Abstract
Rahel Jaeggi’s outstanding Critique of Forms of Life constitutes the most formidable of several recent efforts within Frankfurt School Critical Theory to revitalize its critical import. 1 Author of a commanding monograph upholding the critical import of a reconstructed concept of “alienation,” Jaeggi brings considerable intellectual gifts—lively philosophical prose, sociological sense, conceptual acuteness—to rework the Hegelian legacy in critical theory through an intriguing recasting of the notion “forms of life” that seminally touches upon important questions that bear directly on the concerns of political theorists committed to genuine critique. The work of an original mind, Critique of Life Forms vindicates an unfeigned critical vocation. Effortlessly moving across the analytical/continental divide, Jaeggi mobilizes, and originally builds upon, a vast philosophical and theoretical scholarship. Philosophically, she ranges from critical theory, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Raymond Geuss to John Dewey, Hilary Putnam, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Wilfrid Sellars, and Robert Brandom to reconceive Hegel’s notion of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit) and thus open up a new set of questions beyond the commonplaces found in mainstream discussions of this foundational Hegelian notion. Present in Frankfurt School Critical Theory as early as Horkheimer’s foundational essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Jaeggi can rightfully claim to be drawing out the critical import of a central idea of critical theory that had been hitherto either ignored or undertheorized.
A book of this range and complexity defies easy summary, and reasons of space preclude doing justice to the richness found in it. Yet without too much simplification one can identify three key contributions: a coruscating elucidation of the critical import of “forms of life”; an original account of “immanent critique”; and a reworking of the idea of “learning processes,” an idea already adduced by Hegel but here vindicated and reworked along pragmatist lines.
Broadly speaking, forms of life are defined through the book in terms of collective human praxis. They are cultural orders of human existence defined by both symbolic and institutional manifestations, practices, and values—in which individual subjects are formed, and, in turn, reproduce and sustain institutions of meaning, shaping subjects—akin to what Hegel famously conceptualized as part of “objective spirit.” But Jaeggi’s seminal contribution consists not simply in lucidly conceptualizing these forms. Rather, by arguing about their historicity and dynamism—forms of life are “shaped (or formed), and hence could also be reshaped” (3–4)—she actually shows how these are subject to critique on the basis of their own immanent forms of normativity. She further shows how, through crises, when problems and conflicts arise, these can be subject to forms of immanent critique without recourse to external standards, and so significantly transformed. Forms of life are thus capable of immanently driven learning processes.
Departing from a lucid critique of the forms of “ethical abstinence” found in liberal pleas for neutrality (here exemplified by Rawls and Habermas), the book proceeds to define forms of life and how these are produced and reproduced. The definition Jaeggi proposes is straightforward enough: a result of a rationally process-driven form of social transformation, forms of life are “problem-solving” entities that mediate both individual and collective life. But there is no simplicity behind this seemingly simple formulation. By building on common-sense definitions and the semantic contiguity—“semantic overlaps” (37ff.)—with other concepts frequently used in everyday parlance (say, tradition, or institutions), Jaeggi’s approach is a touch inferential, something unsurprising in a work deeply influenced by American pragmatism, and not only in the form of John Dewey. Robert Brandom’s presence, one of the most brilliant and original American philosophers active today, lurks throughout her account of forms of life beyond the explicit references to his writings. Jaeggi immanently works her way through several meanings, dispels many a misunderstanding or misconception, and at the end emerges with a cogent conceptual articulation of this notion. As befits a work that compellingly advocates immanent critique, the book exemplifies it in the structure of its argumentation.
What are the core determinations of “forms of life” as a concept? At the very outset, Jaeggi links this notion to Critical Theory’s original commitment to “collective emancipatory processes” (xi). Qua rational entities bearing their own particular rationality, the ensemble of practices Jaeggi theorizes as forms of life are characterized as “orders” of human existence, which are cast as “historically developing learning processes endowed with normative claims to validity that is the key to their evolution” (3, xiii). And so, the centrality of immanent critique in the constitutive forms of learning that, according to Jaeggi, are central to the historical transformations of forms of life. Embedded in culture and history, irrespective of how this embeddedness is conceived, figured, or represented across time and space, humans inhabit forms of life, and the immanent criticism of modern forms of life takes as its point of entry the “frame of reference with which we act and orient ourselves” (7).
