Maya Krishnan
Boston Review
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| Hardwick Weston, "Angelus Novus: Propadeutic Map for an Image History of the 00s" |
Resenha:
Progress and Regression
Rahel Jaeggi, traduzido do alemão por Robert Savage
Harvard University Press, US$ 35
O Angelus Novus de Paul Klee chegou recentemente a Berlim. Durante alguns meses neste verão, as estações de metrô foram cobertas com cartazes com imagens ampliadas do icônico anjo bege de Klee, anunciando sua estadia temporária no Museu Bode como se fosse a parada de uma turnê de uma estrela do rock. Os berlinenses compareceram em massa. Ao lado da bilheteria, os visitantes eram convidados a ficar diante de um par de asas de penas brancas e compartilhar uma selfie nas redes sociais com a hashtag do museu.
Com seu olhar vazio e careta de dentes irregulares, o anjo era um convidado de honra improvável em uma exposição que comemorava o fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Manuscritos do famoso ensaio de Walter Benjamin que faz referência à figura, “Teses sobre a Filosofia da História”, ladeavam a imagem de Klee. Os curadores sugeriram que a jornada do anjo poderia ser interpretada como um símbolo de retorno do exílio, mas Benjamin extrai uma lição diferente do olhar do anjo. Para o Angelus Novus, o passado não é uma “cadeia de eventos”, mas “uma única catástrofe que acumula destroços e os atira a seus pés”. Este anjo é o “anjo da história”, suas asas presas em uma tempestade que o impulsiona para o futuro — e “essa tempestade”, escreve Benjamin, “é o que chamamos de progresso”.
“O espanto atual de que as coisas que estamos vivenciando ‘ainda’ sejam possíveis... não é filosófico”, escreveu Walter Benjamin, numa frase que se tornou célebre.
Benjamin’s anti-progress manifesto is having its moment. On Election Day last year, the Theses’ tart remark on the rise of fascism circulated widely online: “The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical.” Who nowadays would want to go on the record defending a theory of progress? Rahel Jaeggi does just that in her latest book, published in German in 2023 and newly translated by Robert Savage.
The move might seem surprising for one of the leading exponents of contemporary critical theory, a philosophical tradition known for searing polemics against what Benjamin called “the infinite perfectibility of mankind.” But Jaeggi is not trying, à la Steven Pinker, to convince us that we really are changing for the better. Rather, her argument is that grasping the bleakness of the present moment requires a theory of progress and progressive social change. It is often said that our current age is not only bad but retrograde: thus talk of democratic backsliding, the rollback of reproductive rights, the backlash against wokeness or gender-affirming care. These terms do not merely suggest that matters are getting worse. They seem to invoke a theory of history, according to which societies are capable of something we might call “regress” and therefore, by extension, “progress.” The two concepts are interdependent: to be a pessimist, you have to be an optimist—or at least, enough of an optimist to think that you could even mean something by “progress.”
It’s more than Benjamin would have granted. But putting forward a theory of progress is not only a way of settling a theoretical dispute; it’s also a move with real stakes. As confidence in collective life wanes, progress can seem not merely unlikely but unthinkable. Talk of progressive social change can start to sound like a fairy-tale or bedtime story: fictions we tell ourselves to feel better. Against this gloomy picture, Jaeggi seeks to show us what it would even mean for progress to be something we could fight for. In order to have a chance of recovering the reality of optimism, we must first recover its possibility.
In other words, progressive social changes are precisely those that open up new opportunities for problem-solving, while regressive social changes generate “blockages of experience” and shut down possibilities for problem-solving. This account takes its cues from a different part of Hegel’s oeuvre: his picture in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the human mind as engaged in a kind of self-education whose standards of success are immanent to that very process, not standing outside it as some transcendent yardstick.
To press the point, imagine the following scenario. We can envision a Tradwife Society coming about gradually. At first, activists push for policies that provide financial incentives for women to stay at home and have more children or advocate for public school curricula that glorify devoted wives and mothers. (The scenario seems less like the stuff of a thought experiment when you consider what’s happening in Oklahoma’s public schools.) If more people then come to share tradwives’ conceptions of what counts as a “problem,” they become more likely to support further policies that incentivize adopting their solutions, in a self-reinforcing chain of progress that could eventually lead to a Tradwife Society. Is this brainwashing? It’s hard to see how self-described progressives could be entitled to that complaint: their own preferred social agendas require that fringe views become mainstream through precisely this kind of process. Public school curricula should teach that the permissibility of slavery is not up for debate; adolescents should learn that “no means no”; social services should remove children from parents who beat them. Why do progressives get to call this the result of “learning” but charge their tradwife counterparts with mere manipulation? When terms like “learning” and “experiences” and “problem-solving” are defined without reference to any substantive notion of the social or human good, it seems all too easy to appropriate them to describe almost any social change.
