The year’s events, inside this country and out, have drawn an increasing number of people to the conclusion that many of us have held for some time: that local and global societies are in the grip of a crisis exposing a series of fundamental contradictions in the way we live. This is a long crisis, one of the capacity for human life itself, and an earlier manifestation in the 1960s and 70s was the occasion for the development of a distinctive approach taken by this publication and its predecessors. Given the depths of contradiction opening up at the present moment, it seems worth restating and applying it afresh.
Emerging from the ‘New Left’, spurred by its limits in grappling with a changing reality, what became a distinctive approach expressed initially in the work of Geoff Sharp was grounded in changing developments within social practices, understood in the broadest sense as incorporating the economy and social reproduction. The approach had two key elements. The first was a break with the taken-for-granted and with some of the deepest assumptions of Marxism, in which the creation of value arose from the transformations of the natural world that occurred as the necessary production of the working classes. This ‘value assumption’ was no longer an obvious and exclusive truth as it had seemed in the nineteenth century.
The second element was the observation that the composition of the working population was undergoing a change, with increasing proportions of workers being trained and educated outside of basic workplace training, in educational institutions. The first element made the second element possible; anew social grouping was produced which could not be easily fitted into the old class paradigm, but nor was it the sociological ‘new’ or ‘managerial’ class of the period.
Taking the first claim, the role of intellectual practices in social and economic life: these are typically addressed within Marxism in a reductive way. The role of the working class within the Marxist conventional account is essentially defended by collapsing scientific endeavour into the category of ‘scientific revolution’, and this category has no social account. Intellect and innovation enter the capital accumulation process in ad hoc ways in high capitalism, via workplace innovation or the entrepreneurial ‘inventor’; the systematic intellectual practices—which only emerge as ‘science’ in the later eighteenth century—remain largely separate from the process.Clearly, the sciences cannot be ignored, but they play no social role in the production of value and therefore have no place in thinking socially about the past, the present and the future.
In contrast, in the twentieth century the sciences began a process of transforming naturethat was independent of working populations, one grounded in intellectual ideas that took hold of nature at a deeper level than in the past. These are familiar, beginning with the Einsteinian and quantum revolutions before the First World War that led to the ‘miracle’ of atomic weapons and energy decades later, the development of computing out of pure mathematics, and the transition to molecular biology with the discovery of DNA in the 1950s. The sheer transformative power of such developments over succeeding decades, in quantity and quality, were such that to writers for Arena, any attempt to draw them back into Marxist frames dominated by the primacy of labour was to utterly miss the point. For Arena, the political defeats of the radical Left in the hot period of the 1960s and 70s were precisely due to a failure to take this complex unfolding reality on board.
The transformed social sphere
But what is the nature of the social that is at the centre of these transformations? Grasping this requires that we find a way of understanding intellectual practices, both in our era and more generally, as distinct forms of social practice—ones that can have profound impacts in their own right. In other words, intellectual practices need to be seen as other than the practices of clever individual intellectuals of diverse social backgrounds who are collectivised. They need to be seen as embedded within social practices and relations of a distinct kind.
To do this, a distinction needs to be drawn between aspects of the body of social relations throughout the postnatural history of our species. For millennia these were almost entirely ‘face-to-face’, beginning with ‘tribal’ or first societies. While ‘face-to-face’ social life has continued throughout history, gradually, it has been added to by forms of technological extension that create different kinds of social relations based in the social network.
Distinctly intellectual relations—those initially of the priest, religion and the scriptures, with cosmological work included—emerged in networks of association that have left them relatively socially–materially ‘abstract’ in contrast with other communities. For them this has been made possible historically because of writing, a medium abstracted from interchanges typical of the face-to-face, which rely upon gesture, the face and the senses based in the body—those qualities which give support to our capacity to empathise with others. Somewhat closer to the present, networks became more widespread due to our reliance upon the printed word and, even more recently, electronic communication including email. Social relations of this kind are not dependent on the presence of the other; rather, technology allows them to be based in the absence of the other.