Forms of life thus consist of collective formations, or interrelated “clusters of practices,” that constitute “orders of social cooperation” subjected to “a certain normative pressure of expectation” (41, 42). These are sustained and reproduced through habitual rules that bear both passive and active moments: “one lives in a form of life as in a structure that is pregiven and laid out in advance, even if one simultaneously creates it through one’s own practice” (41–42). Yet the most compelling formulation of the project is found in the closing remarks to the book’s introduction, which foreshadows the strengths that the argument makes and the proposal’s limitations: . . . criticism of forms of life points to the irrationality, obsolescence, contradictoriness, or dysfunctionality of forms of life and aims to transform them for the better in ways directed and motivated by norms. Forms of life are porous and open to influence, and if they are not to be compulsive, they must involve a moment of openness to experience. The evaluation of forms of life should find its criterion in the subject matter of the problem or in the success of the problem-solving processes. Because, conversely, their problems depend on interpretation and are changeable and open-ended—contrary to a trite functionalist perspective—not only can forms of life overlap, they are also inherently dynamic. Thus, the project of criticism of forms of life is rooted in a pragmatist reconstruction (and reduction) of motifs from the philosophy of history and in the assumption that the development of forms of life can be understood in this sense as a learning process that, although open, is nevertheless directed. (31)
This is an ambitious prospectus full of arresting insights about critique, immanent transformation, and the nature of historical processes. And Jaeggi delivers on this brilliant philosophical program with commendable ambition, conceptual acumen, and an attention to detail that repays several readings.
What about the limitations? While these only emerge through a careful consideration of the constellations of themes the book crafts, and the theoretical forms in which these are formulated, a few are already found in the passage just cited—as the passage intimates, the jargon of normativity supervenes Jaeggi’s critical project, occasionally capsizes it, and ultimately, undermines its political edge. Jaeggi construes forms of life mostly in terms of “norms,” “problem-solving,” and “learning processes,” thus privileging pliability over implacability, even if in reality it is obstinacy that often defines the persistence of forms of life. Religiously bound forms of life—say, Amish or Hassidic—readily come to mind, but there are secular versions, too. More to the point, forms of life, as Jaeggi’s rich and compelling account makes abundantly clear, encompass rules, ideas, ideals, wishes, ideology, practices, and imperatives that form the mainstay of social formations and their forms of collective life; and, as such, forms of life are often both politically constituted and ideologically sanctioned.
Can the terminology of normativity, norms, and the normative encase all of these notions, each with its own vectors and historicity, so neatly? What is gained and what is lost by translating, if not subsuming, all of these terms into such language? To better grasp the obduracy and resilience of forms of life and avow the desirability of altogether abolishing some of them—a possibility entirely downplayed in Jaeggi’s book—a more critical philosophical terminology is needed.
Philosophically bilingual, Jaeggi easily moves between analytical and continental philosophies. Yet crisscrossing over this divide is not always smooth, and sedimentation in the concepts and thought forms of each threatens to lead some of her otherwise deep arguments astray. It is one thing to be conversant in different philosophical traditions, as Jaeggi certainly is, and yet, it is a different thing altogether to transcode across them. Doing so runs the risks of sidestepping problems sedimented in one terminology, and thus hastily smoothing them out, only to find them reappearing in the other terminology bearing the marks of an unresolved tension or contradiction. For philosophical terminology and concepts bear the weight of their history, which, to borrow an image from the young Hegel, is experienced like lead in their feet. 2 In an earthier vein, Adorno consistently emphasized this insight mostly through the metaphor of sedimentation. If in one of his earliest writings he referred to how philosophical language bears “ruins,” and that the philosopher’s material is the ruination that links words with history, in Negative Dialectics he openly avowed sedimented history. 3 And, in Philosophical Terminology (1962–63), he clearly set out the perils of ignoring these sedimentations in concepts, and the transcoding from one philosophical language to another, especially by way of neologisms. Philosophical terminology, he argues, is “essentially historical” both in relation to its prior usages in philosophical systems and in how these are mediated by history itself. It thus constitutes thought’s historical knots, which persist as “the hardened scar” of an unresolved problem. 4 Attention to such sedimentations is thus crucial in any dialectical philosophical engagement.
