Most People: “In order to eat, support my family, clothe myself, and shelter myself, I must work. I get a raw deal, but I have to do it anyway. Yeah sure, it’s all bullshit, but what else am I going to do. The other problem is that in order to work, I must eat, cloth myself, shelter myself, etc. But I can’t do that unless I work. I don’t really believe in much because I know it’s all BS. But in order to take care of myself, my family, clothe myself, shelter myself, etc., I have to work. Truth be told, I don’t have time to think about much else. I work all day. I come home and have to feed myself and my kids and do chores. We do some homework, have dinner, watch some ridiculous television, and go to bed. We get some nice holidays and decorate. Oh yeah, and we hope God will help us as the kid is autistic, our blood pressure is high, and the husband has arthritis. There’s not much more we can do than hope. Most of the time I’m exhausted.
Critical Theorist (at cushy university that’s taken care of): Don’t you see, it’s your beliefs, the fact that you’re ideologically duped, that places you in these circumstances? You’re a horrible, stupid, terrible person that just doesn’t get it. If you just took the time to read Adorno and Zizek and Laruelle and Marx and Deleuze and Guattari, everything would be different. You’d fight the good fight and quit your job and change things. But you’re an ignorant fool with superstitious beliefs, pervaded by ideology, ignorant and duped. Don’t you know? You just need the right theory to change these things? What? You talk about your geography, about the lack of opportunity where you live? Reactionary prick! How dare you place your kids, nutrition, and shelter first! How dare you consume meaningless baubles when you could be changing everything! Wait, what, you want to do dinner next week? Sorry, you’re a bit beneath me, but I am fighting for you, you dope. If only you’d just get the right ideas. Quit talking about your circumstances and reading and watching that trash! The problem is your ideas. Aren’t you a good materialist like me? Have you heard that there are other people that dare to say that nonhuman things like laundry contribute to the human condition? They reject the idea that everything is the force of ideas. How dare they deny your suffering and circumstances! Sorry, I can’t organize anything or any alternatives for your life, I’m busy writing articles for other people like me to bring about the revolutions.
Larval Subjects . 
December 12, 2012 at 6:11 am
Of course old Karl Marx once told us (quoting a an old quote himself), smiling, “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”. Maybe self-help books on revolutions are still needed, Levi. :)
Either that are teach them all how to rebel against their own repetitions of working and feeding … working and feeding … oh, dang, I have to run now and go work so I can feed myself and my young uns, oh dear, oh my… ;)
December 12, 2012 at 3:14 pm
I just think a lot of social and political theory ignores the way the everydayness of life, its exigencies, function to perpetuate power relations. There’s a tendency to treat the discursive as the only thing that’s real– after all, that’s what academics work with –and to be completely blind to these things. Meanwhile, no alternatives are offered and people are treated like ideologically blinkered idiots. In a lot of ways, ideology critique is often just an elaborate strategy for establishing the critic as superior and the criticized as a dupe in need of a master.
December 12, 2012 at 9:04 pm
The “critical theorist” here seems to want to convince each individual worker to think like he does. As I understand critical theory, that was never the point.
Revolutionary change can come about through ideas that work over longer periods of time than the snap moment one is convinced of something. The scholarship available to certain people far exceeds the limits of most of the masses concern, and yes, the don’t have the time or energy for it. That doesn’t mean certain ideas that resonate with many (but maybe a comparatively small amount) don’t do so. Big changes to the structures and systems that catch us and work us to death can happen without a democratic consensus to get us there. One person’s ideas, or a small clique can have a major impact on the course of history just by being read and talked about. Isn’t that what OOO is banking on?
December 12, 2012 at 10:15 pm
I think the problem lies in the critical theorist’s belief that it is primarily beliefs that structure social relations. In other words, critique would be better directed at material constraints that structure possibilities and in discovering ways to shift those. So the point here isn’t that the critical theorist doesn’t get the average person to think like them, but that they misidentify the problem because of their own class position and tendency to work primarily with the discursive or ideas; thereby leading them to think that ideas are the only and most real things in the world.
December 12, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Another way of putting it would be to say that we need to look at societies ecologically. What are the hierarchies or how are entities related in it? What are the feedback mechanisms that maintain these patterns? What are its vectors of development? How does information travel throughout it? What parties are reached and what aren’t reached? What dependencies lock people into certain forms of life even if they don’t wish for those forms of life? An ecological approach to society and politics allows us to begin formulating effective ways of engaging to produce change rather than simply pointing out what’s wrong or unjust for a community of like-minded individuals.