It is this emergence—of intellectual practices able to reconstitute the natural world in the first instance and then a widespread form of social absence hitherto unknown to the world—that has become a crucial element in world transformation. This attention to socio-material abstraction argues that it has been a driver of human transformation identified in the various streams of modern-era theory but hitherto subsumed into other elements. Marx identified the commodity form, and Sohn-Rethel drew from that the notion of ‘real abstraction’; Durkheim made visible the deep differences of social form between our society and those organised by kinship, myth and totem, and the structural relations within, and Levi-Strauss gave this categorical form. Varying observations appeared in Simmel, George Herbert Mead, McLuhan and others.
But it was only in an era in which intellectual practices had become so abstracted as to threaten the extinction of humanity, or to provide unlimited technological transformation of everyday life, that it could become fully visible to those willing to question the adequacy of received approaches. Essentially, new forms of human interchange—writing, printing, electro-mechanical media, digitalia—made possible the new intellectual practices that in turn have made possible the transformation of the world via social institutions which embody and carry abstracted processes.
Historically, intellectual practices have developed a distinct culture of interchange that carries over some of the elements of face-to-face social relations but also allows for individualised movement and forms of individuality far beyond what was available in face-to-face cultures. From those cultures, priests, intellectuals, scientists take their ethic—including respect for the other, mutual support and a commitment to truth—which is now intensified in order to sustain a distinct social grouping despite the absence of the other. Crucially, this had been a culturecommitted to the service of face-to-face communities,even though tensions associated with corruption by various relationships with the Powers never went away.
There is no better illustration of this tension at work between intellectual practices and the Powersthan that of the divisions that emerged within that enormous program, the Manhattan Project, amassed to produce the atomic bomb. Here in a world at war was an unprecedentedly focused conjunction of intellectual practice and real-world power, combining a new world of material knowledge of the previously unknown with thinking drawn from the world as it had been before. The hopes among leading intellectuals for a resolution to the new threat of annihilation was brushed aside by the civil/military administration. This struggle initiated a new form of politics between intellectual practices and the wider social order which continues to this day.
The successful development of the Bomb initiated a process of social transformation that first ushered in a radical enhancement of the physics discipline across the whole university spectrum, especially facilitated by government and military investment. As Adam Becker put it in ‘What is Real’:
After the war ended, physics research in the United States never returned to what it was before the war. Damned by their success in building the bomb, military research dollars poured into physics … Less than a decade after the war, in 1953, physics research funding was just shy of $400 million—an increase by a factor of twenty-five in just fifteen years. And, by 1954, 98 percent of the money for basic research in the physical sciences in the United States was coming from the military or defense-oriented government agencies, like the Atomic Energy Commission, successor to the Manhattan Project.
This development in turn initiated a social process that transformed the relation of intellectual practices to social life in all the institutions of society, not just the workplace and the economy. Radio and then electronic media led to a reconstruction of how people lived, which has culminated in social media. While the face-to-face of known others has never gone away as a mode of interchange, it is increasingly attenuated or hollowed out by relations of absence. These changes began to threaten the sustainability of families and communities as well as the coherence of individual identity in their received form. An orientation towards relations of absence in everyday life weakens the hold of the historical, more distant, state upon the social order and prepares the way for the enhancement of intellectual practices generally. Historically, the Left has seen this as either unambiguous progress, or, in Marxism, as offering the expanded means of production that will make revolution possible. Weber saw modernisation as creating the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy, a resource for romanticising the premodern by both Right and Left. Our argument would be that the older received forms of social control—church, rank and so on—are being displaced by a variety of forms of more extended, invisible and embedded technological surveillance and self-surveillance, and related forms for the maintenance of social order. But also being displaced are the less abstract forms of communal association which underpin them, and provide the ground for potential communal self-determination against them. It is this latter dissolution that other approaches on the Left tend ‘not to see’.