How does any of this bear on Critique of Forms of Life? Sedimentation draws attention to the potential perils of transcoding across philosophical terminologies. Throughout the book Jaeggi shows an acute sense of how sedimentation is at work in different ambits (74, 78, 82, 90, 127, 145, 229), but she underestimates how it is built into concepts, how these persist and obstruct conceptual translation, and the ways sedimentation can at once enable and block forms of knowledge and practice. For example, after aligning her argument with the robust tradition of immanent critique “inspired by Hegel and Marx,” Jaeggi transcodes from one terminology to another and illustrates the perils associated with such acts: “The transformation process referred to here can be described as an ethical learning process or, in more old-fashioned terminology, as an emancipation process that, according to this assumption, is triggered by the critical thematization of one’s own form of life and those of others” (31).
In this otherwise compelling formulation, Jaeggi moves between “emancipation” and “ethical learning process” and thus reduces emancipation, its collective connotations, and its calls for abolition into the rather more modest effort of an ethical learning process. Yet, the nonidentity between the critical, ethical, and political valences of the two is striking. Normative and ethical learning processes have ascendance in the architecture of Jaeggi’s book in ways that emancipation does not. However, one is an ethical process that is minimally binding, whose criteria are far more easily met within existing forms of life, while the other imposes a more robust task that calls for attention to state forms and capitalism as a form of life for the sake of their abolition. And politically speaking, emancipation has a far more radical and formidable critical imperative built into its own conceptual determinations than the more pliable terminology of learning processes. Emancipation, furthermore, is historically inseparable from unintended consequences—wars and revolutions—as well as the abolition of forms of life, whose logic is irreducible to the progressive rationality Jaeggi ascribes to learning processes.
Problem-solving, pathologies, functionality, distortion, and even learning processes: this rather functionalist terminology is ultimately anchored on a social theory that is technocratic and harkens back to nondialectical normative sociologies that offer liberal alternatives to Marxism, which in many cases reproduced the structure of neoclassical economics. Earlier on, Habermas made a crucial philosophical move with lasting effects not only in the architecture, form, and politics of his philosophy, but one that has been mostly uncritically reproduced in Frankfurt School Critical Theory—Parsons dislodged Marx, both as theorist of modernity and capitalism.
Yet this transatlantic philosophical and sociological jargon, with Parsons as a vanishing mediator, has become so normalized in post-Habermas Critical Theory that not even the work of its most formidable heirs, like Honneth and Jaeggi, are exempt from it. Jaeggi rightfully distances herself from “trite functionalist perspective” (31), and in important ways Critique of Forms of Life earns such distancing. But Jaeggi ultimately underestimates the functionalist sedimentation built into the terminology she too often uses with more critical and radical intent.
Of course, normativity is shared conceptual territory across different philosophical traditions and not the sole result of moving between different philosophical languages within Critique of Forms of Life. Absent in any meaningful way from Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s corpuses, and not even indexed in John Rawls’s Lectures on Ethics, normativity is a recent and not very enlightening coinage, as Raymond Geuss has most emphatically and consistently argued. 5 Initially deployed as an adjective, either to merely designate a rule that constitutes a norm or standard in a given context or as metonym for nonpositivist political theorizing that has a prescriptive edge, the stuff of vision, however tacitly expressed, it has become an engorged noun. What exactly does “normative” mean in contemporary distended usages, and what sediments does it bear from the historical determinants leading to its ascendance? For the jargon of “normativity” is coeval with the depoliticized politics of the ethical turn enveloping the North Atlantic west since the seventies and the attempt either to supervene or to capsize political life with ethical supplements. 6 There is, accordingly, an internal politics to this concept.
There are, then, stronger and weaker versions of normativity. In the weak version, normative is simply an adjective. “Normative” is used to contrast a prescriptive view from the objectivity attainable within the social sciences. Alternately, it carries connotations of rule that Weber famously theorized as “a norm by reference to which present, past or future events are ‘measured’ in the sense of a value judgment—in other words, a general statement of what something ought (from a logical, ethical or aesthetic point of view) to be as opposed to the empirical [statement concerning] ‘what is.’” 7 Stated differently, Weber was concerned with contrasting rule as description with rule as norm, hence, appealing to a validity whose content was determined by the discipline in question. But in the stronger and ultimately distended version of it, normativity connotes either a standard or morally laden rule in ways that conflate the different forms of validity Weber rightly distinguished. At its most questionable, it slips into the hypostatized idea of “normativity” that presupposes the claim that there is a single framework entity that the term normativity refers to, as an essence, as it were, out of which all forms of ethical rules and norms emerge. One could say, in Platonic vein, that normativity then becomes an idea in which the rules and practices crafted to navigate situations become reified.