December 13, 2012 at 12:12 am
I’m usually a lurker here, but this post stands out, for some reason, from the majority of your posts; perhaps it’s the tone. Regardless, and maybe it’s because I come from a long line of factory workers, I do see your point, here–the problem is where said point is being aimed. Critical Theorists are hardly the only academics who think this way, and not all critical theorists do think as such. It seems to be a plague of the middle class academic, rather than any particular field, born from the very materiality that they (allegedly) fail to acknowledge.
That said, most academics are not concerned with “liberation” in the sense that critical theorists are, so their fault, while no more egregious than the same fault shared by others, shines like the corona during an eclipse.
December 13, 2012 at 2:18 am
Levi,
I am very sympathetic to your critique here. In following your line of argument, what then is the avenue for change in regards to networks and ecosystems? If the Critical Theorist misunderstand the point of transformation as subjective belief, how does one change a network or ecosystem?
December 13, 2012 at 8:26 am
Is this still an attack on Galloway? I ask because while I much liked a previous post that criticized university discourse, it’s difficult to think of just who you might have in mind, if not Galloway … besides Althusser. Who, at least according to Ranciere, defended university discourse against all comers when it was challenged in 68. I suppose the attack could also be on the SWP in the UK, as interpreted by, say, Ben Watson (in which case the “university” in “university discourse” has to be read in Lacan’s metaphorical sense). Otherwise, I am having trouble figuring out who your actual targets are here. I mean, what texts, what cushy well paid etc etc theorists do you have in mind specifically?
December 13, 2012 at 1:12 pm
John,
Nobody specifically, but at a particular style of theory that’s blind to certain things because its own material conditions.
December 14, 2012 at 3:34 am
it’s baubles, not bobbles.
December 14, 2012 at 3:45 am
Well nobody’s perfect. Thanks for your pedantry, Ruth. :)
December 14, 2012 at 5:36 am
There are some nice lines in an essay by Andrew Smith in the current NLR which I think speak well to this question of academic critique’s relationship to everyday experience:
“I am unwilling to reject altogether the visual metaphor of ‘looking at’ something, from the outside, as a means of knowing it better. The question rather is who it is that seeks to know things in this way, and why. In discussing the job, many of those I worked with sought precisely to turn it into something to be ‘looked at’, as a way of asserting a clarifying conceptual control over the work and its contradictions.
For example, not long after starting work in a supermarket, I asked an older colleague during a lunch-break about the nature of the job. He began by saying: ‘This place, it’s like . . .’ In the pause that followed I waited for him to choose some appropriate analogy. But instead, he said: ‘It’s like being asked to do one thing and then, bang, bang, bang, being asked to do all this other shit, so you can never get on with the first thing. So it never gets done, and then you get given grief for it.’ This was, of course, exactly what the work was ‘like’. Yet by framing his summary of the experience as something ‘like’ but other than itself—as a simile of itself, so to speak—my colleague was also turning it into something to be looked at, in a way that helped him, and me, make sense of it. Similarly, there can be a process of commuting labour into something to be ‘looked at’ when shopworkers are socializing after hours, amidst the chat and gossip, and the salvaging of a kind of comedy out of the experience of small belittlements.
This sort of collective looking cannot deny the necessities determining the experience of labour; the start of the next shift always casts its long shadow over such conversations. But what is asserted, all the same, is the fact that making meaning out of that experience is a power workers can claim as their own. The ‘meta-method’ may be important precisely because it helps to constitute what is otherwise merely given experience into something meaningful, through critical investigation by those most implicated in the thing itself. It would be presumptuous to claim that what follows is straightforwardly an expression of that kind of vernacular sociology. One problem with the reflexive turn in social sciences is that it risks descending into a self-interested false modesty, which discounts the relative privilege that is the condition of its possibility. I want to be open about the fact that what I present here is a reflection after the event, and that I have been able to develop and organize my argument thanks to the real advantages of a university position. That said, I hope the argument that follows will be at least contiguous with my co-workers’ reflections in ‘looking at’ our jobs; it has been put together in solidarity with them.”
http://newleftreview.org/II/78/andrew-smith-on-shopworking
December 14, 2012 at 7:23 pm
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December 17, 2012 at 12:36 am
Anyone who writes (Critical Theorist essay, instruction booklet manual, fiction writer describing an imaginary planet, grade school math textbook, religious text, nutritional label on a food product, lyrical poem) is persuading, writing from the perspective of “you, as reader, has a new thought that will, upon reading, be created.” This is why I’ve seen so many academics fulminate when someone tries to explain Rancière (esp. so vis-a-vis the Ignorant Schoolmaster) – it’s so unpalatable as an enterprising possibility for them. Critical Theory is no different than an advice column which is no different from a Stephen King novel which is no different from a Zagat rating book. All writing is persuasion. What is the point in saying X is (fill in the blank) than Y?