written by Theodor Adorno
shared by sean on May 24th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
The much invoked unity of theory and praxis has the tendency of slipping into the predominance of praxis… The forced primacy of praxis irrationally stopped the critique that Marx himself practiced.
Elsewhere in this argument for “thinking”, Adorno argues against “do it yourself,” calling it “pseudo-activity” that reduces political involvement to theater.
Zizek was recently on Democracy Now! and his closing statement he offers this defense of theory, which brought to mind Adorno’s text:
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: It will be simply—OK, maybe, the point that I always like to repeat: don’t beat—don’t get caught into a fake discourse of humanitarian emergency. Remember that when somebody is telling you, “You’re doing your theory. You are dreaming. But people are starving out there and so on. Let’s do something,” this is the threat. This is the threat.
Today’s hegemonic ideology is this kind of state of emergency ideology. What we need is to withdraw—don’t be afraid to withdraw and think. You know, Marx thesis eleven: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is, we have now to change it. Maybe, as good Marxists, we should turn it around. Maybe we are trying to change it too much. It’s time to redraw and to interpret it again, because do we really know what is going on today?
What is going on today? There are old fashion theories, either Marxist or liberals who claim the same capitalism is going on. Then there is a whole set of fashionable terms like post-industrial society, post-whatever, information society, which I think don’t do the job. We even don’t have what my friend Fred Jameson likes to call “cognitive mapping,” you know, that you get an idea what’s going on. We need theory more than ever. Don’t be—don’t feel guilty for withdrawing from immediate engagement and for trying to understand what’s going on.
In The Parallax View Zizek writes:
[Bartleby’s] “I would prefer not to” is to be taken literally: it says “I would prefernot to,” not “I don’t prefer (or care) to”—so we are back at Kant’s distinction between negative and infinite judgment. In his refusal of the Master’s order, Bartleby does not negate the predicate; rather, he affirms a non-predicate: he does not say that he doesn’t want to do it; he says that he prefers (wants) not to do it. This is how we pass from the politics of “resistance” or “protestation,”which parasitises upon what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation.