Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

revolutionary political thought but also conservatism itself, since the latter is strictly unthinkable unless not conserving the given is somehow on the agenda. Though this sociopolitical matrix did not give rise to critique in the textual sense, it did create a situation in which critical thought possessed immediate political urgency.

      The general importance of the French Revolution can also be expressed—and here the philosophical objective correlative becomes less Kantian than Hegelian—by crediting it with the invention of history itself, or (what in critical terms amounts to the same thing) the enabling of radically historical thought. Here Lukács’s account is definitive: “It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience, and moreover on a European scale” (emphasis in original).⁸ Prior to 1789 (and with the immense but finally ambiguous exception of the English Revolution of the 1640s) the political history of Europe had constituted a (relatively) unimportant narrative and one of indifference to the great majority of the population. But revolution necessitates that the masses be “invited” into history, as the leaders of the French Revolution did; their successors and enemies were virtually compelled to follow suit, particularly with regard to the mass (often conscript) armies that replaced the small mercenary and professional bands of the prerevolutionary era. For the first time, significant historical change took place not only during the lifetime but within the actual lived experience of the average (especially male and adult) person; it is this greatly accelerated and expanded pace of events that amounts to history in the sense that has been known ever since. As Lukács puts it: “Hence the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them” (Historical Novel 24). In this context, critical theory inevitably takes a historical turn, as the historical dialectics of Hegel (who was of course concerned with justifying the “necessity” of the French Revolution) supersede the essentially static conception of human nature assumed by Kant and other earlier thinkers. If, then, the Kantian invention of critique constitutes the priority of interpretation, of the dialectical “interinanimation” (to adapt Donne’s useful coinage) of subject and object, then the Hegelian moment may be defined as the recasting of critique into the radically historical form it has taken ever since the age of the democratic revolution. The historicization of dialectical critique, it should be added, also means that henceforth social formations must be seen not as inherited collections of natural habits but as systemic and mutable totalities (though for Hegel, of course, such mutability is wholly idealist in character).

      Natural science and the French Revolution: it is worthwhile to consider the political connotations that attach to these two crucial determinants of the critical moment. Both innovations are of course fundamental to modernity itself, and in particular to the hegemony of the Western (though no longer only the Western) nation-state organized on the economic basis of industrial capitalism (or, until recently, Stalinist socialism). In that sense, science and the traditions of 1789 would seem to be virtually unassailable; and so they are on the levels of economic or, to a lesser degree, political production. And yet (in a case of “uneven development” whose significance Habermas has been almost alone among current thinkers in estimating) the matter falls out rather differently on the ideological or cultural plane, where modernity as a concept (or, in Raymond Williams’s sense, as a structure of feeling) has never attained complete security. Indeed, the contemporary cultural landscape is littered with antimodern protests and in particular with instances of ideological resistance to natural science and to the politics of 1789. Consider, on one educational level, the persistent campaigns against evolutionary biology in the public school curriculum, or, on a somewhat different educational level, the journalistic acclaim often granted to any treatment of the French Revolution that recycles neo-Burkean platitudes (for example, Simon Schama’s Citizens [1989]). Such attacks are generally made from the political right, as these examples suggest, though more complex variations on the antimodern thesis have sometimes been attempted from the left (by far the most powerful such attempt being Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment [1947], which identifies Auschwitz as the culminating and paradigmatic project of enlightened modernity). There would seem, then, to be something in the very nature of modernity with which the modern world is never completely comfortable, and which can hardly be satisfactorily explained as mere regressive nostalgia (as though the actual restoration of a Catholic feudal past were an even apparently viable option).

      The “something” in question may, at least to a considerable degree, be identified with critique, or critical theory, itself. Inseparable from the foundation of modernity, critical theory can nonetheless expect no dependable gratitude from it; for the critical refusal of all repose must call into question the structures of “actually existing” modernity itself—and this is equally true whether one is thinking of structures in the economic sense (the capitalist mode of production) or in the psychological sense (the unified bourgeois ego). Accordingly, the persistence of precritical thinking cannot be understood as mere atavism, nor as ineffectual error to be remedied by a course of reading in Kant, Hegel, and their successors, nor even, exclusively, as expressing a fully serious wish for prescientific modes of knowledge and predemocratic political organization. Precritical thought is rather the “intellectual equivalent” (to invert Plekhanov’s famous formulation of the “social equivalent” of the work of art) of any status quo. It is a nonirritable condition of mental ease to which every mind is highly susceptible, and the inevitable Other with which critique must dialogically contend in any arena however modern. (The real force of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as of the celebrated opening essay “Cultural Criticism and Society” in Adorno’s Prisms [1955], depends on understanding that the Frankfurt School critique of modernity—crucially a critique of critique—is thus also an implacable self-critique and in that sense thoroughly modern after all.) Critical theory, to use a currently fashionable term, is unswervingly oppositional.⁹

      The various definitional strands suggested thus far may now be woven, at least provisionally, into a more extensive definition of critical theory. Critical theory is dialectical thought: that is, thought which (in principle) can take nothing less than the totality of the human world or social field for its object. And yet, not only does critical theory regard the latter as a historical process, constantly in material flux; it also conceptualizes its own methodology as deeply involved in that flux rather than as a passive intellectual instrument by means of which an unproblematic (as-if-Cartesian) subject extracts absolute knowledge from pregiven objects. Furthermore, by dissolving the reified static categories of the ideological status quo, critical theory constantly shows that things are not what they seem to be and that things need not eternally be as they are. Thus it maintains a cutting edge of social subversion even at its most rarefied and abstract.

      It is not my present purpose to suggest an inventory of those theories since Kant and Hegel that can be regarded as genuinely critical. Such discriminations will be made ad hoc throughout the current study, but a full-scale catalogue would be far too cumbersome (even leaving aside the difficulties of undialectical genre theory—to be discussed in the following section of this chapter—that a merely classificatory approach would entail: critical and precritical elements may well coexist even within the same text, to say nothing of the same “school”). Nonetheless, I do want to discuss briefly three areas of theoretical discourse that seem to me privileged.¹⁰

      Marxism remains the central instance of post-Hegelian critical thought. I admit at once, however, that Marxism is undergoing a certain crisis today, though not precisely in any of the ways that it is currently fashionable to maintain. For example, the neoliberal notion that the totalizing intellectual dynamic of Marxism is somehow obsolete can hardly be taken seriously save as a symptom of how the increasingly pervasive regime of commodification and exchange-value makes it increasingly difficult to resist the empiricist splintering of knowledge into monographic “specialities.” Indeed, the ever more thorough penetration of the social field by exchange-value is itself a function of the progressive globalization of capital, which in turn renders a perspective capable of grasping social formations as totalities more urgent, though doubtless also more difficult, than ever. It is important in this context to remember that, as Ernest Mandel and others