rejoins that, “given the basic understanding of the relationship between agent and structure, the pluralization of ideology would just entail more possibilities for being functionalized, not fewer. Social change would still not depend on the actions of agents qua agents […] but depend rather on the ‘chemical’ interaction among institutions which interpellate their members.”
This is confusion entirely of Suther’s own making. He is foisting his own “understanding of the relationship between agent and structure” onto me, and then accusing me of being trapped in the aporias of his understanding, despite my explicit rebuttal of both structuralism and functionalism. He assumes that structure and ideology are opposed to agency, that structure and ideology are dominating, and that agency is the source of “social change.” All of this is foreign to the framework I am outlining in my essay.
Agency is not opposed to structure or to ideology. Ideology elicits agency, and structure is comprised of action. Suther realizes that social change depends on human action, but doesn’t seem to grasp that social stasis depends on human action to exactly the same extent. Agency is not specially keyed to change, rupture, or emancipation. The enslaved are agents, too. So are cops. So is your conservative uncle who buys the same jeans and polo shirts he’s been wearing for thirty years.
Suther is here trying to force me – together with Gramsci, Althusser, and Therborn – back into the mode of ideology critique, and back into the model according to which social structures are the outcomes of alienated human activity that have slipped from our control and now dominate us as something external.
Long paragraphs of Suther’s response are therefore devoted to expounding matters about which we are in agreement and defending positions that I never attacked. I am accused of “assimilating the space of reasons to the space of causes” when that distinction is crucial to my account; it is precisely because ideology comprises “the space of reasons, the terrain where agency happens,” that ideology is not a set of “dispositional regularities” or other causal determinations, acting on us from outside. I am accused of rejecting “normative self-governance” and “the idea that norms are self-determined.” I would challenge Suther to indicate where I perform these rejections, as I cannot seem to locate any such rejections in my essay.
Suther writes, “The space of reasons is precisely not just a structure of interdependently defined roles but the normative process of mutual struggle to determine how we live.” I completely agree. I only want to add one simple point: that is the field of ideology! “We can maintain ourselves as animals,” Suther notes, “only through initiation into the social space of reasons.” Yes, I agree, we are the ideological animal. It is tempting to go through sections II and III of Suther’s response in this manner, quoting him back to himself in agreement, and then adding “and that’s ideology!” at every juncture. I will stop though, my point hopefully being made.
Sua sponte
Underlying Suther’s confused accusation of determinism – and helping to motivate it, I think – is a misunderstanding that is not Suther’s per se, but is embedded in the conceptual heritage that we all use to try to think through our situation. We have inherited a word, freedom, that we use to name both one of our highest political aspirations and a basic aspect of human being – that we act “on our own.” This encourages us to think there must be some continuity between the two, that political freedom must realize or perfect our freedom to act.
This is a mistake. To be politically free one must enjoy a common social status and the institutions that protect that status. But this does not enhance or magnify our ability to act in any metaphysical sense. Individuals are equally norm-directed, and their acts are equally undertaken on the basis of reasons, regardless of the social and political institutions under which they live. (Note that I am not saying that these norms and reasons are equally good regardless of the social and political institutions that encode them; bad reasons motivate action, however, in the same way as good reasons.)
Reflecting the inherited confusion of political freedom with the freedom to act, Suther’s response conflates these two senses while not noticing that my essay tries to distinguish between the two. I reserve the word “freedom” for political freedom, and use “agency” to name the capacity to act in the space of reasons. The collision between these two ways of talking about freedom litters Suther’s response with glittering shards of incomprehension.
“The space of reasons,” Suther claims, “is unintelligible except as a realm of freedom.” I agree – but only if we are clear that “freedom” here means agency. The space of reasons is not necessarily a space free from domination, however, and hence is not necessarily a realm of political freedom. The social fact that cops have the legal power to arrest and detain, and have broad latitude to use deadly force, is a reason to avoid them and to be cautious around them. Especially if you are a member of a marginalized or racialized group, who cannot be reasonably confident that the legal system will protect you from the police power; hence, this power is dominating, compromising your political freedom. Nonetheless, it operates entirely within the space of reasons: what you know about the norms governing actions in your society gives you reasons to act according to your own norms of caution and deference. Even coercion and direct threats operate within the space of reasons; as Hegel rightly notes, you must let yourself be coerced.
Once we appreciate the fact that people are equally agentic – hence, equally “free” in the terms of “Hegel’s logical-metaphysical account of willing” – in every form of human society, we are forced to look elsewhere for guidance for our political aspirations and struggles. I propose looking to universal and equal freedom from domination for this guidance. Suther objects that this is a purely instrumental conception of freedom, which reduces freedom to “a mere means to the fulfillment of my actual end, my satisfaction of my contingent interests.” This objection, however, rests on the same substitution of agency for political freedom.
Enjoying political freedom does not dictate to people what their actual ends must be – the whole point of being politically free is that you are free to live your life – but this does not at all entail that our agency is indifferent to the ends we choose for ourselves or the norms of action we adhere to. (Every author who writes about autonomy or self-determination recognizes that we can undertake practices that undermine our own agency; drug use and addiction are the favorite cases.) Nor does it entail that our commonly-enjoyed political freedom is indifferent to the ends people pursue. Some ends can only be pursued either by having or by seeking dominating power over others.