After the emergence of the new ‘powers’ of intellectual practices in the twentieth century, an apparently paradoxical process occurred. Society as a whole, as the increasing results of science were applied to it, became more generalised, materially abstracted, massified. This transformation did not simply add new layers to the top of social life; it undermines community autonomy and the ‘presence’ of face-to-face community through a turning away from the service of intellectual practices as such and towards pre-existing social orders and communities set within the human scale. Society is put at the disposal of the new forces and powers. But scientists are gathered in vastly increasing numbers—in universities, and corporate and military facilities—in which the unbounded and transgressive pursuit of techno-science, theoretical science and inquisitive thought has become a project in itself. This project is no longer grounded in the needs and hopes of citizens, or even of Earth itself, instead feeding all forms of power and consumerism—including the transformation and enhancement of what was formerly the human body as given within the evolutionary process itself. Intellectual practices sense, but do not yet choose, this road of intellectuals for themselves. This choice remains a core moral and ethical one for intellectual practices typical of the contemporary social order, one that is crucial for the resolution of general directions within society today.
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The second element of the Arena approach—the changing composition of the workforce—gained most emphasis when Arena first sought to point to a situation that had started to emerge in the early 1960s. Here Sharp gave an account of the emergence of a new social agent in a transforming social structure: the intellectually trained, who differed in basic ways from those working-class agents given focus by Marxism. In Marxism, the intellectually trained are simply distributed between working class and bourgeoisie, and various provisional and never-settled semi- and sub-classes. Their character as the ‘intellectually trained’ is seen as secondary to their relationship to capital and wage labour. For Arena writers at the time, this was a crucial and epochal error of the Left.
Characteristically, the intellectually trained are trained in the academy, not on the job. They do not learn particular techniques in the first instance; rather, they internalise generalised techniques first developed by creative intellectuals—what I have been calling intellectual practices or the intellectual culture proper. It follows that flexibility is a core characteristic. And crucially, this relation with intellectual practices is an ongoing one, essential for the periodic renewal that typifies intellectual training. Personal choice is an essential characteristic, and while today, by and large, the intellectually trained and intellectual practices choose to support the contemporary social order, their formation allows other possibilities. This is because universalistic intellectual practices have concerns broader than those of capitalism—or any particular social structure or power—and service is a deeply entrenched value.
We get a partial glimpse of this possibility with climate change, where climate scientists’ rebellion over climate policy can be seen as a rational revolt against the assumptions of the social order, in which the scientists have come to believe that the lives of all are increasingly at risk. In some circumstances, both intellectual practices and the intellectually trained can become fierce opponents of a given social order with a time-scale that reaches far beyond that apparent in this example.
This transformation of the social order has ushered in a growing disparity between two different kinds of workers in industry, with the industrial working class—those who contribute to capital accumulation through substantially routinised and inflexible, or minimally flexible, labour practices—in relative decline. Apart from these major shifts in the composition of the workforce, Sharp and other Arena editors have recognised a generalised transformation that places intellectual practices in the forefront of processes described as the high-tech revolution.
As noted,Sharp saw this development as epochal: technique in the world was increasingly a product of the academy, of practices derived from complexes of ideas that constituted real lived abstractions: that is, it was set apart from the productive process itself. This high-tech revolution even stepped outside of conventional economic concerns and turned upon everyday life, and then upon the evolutionary process itself. Completely without precedent, homo sapiens, with the help of techno-science, began to imagine it could shape and displace evolution, as illustrated by various contemporary interventions to reconstruct the body, the temptation to use geo-engineering as a response to climate change, and Elon Musk and his followers’ desire and capacity to begin to colonise space.