Maybe this isn’t a problem for Jaeggi. Perhaps the processual theorist should say that if a society collectively moves toward the modes of problem-solving favored by Williams in the manner sketched above, then achieving the Tradwife Society will in fact have been progressive. And yet, Jaeggi’s book is scattered with examples that suggest that she thinks her definition of “progressive change” winds up coinciding, more or less, with things mainstream leftists like—Black Lives Matter, for instance, or the legalization of gay marriage. The repeated invocation of these familiar points of reference gives the impression that mainstream leftism amounts to an “increase in complexity,” hence “enrichment,” whereas politically opposed changes entail a “loss of complexity,” such that “conflicting experiences” are “systemically blocked.” Needless to say, conservatives are not going to agree.
In fact, their disagreement arguably runs deeper than simply disliking Black Lives Matter. Who is to say that having more opportunities for problem-solving is always better? Jaeggi suggests she has abandoned all controversial substantive judgment by speaking in processual terms. But there’s an ineliminable bit of such judgment, after all, in calling “more” progressive and “less” regressive. A conservative might very well protest it’s the other way around: human complexity and possibility is best realized through a process that leads to deepening commitments within a narrow set of choices. Liberal societies, the old argument goes, are broad but shallow: everyone gets to choose their partner, choose their religion, choose their gender but is left cycling like a good consumer through options that increase in number while decreasing in meaning or richness. The progressive, the conservative might say, is equally guilty of “blocking” experience. What about the experience of belonging to a society where Scripture is continually quoted, where the cross is on display, where neighbors meet at Sunday services? Why could this not lead to an ever-deepening, ever-changing appreciation for the glory of God’s creation? This particular manner of learning and gaining experience is not available in a secular society that scrubs religious symbols from communal and public life.
Perhaps this conservative argument is a bogus apologia for religious parochialism. But I’m not sure how to make that case without appealing to a substantive conception of the social good—and being willing to fight the conservative head-on about whose conception is correct. To be clear, my concern isn’t that Jaeggi fails to provide sufficient resources to validate my own preferred convictions. It’s that the processual theory makes a seductive but misleading promise: that we can anoint certain changes “progressive” and others “regressive” without demanding that others agree with us about the good life. And yet, to advocate for a piece of legislation, go to a protest, or struggle to bring about any change whatsoever, is to act under some conception of what is good. All involve taking “the risk of the universal,” a phrase used by the late social philosopher Gillian Rose to describe the danger inherent to political action and political theory alike.
And yet, as the Frankfurt School’s latest texts are imported into the Anglophone philosophical sphere, something gets left behind. It has become common to engage with these thinkers as if their proposals concern purely in-principle questions: What are the conditions for successful mutual recognition? What matters more, recognition or redistribution? But the critical theorist is not a normative ethicist who got lost on the way to the philosophy department. Jaeggi notes at the outset of Progress and Regression that she intends to revive “what was once a fundamental concern” of the tradition: “investigating the causes, driving forces, character, and underlying laws of the social transformation process.” One motivation for her processual account—her refusal to just come out and say what makes societies better or worse—stems from her view that social theory should study our ideas as empirical aspects of social change.
Consider an example. Suppose you think that good societies afford people autonomy, including sexual autonomy. Then you might hold that the state-ordained marriages of Plato’s Republic are a mark against it and that the rollback of abortion rights in the United States is a regressive change. What’s wrong with this method of social analysis? Jaeggi might observe that the very ideal of “sexual autonomy” only becomes thinkable due to material changes such as the development of birth control and the postwar entry of women into the workforce. She thereby proposes to “wrest back a materialist moment in the concept of progress.” She wants us to understand how our moral and political norms are “historically constituted,” not “timelessly valid.” Trying to abstract substantive criteria such as “sexual autonomy” or “human dignity” from changing social reality, and then turning them back around to judge very those same processes, is like trying to judge the nature of a river while being swept along by it—except it’s even more complicated, since your standards of judgment are themselves a product of the currents.
At least, that’s the idea. And while reading Progress and Regression, I feel that Jaeggi must be right. Her approach really does bring something important into view about the changing character of our forms of life and the embeddedness of our moral judgments within them—something generally missing from the substantive theorist’s account and even the political liberal’s. Reading early or late Rawls, you learn virtually nothing about social change. An exclusive concern with either with the principles of justice or speculative arguments about the stability of liberal societies offers relatively little for the empirical-minded. Perhaps a theory that refuses to blush and simply makes the case for it preferred account of the social good does not solve a real social-theoretic problem so much as put us at risk of losing our grip on the difficulty of being both participant and theorist of a historically contingent social world. This is the difficulty of critical theory, and it is the difficulty of Jaeggi’s book, which is worth reading whether one agrees with its conclusions or not.