Yet in contemporary political and critical theory, “normative” and “normativity” often work as mere placeholders that at once subsume and occlude social and political considerations that are never properly thematized. Both post-Habermas Critical Theory and contemporary heirs of the pragmatism also nourishing Jaeggi’s book lavishly indulge in what has become a distended jargon. 8 So normalized has it become that few even bother to define or justify its critical import. Critique of Forms of Life is not entirely bereft of this language, even if Jaeggi accounts for how these notions are at work in her book. Throughout the book, forms of life are routinely referred to as “normative ensembles” (94, passim), but Jaeggi neglects to account for the historical and political determinants that make normative pressures (98ff.) effective, or able to gain ascendance within forms of life. Critics have argued that Jaeggi’s conceptualization of forms of life lacks an adequate account of negation, but that charge misses the mark: what is actually missing is an account of an even more central dialectical concept, mediation. 9 Yet, like the institutional mediations of the frames of reference Jaeggi identifies as contouring forms of life, which are adduced but not sufficiently theorized, the imperatives and structures of power of capitalist political orders bearing upon these frames of references are not conceptualized— even when these bear directly on the prospects for effective social transformation and thoroughly mediate its prospects.
Politically speaking, however, any account of social and ethical norms needs to dispense with the conceit of normativity and incorporate a critical understanding of the duality of rule, and its verb form. 10 Jaeggi, to be sure, avows the difference between rules and norms and the former’s semantic and historical contiguity with “practices” (57ff.). Even so, whereas Jaeggi compellingly formulates a view of immanent critique in which norms are subject to criticism (203ff.), the more robustly political notions are absent from her account. Yet in the political field, rule qua ruling mediates any scene-setting in which political action takes place and the forms of political literacy enabled or disavowed in particular situations. And these simultaneously mediate and are mediated by forms of life. Political action and rule, especially in situations in which the demands of inaugurating and sustaining a new order are at stake—namely, radical transformation and abolition of the mainstay of political life and the forms of life sustaining it—thus require a sober realism. Such a realism is inseparable from the need to establish rules and maxims of actions, as well as exceptions, along with rules for adjudicating the exceptions in situations shot through with orders of violence. This dialectic of rules and exceptions is grounded on the particular situation and controlled by it. 11 Genuine political reflection, accordingly, is concerned with rules without speaking euphemistically about norms that would detour political theory into ethics.
One of the most powerful sections of Critique of Forms of Life is the account of “the dynamics of learning processes” (272ff.) and the centrality Jaeggi accords to historical experience in the context of her discussion. These dynamics are central for any actual critical theory that does not take progress for granted and wants to theorize the ways in which moral and political literacy are acquired within historical forms of life. Even if the account of progress and regression in this section of the book is clipped—Jaeggi is currently at work on a book on this dialectic—it gives necessary prominence to the centrality of social and systematic blockages to the learning processes it theorizes, and some important reasons for their occurrence (283–286).
Jaeggi’s philosophical construction of these learning processes proceeds through a powerful interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history with particular emphasis on “determinate negation.” Central to the argument is the claim that dynamics of learning processes emerge “when we conceive of social transformation processes as the unfolding of (social) contradictions or as a matter of coping with problems,” and the ability of these learning processes to grapple with blockages, progress, and regression by conceiving innovation as “a certain kind of continuity between the old and the new—continuity in discontinuity (272–273). Echoes of Adorno’s philosophy of history could be heard here—“History is the unity of continuity and discontinuity”—but his negative (and materialist) dialectical formulations are not adduced here, even if these are intimately related to the dialectic of progress and regression Jaeggi defends. 12
One reason for Adorno’s absence could be the rejection of the primacy of progress found in Adorno, but that is tacitly avowed when Jaeggi conceives “social change as a rational transformation that is both continuous and discontinuous—that is, as a learning process which becomes progressively richer and more differentiated while nevertheless remaining open. Historical social transformations can then be understood as learning processes with reference to which one position can be characterized as better or worse than the position overcome, and hence as representing progress and regress vis-à-vis that position” (311). Herein, however, a modicum of progress, as the position from which both progress and regression ought to be assessed, a learning of sorts, is required for that reflexivity that then adjudicates what is progressive or regressive. Jaeggi, moreover, emphasizes Hegel’s account of “a processes of enrichment and differentiation—or, if you will, as progress” that is then reworked in order to “provide a description of social and historical learning process from which the criteria of their rationality as learning processes . . . can be gleaned” (273). Forms of life thus emerge as bearers of a diachronic identity. These immanently possess a dynamic of learning processes that enables, deepens, and extends the experiences of a form of life that has changed overtime while retaining its identity. Blockages exist, to be sure, and these “prevent a society on reflecting in appropriate terms on the realities of social change” (283). Even so, the rationality of progress built into learning processes, according to Jaeggi, “calls for reflection back upon the framework or the foundations of the very structure of practice and interpretation that causes such blockages” (285).