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This argument in Arena, now developed over sixty years, is not about how the social contradictions of social class as codified by Marx and adopted near-universally no longer exist. Rather, it is about how those social contradictions no longer carry the same weight in social life today, because another contradiction of great significance has emerged since the enhanced powers of intellectual practices made their mark on social life. This has been named in Arena as a cultural contradiction, in part because intellectual practices have long been regarded by Marxists as cultural. It is an epochal transformation that undermines much of the force of the class contradictions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, shifting the emphasis towards a broader social focus—one that ushers in a relentless upheaval in the social structure over generations. One way to view this transformation is through a shift in the balance between face-to-face, embodied relations and more abstract relations that has erupted across social life. Up to the sixteenth century in Europe, the everyday life of most people was substantially conducted in the face-to-face. Literacy has risen and fallen among elites from the ancient city-states onwards, but only began to spread to wider groups with the mass-printed book. Even in modernity, the working and middle classes may have read books and newspapers, listened to the radio and gone to the movies while, in the new cities, cosmopolitan, mobile ‘bohemian’ subcultures formed, but most people’s lives and social-psychological development remained dominated by family, neighbourhood, village, church and other such groupings. It is only in our era, and relatively recently, that abstracted media in multiple form have begun to thoroughly interpenetrate practically every possible social relationship and the spaces and times in which they are lived. The effects of this may be seen in the transformation in the structure of social relations and selfhood,related to a lack of grounding in embodied social life and the natural world.
The reader will note that this account has similarities with many classic social commentaries of the age, such as Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and the work of Richard Sennett. The shortest possible general comment would be that almost all of these books cannot see the abstracting process that underlies the social changes they interpret, and thus they are always, however sophisticatedly, taking immediately prior social forms arising from different intersections of intellectual practices and social life—the world of print or the village—to be the ‘natural’ ones, the unmediated expressions of human social being. Simon Cooper explores how this process has continued with the new American ‘post-liberals’ in his review in this issue.
In that sense, when intellectual practices gain the capacity to systematically transform nature and produce value independent of the working class—though not of human operators—cultural contradictionstarts to become the dominant form. It ushers in processes that not only present new challenges for the species but potentially take steps beyond what the species can cope with. Intellectual practices displace or attenuate given forms of association with more constitutively abstract forms; forms such as the face-to-face that have long been definitive of homo sapiens begin to unravel, and forms of what is taken to be the given in nature also unravel by drawing the ‘natural’ into processes of potentially unlimited transformation.
While cultural contradiction does not end the social contradictions of capitalism, it does suggest that the working class, as an encompassing class, lacks both the historical drive and the capacity to be a unified agent within history. Cultural contradiction has multiple effects in the social world. People begin to act against its manifestations in piecemeal ways. Some begin to walk away from contemporary social life, attempting to rebuild their face-to-face relations with others and with nature, much like the counterculture did fifty years ago. Conventional politics fragments and turns upon itself, having lost the stable reference points that were its basis in the past. The whole frame of ‘progress’ and expansion, actively supporting a sense of the future, begins to unravel for growing sections of society, as well as in the political realm. We can touch on a few examples to make this clearer, while noting also that lengthier accounts are required.
This process can be seen in the way that social and cultural issues—the notion of gender, for example—have come to the centre of debate very rapidly and, within standard political frames, inexplicably. Social institutions, for example, lose meaning as our culture, unlike all previous cultures, undermines the binary divisions such as male and female, that underpins the deep meaning of face-to-face. Opposing discrimination against people identifying as trans is one thing, but from the standpoint of cultural necessity, it must also be seen as a form of generosity to a non-standard situation produced by highly abstracted societies—a process that can undermine the stability and development of cultures, and as such needs careful and informed thought. Cultures that become increasingly incoherent make their mark upon the political realm.
Primary institutions of social life based in the face-to-face have thus been attenuated by media forms based in social abstraction where the other is not present; this is especially the case with social media, where for the individual, the balance of social forms moves radically towards social absence and the ‘freedom’ of no longer being bound by grounded community they allow—or, as a counter, the vulnerability they generate. Another example is the rise of conspiracy theory, which booms in social conditions where the other is never present. It is characteristic of the inability of our current era to see itself and its full processes that every explanation for the vast increase in conspiracy theory is offered, save for the matching vast increase in abstracted systems of absence dominating everyday life.