But when I put the book down and step away from Jaeggi’s compelling prose, my boring old doubt flickers back into focus. Does her turtles-all-the-way-down historicism risk collapsing into all too familiar relativism? Jaeggi adamantly denies as much. Rather, “norms are valid because and insofar as they are the result of a particular development.” But when criteria for judging norms are “slimmed down and formalized” in the way that Jaeggi’s processual account requires, I don’t see how we can justify any concrete judgment that a social change is progressive or regressive except by surreptitiously interpreting processual terms such as “learning” according to our preferred substantive criteria. It is hard to have a theory that takes into account the vertiginous historical contingency of our conceptions of the social good—I have my ideals, the Spartans had theirs too—while still licensing universal judgments such as “slavery is wrong” or “rape should be outlawed.”
An alternative might be to say that we do not get to choose between substantive theories that run the risk of a violent suppression of the Other and processual theories that avoid this danger. We only get to choose between theories that own up to their own liabilities and those that provide a false sense of moral or political security. Perhaps political action requires being willing to act on what Rose called “the risk of the universal interest,” while accepting that this is an exercise of power by fallible agents who might wind up being wrong.
Progress and Regression
Rahel Jaeggi, traduzido do alemão por Robert Savage
Harvard University Press, US$ 35
O Angelus Novus de Paul Klee chegou recentemente a Berlim. Durante alguns meses neste verão, as estações de metrô foram cobertas com cartazes com imagens ampliadas do icônico anjo bege de Klee, anunciando sua estadia temporária no Museu Bode como se fosse a parada de uma turnê de uma estrela do rock. Os berlinenses compareceram em massa. Ao lado da bilheteria, os visitantes eram convidados a ficar diante de um par de asas de penas brancas e compartilhar uma selfie nas redes sociais com a hashtag do museu.
Com seu olhar vazio e careta de dentes irregulares, o anjo era um convidado de honra improvável em uma exposição que comemorava o fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Manuscritos do famoso ensaio de Walter Benjamin que faz referência à figura, “Teses sobre a Filosofia da História”, ladeavam a imagem de Klee. Os curadores sugeriram que a jornada do anjo poderia ser interpretada como um símbolo de retorno do exílio, mas Benjamin extrai uma lição diferente do olhar do anjo. Para o Angelus Novus, o passado não é uma “cadeia de eventos”, mas “uma única catástrofe que acumula destroços e os atira a seus pés”. Este anjo é o “anjo da história”, suas asas presas em uma tempestade que o impulsiona para o futuro — e “essa tempestade”, escreve Benjamin, “é o que chamamos de progresso”.
“O espanto atual de que as coisas que estamos vivenciando ‘ainda’ sejam possíveis... não é filosófico”, escreveu Walter Benjamin, numa frase que se tornou célebre.
Benjamin’s anti-progress manifesto is having its moment. On Election Day last year, the Theses’ tart remark on the rise of fascism circulated widely online: “The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical.” Who nowadays would want to go on the record defending a theory of progress? Rahel Jaeggi does just that in her latest book, published in German in 2023 and newly translated by Robert Savage.
The move might seem surprising for one of the leading exponents of contemporary critical theory, a philosophical tradition known for searing polemics against what Benjamin called “the infinite perfectibility of mankind.” But Jaeggi is not trying, à la Steven Pinker, to convince us that we really are changing for the better. Rather, her argument is that grasping the bleakness of the present moment requires a theory of progress and progressive social change. It is often said that our current age is not only bad but retrograde: thus talk of democratic backsliding, the rollback of reproductive rights, the backlash against wokeness or gender-affirming care. These terms do not merely suggest that matters are getting worse. They seem to invoke a theory of history, according to which societies are capable of something we might call “regress” and therefore, by extension, “progress.” The two concepts are interdependent: to be a pessimist, you have to be an optimist—or at least, enough of an optimist to think that you could even mean something by “progress.”
It’s more than Benjamin would have granted. But putting forward a theory of progress is not only a way of settling a theoretical dispute; it’s also a move with real stakes. As confidence in collective life wanes, progress can seem not merely unlikely but unthinkable. Talk of progressive social change can start to sound like a fairy-tale or bedtime story: fictions we tell ourselves to feel better. Against this gloomy picture, Jaeggi seeks to show us what it would even mean for progress to be something we could fight for. In order to have a chance of recovering the reality of optimism, we must first recover its possibility.
Jaeggi’s main examples of progressive change involve moral improvement: the abolition of slavery, the outlawing rape within marriage, growing social consensus against corporal punishment of children. And all these developments took place alongside broader social and economic changes. As women entered the workforce after World War II and became less financially dependent on men, it was possible for marriage to be understood as something other than a man’s ownership of a woman, which made it possible to see “marital rape” as rape. So some social changes make moral improvements possible.
