The End of Progress

Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory

Amy Allen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231540636
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School—Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst—have defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like?

Amy Allen fractures critical theory from within by dispensing with its progressive reading of history while retaining its notion of progress as a political imperative, so eloquently defended by Adorno. Critical theory, according to Allen, is the best resource we have for achieving emancipatory social goals. In reimagining a decolonized critical theory after the end of progress, she rescues it from oblivion and gives it a future.

1

Critical Theory and the Idea of Progress

In 1993, in his sequel to his groundbreaking and field-defining book Orientalism, Edward Said offers the following indictment of Frankfurt School critical theory: “Frankfurt School critical theory, despite its seminal insights into the relationships between domination, modern society, and the opportunities for redemption through art as critique, is stunningly silent on racist theory, anti-imperialist resistance, and oppositional practice in the empire.”¹ Moreover, Said argues, this is no mere oversight; rather, it is a motivated silence. Frankfurt School critical theory, like other versions of European theory more generally, espouses what Said calls an invidious and false universalism, a “blithe universalism” that “assume[s] and incorporate[s] the inequality of races, the subordination of inferior cultures, the acquiescence of those who, in Marx’s words, cannot represent themselves and therefore must be represented by others.”² Such “universalism” has, for Said, played a crucial role in connecting (European) culture with (European) imperialism for centuries, for imperialism as a political project cannot sustain itself without the idea of empire, and the idea of empire, in turn, is nourished by a philosophical and cultural imaginary that justifies the political subjugation of distant territories and their native populations through claims that such peoples are less advanced, cognitively inferior, and therefore naturally subordinate.

Twenty years after Said made this charge, not enough has changed. Contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory, for the most part, remains all too silent on the problem of imperialism. Neither of the major contemporary theorists most closely associated with the legacy of the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, has made systematic reflection on the paradoxes and challenges produced by the waves of decolonization that characterized the latter half of the twentieth century a central focus of his work in critical theory, nor has either theorist engaged seriously with the by now substantial body of literature in postcolonial theory or studies.³ In the case of Habermas, this lack of attention is all the more notable, given his increasing engagement in recent years with issues of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and the prospects for various forms of post- and supranational legal and political forms.⁴ Moreover, with a few prominent exceptions, critical theorists working in the Frankfurt School tradition have followed Habermas’s and Honneth’s lead.⁵ Although the topics of global justice and human rights have been high on the agenda in recent years in Frankfurt, those topics tend to be pursued in a way that refrains from the kind of wholesale reassessment of the links between moral-political universalism and European imperialism that Said counsels. And even those relatively few calls from within the Frankfurt School camp for the decolonization of critical theory have tended to be met with an expansion of the canon of critical theory, to include such thinkers as Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel, Frederick Douglass, and Toni Morrison.⁶ As welcome as such an expansion of what counts as critical theory is, and as fruitful and groundbreaking as its results are, this strategy for responding to the silence of mainstream critical theorists on the questions of imperialism and colonialism means that the deep and difficult challenge that our postcolonial predicament poses to the Frankfurt School’s distinctive approach to social theorizing has not only not yet been met, it has not even been fully appreciated by its practitioners. This book constitutes an attempt both to articulate and to meet that challenge.

Like Said, I believe that there is a reason for the Frankfurt School’s failure to respond adequately to the predicaments of our post- and neocolonial world and that this reason is connected to philosophical commitments that run deep in the work of its contemporary practitioners. The problem, as I see it, arises from the particular role that ideas of historical progress, development, social evolution, and sociocultural learning play in justifying and grounding the normative perspective of critical theorists such as Habermas and Honneth.⁷ As I shall argue at length in what follows, Habermas and Honneth both rely on a broadly speaking left-Hegelian strategy for grounding or justifying the normativity of critical theory, in which the claim that our current communicative or recognitional practices represent the outcome of a cumulative and progressive learning process and therefore are deserving of our support and allegiance figures prominently. Thus, they are both deeply wedded to the idea that European, Enlightenment modernity—or at least certain aspects or features thereof, which remain to be spelled out—represents a developmental advance over premodern, nonmodern, or traditional forms of life, and, crucially, this idea plays an important role in grounding the normativity of critical theory for each thinker. In other words, both Habermas and Honneth are committed to the thought that critical theory needs to defend some idea of historical progress in order to ground its distinctive approach to normativity and, thus, in order to be truly critical. But it is precisely this commitment that proves to be the biggest obstacle to the project of decolonizing their approaches to critical theory. For perhaps the major lesson of postcolonial scholarship over the last thirty-five years has been that the developmentalist, progressive reading of history—in which Europe or “the West” is viewed as more enlightened or more developed than Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and so on—and the so-called civilizing mission of the West, which served to justify colonialism and imperialism and continues to underwrite the informal imperialism or neocolonialism of the current world economic, legal, and political order, are deeply intertwined.⁸ In other words, as James Tully has pithily put the point, the language of progress and development is the language of oppression and domination for two-thirds of the world’s people.⁹