At such a time, it is increasingly clear that much of the world is now oriented towards war—in Europe, the middle-east, and Asia—and yet accounts of geopolitics put largely in terms of imperialism become, as becomes obvious to many, increasingly inadequate as explanations of current events. It is worth reflecting on how the new powers of intellectual practices, unleashed in stages since the Second World War, clearly facilitate new forms of weaponry. But more importantly, they have progressively undermined the given social institutions that composed our social order and reconstituted them on a more fragile basis, thus creating the conditions for war.
This drift in the nature of social institutions can be illustrated in a number of ways, but probably best by reference to the reconstruction of the institutional order around economic globalisation, for this major shift to global institutions was only made possible by technology that allowed the displacement of the local via deregulation processes that launched what is effectively a new order largely based in social absence.
Received social institutions like the modern market are transformed when the revolution of intellectual practices begins to take hold. So, for example, the impact of a super-charged market upon world economy, in turn shifts an emphasis upon exported-oriented economies up several gears into a perspective that seeks to transform all economy from local production to trade oriented global production.
Export-oriented economy was once a strategy that offered the prospect for undeveloped economies to transcend their circumstances via development. East Asia is the leading example. Now all economies shift the balance of their economic institutions towards the global. The closest that world economy came towards globalisation in the past was the late nineteenth century imperial economy of the West. With globalisation today in increasing difficulty, it is worth noting that the unravelling of that earlier period of more limited globalisation lay in the background of World War One. There is no point in denying that expanded global economies are more productive, but here productivity has contradictory effects. Experiments facilitated by social absence lead to institutions that are less grounded socially than previously; consequently, they are more vulnerable, and the social order can easily fragment.
In other words, this quite singular order can only feel its way towards stability; it has never been proven, except for a decade or two, as a form of social order. And fragility characterises its institutional core because it has lost its association with stable communities based in the face-to-face. In other words, it is based in fleeting social relations.
As the initial enthusiasm for an external global order fades and the consequences of internal disorder surface wherever one looks—from internal economic decay and social stress to political shallowness—the world lurches towards violent ‘solutions’. Hopes that a global order would be able to be more transparent fade. States struggle to stabilise the social order, and making its mark year by year is what appears to be the re-emergence of warlordism as a substitute for state organisation. Or the two may be combined, as for example with Vladimir Putin, who is able to plunder the residues of a former superpower while threatening the world with nuclear armageddon. However, the ‘warlord’ no longer has the backing of relatively coherent communities, and should be seen as a leader of individuals increasingly ‘grounded’ in social absence: a new historical phenomenon.
We can focus here upon short-term prospects which are probably quite grim, but how the challenge of these new conditions, and new social forces, will work its way out over the next generation or two will turn in significant part on the response over time of intellectual practices in the academy. One crucial thing to understand is that this approach is not a theory of manipulative intellectual ‘elites’ as deployed by the Right throughout modernity. Quite the contrary: it is only when intellectual forces move to the centre of life that the approach here becomes a necessary substitute for class-based theories whose powers of explanation have been declining for decades.
Sharp made it clear that this would be no easy task:
… any movement towards confronting the new-found merger … of intellectual practices with the Powers, is a project of unprecedented difficulty. It is a conjunction that may continue to devolve into new forms of tyranny unless the interpretive branch of the intellectual practices can renew its former precedence.
Will intellectual practices continue their implicit cooperation with capital and destroy much of the world of homo sapiens and other species? Or can they be redirected to draw upon their universalist ethical orientation, turn against the seductions of capitalism and the will-to-power, and return to and serve the broad community?
For further reading, see the ‘Foundation Articles’ section.