But to refer to such complexes of moral and social change as progress is to say something more. Precisely what, though? Perhaps that there is a goal toward which collective life is heading, or a culminating point where society is at last fully realized in accordance with reason or moral values. But this kind of teleological account of history has a dismal history of its own. Overconfidence in this vision informs some of Hegel’s more regrettable moments in the Philosophy of Right. There, Hegel separates world history into four successive “realms,” starting with the “Oriental realm,” in which nature is “either directly divine or else God’s ornament” and collective life consists in “feebleness and exhaustion.” World history then progresses through the Greek realm and the Roman realm before culminating, rather ominously to contemporary readers, in the “Germanic realm.” We could try to bring the teleological theory up to date by finding something other than the “principle of the north, the principle of the Germanic peoples” by which to measure the direction and fruition of societies. And yet, Hegel’s absurdities seemed plausible enough to him. It is tempting to elevate one’s parochial preferences into a universal standard.
Teleological theories are not merely distasteful. From Jaeggi’s point of view, they fail to capture what progressive social change is really about. Building this case leads her to a creative rethinking of the fundamental terms of social theory. Rather than appeal to “groups,” “interests,” or “goals,” Jaeggi takes as her basic unit of analysis the “form of life”—an assemblage of social practices that solves problems. The bourgeois family form solves the problem of reproducing labor within a capitalist society, for example; a medieval monk’s life of prayer functions to shore up confidence that the hierarchies of a feudal society are God-given. Jaeggi sums up in a slogan: “Societies do not have goals, they solve problems.”
And for her, as for pragmatists like John Dewey, problem-solving is not a one-and-done matter but an ongoing process. As people live longer as the result of medical developments, the bourgeois family becomes the partial solution to the problem of how, in the absence of robust state support, to care for people who now regularly live past eighty or ninety years old. But as families struggle simultaneously to raise children and care for elders, pressure for new solutions arises: daycares or nannies, nursing homes and in-home health aides. This, in turn, creates new problems for the bourgeois family: how does it conceive of its boundaries when its functions are increasingly performed by “external” members and institutions? As Jaeggi puts it, “social formations always present themselves as dynamic entities that are plagued by all manner of problems, lurch from one crisis to the next, and are pushed beyond themselves.” Societies change through a ceaseless dialectic of problems whose solutions give rise to new problems, which in turn require new solutions.
Societies can also change in an even more fundamental way, Jaeggi argues: through shifts in the way problems are solved. This is still a matter of problem solving, but taken to a higher level. Such shifts arise in response to “second-order problems,” or problems with how we solve problems. The institution of the welfare state, as well as its subsequent abolition, are changes of this sort. Thus the neoliberal era inaugurated by Reagan and Thatcher is best understood not as a solution to a problem but rather as a transformation in the basic paradigm American and British societies used to solve problems such as how to care for the sick and elderly (or not care for them, as the case may be). This kind of change—a change the very manner of problem-solving—is what Jaeggi means by social change.
But to refer to such complexes of moral and social change as progress is to say something more. Precisely what, though? Perhaps that there is a goal toward which collective life is heading, or a culminating point where society is at last fully realized in accordance with reason or moral values. But this kind of teleological account of history has a dismal history of its own. Overconfidence in this vision informs some of Hegel’s more regrettable moments in the Philosophy of Right. There, Hegel separates world history into four successive “realms,” starting with the “Oriental realm,” in which nature is “either directly divine or else God’s ornament” and collective life consists in “feebleness and exhaustion.” World history then progresses through the Greek realm and the Roman realm before culminating, rather ominously to contemporary readers, in the “Germanic realm.” We could try to bring the teleological theory up to date by finding something other than the “principle of the north, the principle of the Germanic peoples” by which to measure the direction and fruition of societies. And yet, Hegel’s absurdities seemed plausible enough to him. It is tempting to elevate one’s parochial preferences into a universal standard.
Teleological theories are not merely distasteful. From Jaeggi’s point of view, they fail to capture what progressive social change is really about. Building this case leads her to a creative rethinking of the fundamental terms of social theory. Rather than appeal to “groups,” “interests,” or “goals,” Jaeggi takes as her basic unit of analysis the “form of life”—an assemblage of social practices that solves problems. The bourgeois family form solves the problem of reproducing labor within a capitalist society, for example; a medieval monk’s life of prayer functions to shore up confidence that the hierarchies of a feudal society are God-given. Jaeggi sums up in a slogan: “Societies do not have goals, they solve problems.”
And for her, as for pragmatists like John Dewey, problem-solving is not a one-and-done matter but an ongoing process. As people live longer as the result of medical developments, the bourgeois family becomes the partial solution to the problem of how, in the absence of robust state support, to care for people who now regularly live past eighty or ninety years old. But as families struggle simultaneously to raise children and care for elders, pressure for new solutions arises: daycares or nannies, nursing homes and in-home health aides. This, in turn, creates new problems for the bourgeois family: how does it conceive of its boundaries when its functions are increasingly performed by “external” members and institutions? As Jaeggi puts it, “social formations always present themselves as dynamic entities that are plagued by all manner of problems, lurch from one crisis to the next, and are pushed beyond themselves.” Societies change through a ceaseless dialectic of problems whose solutions give rise to new problems, which in turn require new solutions.