Habermas’s and Honneth’s reliance on a progressive, developmentalist understanding of history as a way of grounding normativity thus raises a deep and difficult challenge for their approach to critical theory: How can their critical theory be truly critical if it remains committed to an imperialist metanarrative, that is, if it has not yet been decolonized? On the flip side, how can it be truly critical if it gives up its distinctive strategy for grounding normativity? If we accept Nancy Fraser’s Marx-inspired definition of critical theory as the “self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age,”¹⁰ and if we further assume that struggles around decolonization and postcolonial politics are among the most significant struggles and wishes of our age,¹¹ then the demand for a decolonization of critical theory follows quite straightforwardly from the very definition of critical theory. If it wishes to be truly critical, then contemporary critical theory should frame its research program and its conceptual framework with an eye toward decolonial and anti-imperialist struggles and concerns. However, if, as I have suggested, contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory relies on ideas of historical development, learning, and progress to ground its conception of normativity, then (how) can this project be decolonized without radically rethinking its approach to normativity?¹² In response to this last question, I will argue in what follows that critical theory’s approach to grounding normativity must be radically transformed if it is to decolonize itself and thus be truly critical.

As I mentioned, Habermas’s and Honneth’s emphasis on ideas of progress in the form of notions of sociocultural development and historical learning processes can be understood as part of the general left-Hegelianism or Hegelian-Marxism of the Frankfurt School, though it is worth noting at the outset that this understanding of history sets the second and third generations of the Frankfurt School apart from the first generation, whose leading members were, at least after World War II, much less sanguine about the idea of progress. The catastrophe of Auschwitz, Adorno noted in his lectures on the philosophy of history, “makes all talk of progress towards freedom seem ludicrous” and makes the “affirmative mentality” that engages in such talk look like “the mere assertion of a mind that is incapable of looking horror in the face and that thereby perpetuates it” (HF, 7). Adorno evokes Benjamin’s ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, in which progress is famously depicted as the storm that blows in from Paradise and irresistibly propels the angel of history into the future. With his back to the future, the angel of history faces the past and “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”¹³ Crucially, however, Adorno and Benjamin do not reject the idea of progress altogether, but rather seek to break it apart and reconceive it dialectically. Specifically, Adorno and Benjamin doubted not that progress in the future is possible or desirable but that any sense could be made of the claim that progress had already happened; indeed, on Adorno’s view, progressive readings of history serve as ideological impediments that block progress in the future. Thus, as Max Pensky puts it, glossing Benjamin, “progress’s first step is the enraged destruction of the discourse of progress.”¹⁴ Or, as Adorno put it in the line that serves as the inspiration for the title of this book, “progress occurs where it ends” (P, 150). What distinguishes Habermas and Honneth from the approach of earlier Frankfurt School thinkers is not their commitment to progress as a future-oriented moral-political goal—a commitment that all of these thinkers share—but rather their commitment to what Pensky calls the discourse of progress as an empirical history. Furthermore, for Habermas and Honneth, these two aspects of progress are deeply intertwined in their critical theory, and it is this intertwining that makes their critical theory so greatly in need of decolonizing.

The overall aims of this book are to critically assess the role played by ideas of development, sociocultural learning processes, and historical progress in grounding and justifying the normativity of critical theory in mainstream Frankfurt School theory, and to develop an alternative framework for thinking about history and the question of normative grounding, one that is more compatible with the urgent project of decolonizing critical theory. In this project, I draw on theoretical resources that can be found in or nearby the Frankfurt School tradition, particularly the work of Adorno and Michel Foucault. This book thus follows in the footsteps of the work of Robert J. C. Young, and could be understood as an attempt to do for Frankfurt School critical social theory what Young’s White Mythologies did for Marxist literary criticism: namely, to expose the extent to which that project is implicated at the theoretical level, by virtue of its commitment to a certain understanding of history, in the very imperialism that it condemns politically.¹⁵ My goal is twofold: to decolonize critical theory by opening it from within to the kind of post- and decolonial theorizing that it needs to take on board if it is to be truly critical and, conversely, to show, through a rethinking of the question of normativity in the Frankfurt School tradition, how post- and decolonial theory might be criticalized, that is, how it might respond to long-standing charges of relativism and questions about the normative status of its critique.¹⁶

In this chapter, I begin by laying out the major conceptual issues involved in the appeal to ideas of historical learning, development, and progress as a strategy for securing normativity. First, I discuss what precisely is meant—and not meant!—by progress in the context of contemporary critical theory, and consider the main reasons that have been offered in favor of the claim that the idea of progress is indispensable for critical theory. Second, I consider the deeply intertwined epistemological and political critiques of the discourse of progress that have gained prominence in post- and decolonial theory. This discussion aims not only to establish why critical theory needs to decolonize itself, to the extent that it is wedded to a certain version of the discourse of progress, but also to motivate the particular strategy for decolonizing critical theory that I will adopt in this book. Finally, I discuss Thomas McCarthy’s recent attempt to respond to such postcolonial and postdevelopment critiques of the discourse of progress, and suggest that the shortcomings of McCarthy’s approach provide us with some preliminary indications of the shape that a decolonization of critical theory will have to take. Those indications will be taken up and developed further in subsequent chapters.