Suther is incredulous. He asks, “what is to prevent my ends from including dealing heroin, polygamy, or anti-Black propagandizing?” Well, can you deal heroin, marry multiple women, or carry on racist propaganda without making others subject to a power they cannot control? If not, then my conception of political freedom certainly rules out the pursuit of those ends. If those ends can be pursued without using or accruing dominating power, however, then, while they might be ethical failings,[1] they do not rise to the level of being threats to anyone’s freedom. Kwame Ture’s distinction is a good guide: “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem.” What people want may very well pose a problem for their own happiness and flourishing; what they have the power to do, on the other hand, is the question for politics.
But Suther is still not satisfied. Isn’t my conception of freedom “indifferent to content”? Don’t we have to rule out “obviously abhorrent, historically obsolete practices like slavery, vassalage, indentured servitude, and so on”? Once we do that, isn’t it obvious that “our interest must lie in mutually justifiable practices, that is, practices in which we mutually regard ourselves as the authors”? Every Rawlsian liberal will be nodding along at this point. I, however, want to be more cautious.
Freedom from domination certainly rules out slavery, vassalage, indentured servitude, and so on, since those are all forms of domination. However, they are not ruled out as historically obsolete, since obsolescence does nothing to prevent them from persisting or returning. Only social relations and political institutions – arrangements of power – that make them impossible can prevent them. And we cannot be so sure that “our interest” excludes them, either, since they have very clearly served the interests of some wherever they have existed – that is precisely why they existed. Preventing them from recurring requires making sure that no one develops a powerful enough interest in making them recur.
What’s more, mutually regarding one another as the authors of our social practices is far too capacious to serve as a criterion for picking out decent political institutions and practices. The dominant love nothing more than regarding the dominated as the authors of the social practices of domination. Israeli spokespeople, both paid and volunteer, will proclaim at great length that the Palestinians have brought everything on themselves, that the only way to stop the slaughter is to surrender completely, that the institutions of Gaza and the government of Hamas reflect the will and the voluntary action of the people of Gaza, and that, therefore, all Gazans must be held responsible for the – often imaginary – deeds of Hamas.
This is not exceptional. The powerful intone breathless encomia to the moral agency and responsibility of those they enjoy power over. Police officers tell us that someone they shot created a dangerous situation and was responsible for their choices and for the outcome. Politicians tell voters we are obligated to vote for them, regardless of the substance of their campaigns, since we are otherwise choosing the worse. The poor are responsible for their poverty. The sick are responsible for their illness. The downtrodden, excluded, and oppressed – why do they make it so easy by being so unlikable? And to this monotonous chorus, the metaphysics of agency chimes in with its aria: “because you must always act on the basis of reasons, you are responsible for your actions and beliefs and called to account, asked to provide not exculpations but justifications.” Never mind that, in the empirically given world of grossly palpable human beings, there are some who – lucky duckies! – are never actually, legally and corporeally, called to account for their actions and beliefs, despite having immense power to compel others relentlessly to explain and justify themselves. Metaphysical responsibility is spread evenly over all of us. Empirical responsibility is not, but falls instead upon individuals and groups in inverse ratio to their social power.
Generally, I think any account of freedom that leans on the metaphysics of agency will, for just that reason, perform this same counterpoint echo of the ideology of the dominant. It will tell the individual worker that their “immediate interest cannot be satisfied on its own terms” – i.e., that they are irrational for trying to earn a higher wage or to save up for a down payment on a house – and that their true interest lies in the good of all. It will tell workers who are organizing a union that “‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ is structurally impossible under capitalist conditions” – the obvious implication being that cynicism and cheating are the only options available.[2] Selflessness or crime – being the devoted servant or the guilty enemy – are the only options available. Descended from the metaphysical realm into the world of power relations, the agent’s self-legislating freedom can comprehend only innocence or guilt.
Political freedom is ethically indeterminate – Suther is right about that. Political freedom does not prescribe ends for people or societies. But metaphysical freedom – agency – is politically indeterminate. It does not differentiate domination from non-domination. It proscribes direct violence, which turns its targets from agents into patients – and which, conveniently, is often the only recourse of the powerless. But it cannot provide agents on the ground with any criteria for differentiating enabling from dominating forms of power. Because it focuses on rules and their enactment, it cannot see unexercised power at all, or tell us anything about its effects. For this reason, Hegel can provide us with a rich phenomenology of human existence, but he cannot guide us at all in our projects of emancipation.
Don’t take my word for it. Hegel told us himself that philosophy always comes too late to tell us what to do. Maybe we should listen to him on this point.
[1] Or they might not. Why should we be aghast at someone supplying opiates for medical and recreational purposes, or engaging in polyamory, where neither of these exploit or impose relations of domination?
[2] Far from arguing what Suther attributes to him, Marx argues that “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s labor” is the immanent norm of the capitalist system and the standard of justice for both worker and capitalist. Wages are not exchanged for labor, however, but for labor-power. And this exchange takes place, on average, as an exchange of equivalents. The problem with the capitalist mode of production is not that it makes a fair exchange impossible, but that it pumps labor out of workers, using them up, under the cover of a fair exchange.