Societies can also change in an even more fundamental way, Jaeggi argues: through shifts in the way problems are solved. This is still a matter of problem solving, but taken to a higher level. Such shifts arise in response to “second-order problems,” or problems with how we solve problems. The institution of the welfare state, as well as its subsequent abolition, are changes of this sort. Thus the neoliberal era inaugurated by Reagan and Thatcher is best understood not as a solution to a problem but rather as a transformation in the basic paradigm American and British societies used to solve problems such as how to care for the sick and elderly (or not care for them, as the case may be). This kind of change—a change the very manner of problem-solving—is what Jaeggi means by social change.
As absurdidades de Hegel lhe pareceram bastante plausíveis. É tentador elevar as preferências paroquiais de cada um a um padrão universal.
When are these kinds of changes progressive? To avoid the trap of false universalism, Jaeggi avoids answering in terms of “change for the better,” which she calls a “substantive” account. The substantive theorist holds that there is some particular social good or common goal—happiness, say, or equality—such that societies progress when they move toward this goal. But substantive theories also seem to run the risk of ethnocentrism, parochialism, and dogmatism, inevitably cashing out the goal in terms of a preference for a particular way of life. So Jaeggi offers instead what she calls a “processual” account, appealing only to characteristics of problem-solving itself: progress, she says, is the result of a “self-enriching experiential process.”
In other words, progressive social changes are precisely those that open up new opportunities for problem-solving, while regressive social changes generate “blockages of experience” and shut down possibilities for problem-solving. This account takes its cues from a different part of Hegel’s oeuvre: his picture in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the human mind as engaged in a kind of self-education whose standards of success are immanent to that very process, not standing outside it as some transcendent yardstick.
It is an ambitious theoretical maneuver: use a second-order theory of change in order to gain a theory of progress without paying the price of normative hubris. But how far does the second-order theory really get us? In particular, can this attempted rescue of “progress” really deliver us from substantive moral argument?
To see how the theory fares, consider tradwives—the influencers on TikTok who promote a supposedly “traditional” lifestyle inspired by an imagined version of the 1950s housewife. In one video that has come across my feed, Estee Williams, donning a pearl necklace and a black sweetheart-neck dress, enjoins: “Look like a lady, act like a lady, and you will be treated like a lady.” Williams says she is “finally liberated” to quit her job so that she can clean her house and cook food from scratch for her husband. It’s “a biblical thing,” she explains.
At present, tradwifery is more a social media trend than anything else. But suppose that women started joining the so-called “tradwife movement” en masse, giving rise to pronounced social change as women collectively embrace living by Williams’s fundamental question: “What can I do to make my man happy?” Women who do so might very well describe themselves as engaged in a “self-enriching” process of learning—contending that modern feminism, with its sex-positivity and lean-in girlbossery, is to blame for “blockages of experience.” Having set feminism aside, they are freed to learn that joy comes from cooking and child-rearing. The problem is how to make decisions within an increasingly disorienting modern society; the solution is to submit to your husband. The problem is that working leads to burnout; the solution is to return to the kitchen.
Would a Tradwife Society count as a regressive social change by Jaeggi’s lights? Leftist theories that appeal to substantive conceptions of the social good can easily make the case. For the socialist or even neo-republican liberal who holds that good societies are ones whose members are neither dominated nor exploited, a move toward a social consensus that marriage consists in “Biblical submission” is unlikely to count as progressive. But Jaeggi has sworn off appealing to any “substantive” standards. She does warn against “regressive solutions” that are merely “functional, at least at first glance,” noting that “where it can be described as successful, problem-solving involves more than just fine-tuning practices that have become meaningless or broken down and reintegrating them into a more or less well-oiled ensemble of practices.” But how can purely “processual” criteria tell us what is broken and what is whole? We are in danger here of smuggling in the substantive. The tradwife has her opinion on what is broken in modern society; the third wave feminist and the polyamorist and the contemporary abolitionist all have quite another. And who gets to decide what counts as “meaningless”?
Perhaps the processual theorist can explain why a shift toward a Tradwife Society is regressive by holding that it could only come about via a process of manipulation, rather than one of learning. Sure, tradwifery might appeal to a few women who find themselves at odds with modernity, one might think, but it could only become a stable collective norm through something like brainwashing or false consciousness.