PROGRESS AND THE NORMATIVITY OF CRITICAL THEORY

Before exploring the role that is played by the idea of progress in contemporary critical theory, let me first say a few words about what precisely is meant here by the term “progress.” In its broadest terms, the idea of historical progress refers not just to progress toward some specific goal but rather to human progress or development overall, überhaupt. As Reinhart Koselleck has argued, this notion of historical progress is a distinctively modern concept that emerges in the eighteenth century. Although the Greeks and Romans had terms that could “characterize a relative progression in particular spheres of fact and experience”—prokopē, epidōsis, progressus, perfectus—these concepts were, according to Koselleck, always concerned with looking back and were not linked to the idea of a better future.¹⁷ Moreover, and perhaps more important, they were always partial, local; the term “progress” did not, for the Greeks, refer to “an entire social process, as we associate it today with technological practices and industrialization” (PD, 222). The Christian notion of progress, by contrast, referred to a spiritual progress that was to culminate at a point outside of time; Christianity thus opened up the horizon of the future, but the better future that it projected would only be realized after the end of history. As far as history was concerned, for the Middle Ages, as for antiquity, “the world as a whole was aging and rushing toward its end. Spiritual progress and the decline of the world were to this extent correlational concepts that obstructed the interpretation of the earthly future in progressive terms” (PD, 224). The modern notion of progress transformed the “constant expectation of the end of the world into an open future”; spiritual profectus became worldly progressus (PD, 225).

On Koselleck’s analysis, the modern concept of progress, which went hand in hand with a new experience of time, consisted in several features. First, the idea of the future as an infinite horizon denaturalized the idea that the age of the world is analogous to the old age of an individual; this, in turn, led to a break between the age of world and the idea of decay or decline: “Infinite progress opened up a future that shirked the natural metaphors of aging. Although the world as nature may age in the course of time, this no longer involves the decline of all of humanity” (PD, 226). In modernity, decline was no longer seen as the pure opposite of progress; “rather progress has become a world historical category whose tendency is to interpret all regressions as temporary and finally even as the stimulus for new progress” (PD, 227). Second, in the modern concept of progress, the striving for perfection that had also characterized Christian thinking about progress became temporalized, located in human history. As a result, progress became an ongoing, never-ending, dynamic process, an infinite task (PD, 227–228). Finally, this modern concept of progress referred to both technical-scientific and moral-political progress, that is, to progress überhaupt. Here is Koselleck again: “Progress (der Fortschritt), a term first put forth by Kant, was now a word that neatly and deftly brought the manifold of scientific, technological, and industrial meanings of progress, and finally also those meanings involving social morality and even the totality of history, under a common concept” (PD, 229).

This modern concept of progress found its clearest expression in the classical philosophies of history of Kant, Hegel, and even Marx. There, historical progress was understood in the strongest possible terms, as a necessary, inevitable, and unified process. Whether operating through the mechanism of a purposive nature, which uses evil to produce good, or of the cunning of reason, which behind men’s backs and over their heads rationalizes existing reality, or of the development of the forces and relations of production, which sows the seeds for communist revolution, these classical philosophies of history understood progress to be necessary (though they had somewhat different views on how much of a role individuals should or could play in bringing about that necessary development) and unified (as occurring more or less simultaneously across society as a whole). Moreover, these classical philosophies of history rested on metaphysically loaded conceptions of the goal or telos toward which progress aimed, whether that was understood as the realization of the kingdom of ends on earth, the attainment of the standpoint of Absolute knowing, or communist utopia.

To be clear: none of the current defenders of the idea of progress in the Frankfurt School critical theory tradition makes such strong claims. Thus, I want to emphasize at the outset that I am not claiming that either Habermas or Honneth holds on to a traditional philosophy of history or to the strong notion of historical progress that comes along with it. Already the failure of the proletariat to rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie in Europe and the United States in the early twentieth century caused trouble for the Marxist version of the classical philosophy of history, while the regressive barbarism and moral-political catastrophes of the Holocaust and the Gulag further undermined strong Hegelian and Kantian theodicies of history. For contemporary critic...