Framing her discussion of these processes is the distinction between successful and failed learning processes, and how the relative failure or success is very much contingent upon the dialectic of progress and regression. Learning processes, moreover, constitute “progressive developments that become richer and more differentiated—that is, developments towards the better” (226). In contrast, “stagnation rather than transformation” is what defines “a failed learning process” (230). But there is no real dialectic between the two, as history is on the side of “successful learning processes,” or so Jaeggi intimates when she writes, “It can be surmised, therefore, that deficient learning processes are invariably unmasked in the long run as dysfunctionalities of the ensemble of practices concerned and hence as failed solutions to problems” (233).
But is such surmising really warranted in light of the mostly dialectical account of forms of life sketched throughout the book? For all the suggestiveness of this section, the opposition between successful and failed learning processes lacks the dynamism Jaeggi ascribes to it. Not only is the dice loaded in favor of success, regardless of the manifold of historical evidence to the contrary, but this opposition does not quite capture the real learning processes of some forms of life and the dominant ideologies binding them. This becomes clear when one introduces more politically robust examples than Jaeggi offers. Capitalism, for instance, is an example of a learning process irreducible to either failure or success. Indeed, it complicates this dyad of success-failure, since the historical unfolding and expansion of capitalism is best characterized as a successful learning, yet one with deadly and disastrous outcomes, to borrow and recast Alexander Kluge’s brilliant formulation. 13 For capitalism, as either form of life or mode of production, has proven extremely able to successfully learn, and thus transform and differentiate, while remaining disastrous, even deadly, for large swathes of humanity.
Or consider the historical trajectory of liberalism in the United States, the land of reference for the pragmatism that Jaeggi’s account of learning builds upon. Are liberal learning processes, in which privilege is often extended in the name of transformation and differentiation but never abolished, successful? Indeed, liberal forms of life are yet another instance of successful learning processes with disastrous outcomes. Consider how in the name of multiculturalism and difference, boards and faculties in American corporations and elite universities have become more diverse in what could easily constitute an example of Jaeggi’s ethical learning process, even while diluting any commitment to equality, racial or otherwise. In the name of a liberal antidiscrimination politics—in which minimal redistribution has occurred, let alone the abolition of institutions and structures, either domestic or international, as precondition to genuine equality and shared power—a more diverse, differentiated liberalism has emerged. That this is a successful learning process for liberals is without question, even if both racism and race reductionism still abide; but “old-fashioned” emancipation it is not, as many continue to immiserate in a racialized political order and economy increasingly defined by polarization of wealth, racial domination, and exploitation. But to account for these processes a different philosophical language, with different theoretical forms, may be needed, including a robust understanding of mediation like the one found in Adorno’s Critical Theory.
Other examples can be adduced. But the foregoing suffices to show how historical learning processes defy the dichotomy Jaeggi sets out to make sense of them. One of Brecht’s typically sharp formulations, one formulated apropos of learning processes in the shadows of catastrophes, bears on any account of learning that takes seriously not just the institutional, systemic, and structural blockages that defined the present, but also the lack of political literacy in situations in which depoliticizing ideologies like liberal democracy or neoliberalism hold sway: “Observers of a catastrophe wrongly expect that those affected will learn from it. So long as the masses are the object of politics, they will never be able to view what happens to them as an experiment, merely as a fate; they learn as little from the catastrophe as a guinea pig learns from biology.” 14 For a Critical Theory of forms of life to have the earthly political edge Jaeggi’s powerful formulations call for, critical reflection on (and mapping of) structures of power, their political forms and the kinds of political literacy and illiteracy promoted is unavoidable. At least on this score, Kluge and Brecht, not Dewey, are the most promising points of departure.