It’s a tempting thought, but it doesn’t give “trad” culture enough credit. Loneliness, instability, and uncertainty are genuine problems in late-stage neoliberal societies, and it’s surely possible for women to choose “trad” solutions to these problems in just as unobjectionable a sense as liberal feminists currently choose other solutions. It’s certainly true that the decisions we make are not made in a vacuum. Our values, beliefs, and actions are deeply shaped by the communities we live in, the media we encounter, the economic context, and much beyond. But if “self-enriching” learning can only be said to happen in the absence of any perceived social influence, it’s hard to see how any social change—whether in a traditional, liberal, or socialist direction—could pass Jaeggi’s test.
To see how the theory fares, consider tradwives—the influencers on TikTok who promote a supposedly “traditional” lifestyle inspired by an imagined version of the 1950s housewife. In one video that has come across my feed, Estee Williams, donning a pearl necklace and a black sweetheart-neck dress, enjoins: “Look like a lady, act like a lady, and you will be treated like a lady.” Williams says she is “finally liberated” to quit her job so that she can clean her house and cook food from scratch for her husband. It’s “a biblical thing,” she explains.
At present, tradwifery is more a social media trend than anything else. But suppose that women started joining the so-called “tradwife movement” en masse, giving rise to pronounced social change as women collectively embrace living by Williams’s fundamental question: “What can I do to make my man happy?” Women who do so might very well describe themselves as engaged in a “self-enriching” process of learning—contending that modern feminism, with its sex-positivity and lean-in girlbossery, is to blame for “blockages of experience.” Having set feminism aside, they are freed to learn that joy comes from cooking and child-rearing. The problem is how to make decisions within an increasingly disorienting modern society; the solution is to submit to your husband. The problem is that working leads to burnout; the solution is to return to the kitchen.
Would a Tradwife Society count as a regressive social change by Jaeggi’s lights? Leftist theories that appeal to substantive conceptions of the social good can easily make the case. For the socialist or even neo-republican liberal who holds that good societies are ones whose members are neither dominated nor exploited, a move toward a social consensus that marriage consists in “Biblical submission” is unlikely to count as progressive. But Jaeggi has sworn off appealing to any “substantive” standards. She does warn against “regressive solutions” that are merely “functional, at least at first glance,” noting that “where it can be described as successful, problem-solving involves more than just fine-tuning practices that have become meaningless or broken down and reintegrating them into a more or less well-oiled ensemble of practices.” But how can purely “processual” criteria tell us what is broken and what is whole? We are in danger here of smuggling in the substantive. The tradwife has her opinion on what is broken in modern society; the third wave feminist and the polyamorist and the contemporary abolitionist all have quite another. And who gets to decide what counts as “meaningless”?
Perhaps the processual theorist can explain why a shift toward a Tradwife Society is regressive by holding that it could only come about via a process of manipulation, rather than one of learning. Sure, tradwifery might appeal to a few women who find themselves at odds with modernity, one might think, but it could only become a stable collective norm through something like brainwashing or false consciousness.
It’s a tempting thought, but it doesn’t give “trad” culture enough credit. Loneliness, instability, and uncertainty are genuine problems in late-stage neoliberal societies, and it’s surely possible for women to choose “trad” solutions to these problems in just as unobjectionable a sense as liberal feminists currently choose other solutions. It’s certainly true that the decisions we make are not made in a vacuum. Our values, beliefs, and actions are deeply shaped by the communities we live in, the media we encounter, the economic context, and much beyond. But if “self-enriching” learning can only be said to happen in the absence of any perceived social influence, it’s hard to see how any social change—whether in a traditional, liberal, or socialist direction—could pass Jaeggi’s test.
O teórico crítico não é um eticista normativo que se perdeu no caminho para o departamento de filosofia.
To press the point, imagine the following scenario. We can envision a Tradwife Society coming about gradually. At first, activists push for policies that provide financial incentives for women to stay at home and have more children or advocate for public school curricula that glorify devoted wives and mothers. (The scenario seems less like the stuff of a thought experiment when you consider what’s happening in Oklahoma’s public schools.) If more people then come to share tradwives’ conceptions of what counts as a “problem,” they become more likely to support further policies that incentivize adopting their solutions, in a self-reinforcing chain of progress that could eventually lead to a Tradwife Society. Is this brainwashing? It’s hard to see how self-described progressives could be entitled to that complaint: their own preferred social agendas require that fringe views become mainstream through precisely this kind of process. Public school curricula should teach that the permissibility of slavery is not up for debate; adolescents should learn that “no means no”; social services should remove children from parents who beat them. Why do progressives get to call this the result of “learning” but charge their tradwife counterparts with mere manipulation? When terms like “learning” and “experiences” and “problem-solving” are defined without reference to any substantive notion of the social or human good, it seems all too easy to appropriate them to describe almost any social change.
Maybe this isn’t a problem for Jaeggi. Perhaps the processual theorist should say that if a society collectively moves toward the modes of problem-solving favored by Williams in the manner sketched above, then achieving the Tradwife Society will in fact have been progressive. And yet, Jaeggi’s book is scattered with examples that suggest that she thinks her definition of “progressive change” winds up coinciding, more or less, with things mainstream leftists like—Black Lives Matter, for instance, or the legalization of gay marriage. The repeated invocation of these familiar points of reference gives the impression that mainstream leftism amounts to an “increase in complexity,” hence “enrichment,” whereas politically opposed changes entail a “loss of complexity,” such that “conflicting experiences” are “systemically blocked.” Needless to say, conservatives are not going to agree.
In fact, their disagreement arguably runs deeper than simply disliking Black Lives Matter. Who is to say that having more opportunities for problem-solving is always better? Jaeggi suggests she has abandoned all controversial substantive judgment by speaking in processual terms. But there’s an ineliminable bit of such judgment, after all, in calling “more” progressive and “less” regressive. A conservative might very well protest it’s the other way around: human complexity and possibility is best realized through a process that leads to deepening commitments within a narrow set of choices. Liberal societies, the old argument goes, are broad but shallow: everyone gets to choose their partner, choose their religion, choose their gender but is left cycling like a good consumer through options that increase in number while decreasing in meaning or richness. The progressive, the conservative might say, is equally guilty of “blocking” experience. What about the experience of belonging to a society where Scripture is continually quoted, where the cross is on display, where neighbors meet at Sunday services? Why could this not lead to an ever-deepening, ever-changing appreciation for the glory of God’s creation? This particular manner of learning and gaining experience is not available in a secular society that scrubs religious symbols from communal and public life.
Perhaps this conservative argument is a bogus apologia for religious parochialism. But I’m not sure how to make that case without appealing to a substantive conception of the social good—and being willing to fight the conservative head-on about whose conception is correct. To be clear, my concern isn’t that Jaeggi fails to provide sufficient resources to validate my own preferred convictions. It’s that the processual theory makes a seductive but misleading promise: that we can anoint certain changes “progressive” and others “regressive” without demanding that others agree with us about the good life. And yet, to advocate for a piece of legislation, go to a protest, or struggle to bring about any change whatsoever, is to act under some conception of what is good. All involve taking “the risk of the universal,” a phrase used by the late social philosopher Gillian Rose to describe the danger inherent to political action and political theory alike.
Aversion to substantive theories of the social good is more than a multicultural or postcolonial phobia. John Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993) begins with the observation that people have vastly different conceptions of the good life. The Protestant’s path to salvation differs from the Catholic’s; the investment banker’s values are not those of a concert pianist. On Rawls’s account, the fact of “reasonable pluralism” means that principles of justice should not be partial toward any particular view of what matters in a human life. Rather, the principles of justice are those that can be affirmed from within “an overlapping consensus of reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines.” Rawls’s political liberalism, like Jaeggi’s processualism, seeks to explain the possibility of judging social configurations, while avoiding dogmatism.
Critics of Rawls have questioned whether his theory can deliver on its promises. On Rawls’s view, the principles of justice need only prove acceptable by the lights of ways of life deemed “reasonable.” So if my way of life requires that we join together in common prayer, my demand would likely disqualify me from being one of the reasonable citizens before whom the politically liberal society need justify itself. The word “reasonable” works overtime in Political Liberalism; its repeated invocation takes on an almost incantatory force as the book progresses. Many have asked whether appealing to the “reasonable” already smuggles in partiality toward some ways of life, just as I have worried that Jaeggi’s preferred interpretation of “learning” smuggles in a substantive leftism. One might wonder, then, whether the face-off between processual and substantive theories of progress is simply a rehash of issues that have already been debated extensively in Anglophone philosophy between Rawlsians and their critics.
Progress and Regression is certainly not a continuation of Rawls by other means, but recognizing what makes Jaeggi’s book different requires situating it within the distinctive legacy of the Frankfurt School, commonly periodized into four generations: its origins with Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Benjamin; a second generation defined by Jürgen Habermas; a third generation marked by Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib, and Nancy Fraser; and now a fourth generation, with Jaeggi perhaps the most prominent figure. Her monograph Alienation (2005) first established her reputation among academics and antagonized youth alike, with its evocative analysis of how we come to feel like the objects rather than subjects of our own lives. For some years now the book has been a staple in certain Anglophone philosophy departments, where the distinctive scribbled black-and-white cover of its 2014 English translation, left on a desk or tucked in a bookbag, has functioned as something like a signifier of taste.
Critics of Rawls have questioned whether his theory can deliver on its promises. On Rawls’s view, the principles of justice need only prove acceptable by the lights of ways of life deemed “reasonable.” So if my way of life requires that we join together in common prayer, my demand would likely disqualify me from being one of the reasonable citizens before whom the politically liberal society need justify itself. The word “reasonable” works overtime in Political Liberalism; its repeated invocation takes on an almost incantatory force as the book progresses. Many have asked whether appealing to the “reasonable” already smuggles in partiality toward some ways of life, just as I have worried that Jaeggi’s preferred interpretation of “learning” smuggles in a substantive leftism. One might wonder, then, whether the face-off between processual and substantive theories of progress is simply a rehash of issues that have already been debated extensively in Anglophone philosophy between Rawlsians and their critics.
Progress and Regression is certainly not a continuation of Rawls by other means, but recognizing what makes Jaeggi’s book different requires situating it within the distinctive legacy of the Frankfurt School, commonly periodized into four generations: its origins with Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Benjamin; a second generation defined by Jürgen Habermas; a third generation marked by Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib, and Nancy Fraser; and now a fourth generation, with Jaeggi perhaps the most prominent figure. Her monograph Alienation (2005) first established her reputation among academics and antagonized youth alike, with its evocative analysis of how we come to feel like the objects rather than subjects of our own lives. For some years now the book has been a staple in certain Anglophone philosophy departments, where the distinctive scribbled black-and-white cover of its 2014 English translation, left on a desk or tucked in a bookbag, has functioned as something like a signifier of taste.
Defender uma legislação, participar de um protesto ou lutar por qualquer mudança é agir sob alguma concepção do que é bom. Tudo isso envolve assumir “o risco do universal”.
And yet, as the Frankfurt School’s latest texts are imported into the Anglophone philosophical sphere, something gets left behind. It has become common to engage with these thinkers as if their proposals concern purely in-principle questions: What are the conditions for successful mutual recognition? What matters more, recognition or redistribution? But the critical theorist is not a normative ethicist who got lost on the way to the philosophy department. Jaeggi notes at the outset of Progress and Regression that she intends to revive “what was once a fundamental concern” of the tradition: “investigating the causes, driving forces, character, and underlying laws of the social transformation process.” One motivation for her processual account—her refusal to just come out and say what makes societies better or worse—stems from her view that social theory should study our ideas as empirical aspects of social change.
Consider an example. Suppose you think that good societies afford people autonomy, including sexual autonomy. Then you might hold that the state-ordained marriages of Plato’s Republic are a mark against it and that the rollback of abortion rights in the United States is a regressive change. What’s wrong with this method of social analysis? Jaeggi might observe that the very ideal of “sexual autonomy” only becomes thinkable due to material changes such as the development of birth control and the postwar entry of women into the workforce. She thereby proposes to “wrest back a materialist moment in the concept of progress.” She wants us to understand how our moral and political norms are “historically constituted,” not “timelessly valid.” Trying to abstract substantive criteria such as “sexual autonomy” or “human dignity” from changing social reality, and then turning them back around to judge very those same processes, is like trying to judge the nature of a river while being swept along by it—except it’s even more complicated, since your standards of judgment are themselves a product of the currents.
At least, that’s the idea. And while reading Progress and Regression, I feel that Jaeggi must be right. Her approach really does bring something important into view about the changing character of our forms of life and the embeddedness of our moral judgments within them—something generally missing from the substantive theorist’s account and even the political liberal’s. Reading early or late Rawls, you learn virtually nothing about social change. An exclusive concern with either with the principles of justice or speculative arguments about the stability of liberal societies offers relatively little for the empirical-minded. Perhaps a theory that refuses to blush and simply makes the case for it preferred account of the social good does not solve a real social-theoretic problem so much as put us at risk of losing our grip on the difficulty of being both participant and theorist of a historically contingent social world. This is the difficulty of critical theory, and it is the difficulty of Jaeggi’s book, which is worth reading whether one agrees with its conclusions or not.
But when I put the book down and step away from Jaeggi’s compelling prose, my boring old doubt flickers back into focus. Does her turtles-all-the-way-down historicism risk collapsing into all too familiar relativism? Jaeggi adamantly denies as much. Rather, “norms are valid because and insofar as they are the result of a particular development.” But when criteria for judging norms are “slimmed down and formalized” in the way that Jaeggi’s processual account requires, I don’t see how we can justify any concrete judgment that a social change is progressive or regressive except by surreptitiously interpreting processual terms such as “learning” according to our preferred substantive criteria. It is hard to have a theory that takes into account the vertiginous historical contingency of our conceptions of the social good—I have my ideals, the Spartans had theirs too—while still licensing universal judgments such as “slavery is wrong” or “rape should be outlawed.”
An alternative might be to say that we do not get to choose between substantive theories that run the risk of a violent suppression of the Other and processual theories that avoid this danger. We only get to choose between theories that own up to their own liabilities and those that provide a false sense of moral or political security. Perhaps political action requires being willing to act on what Rose called “the risk of the universal interest,” while accepting that this is an exercise of power by fallible agents who might wind up being wrong.
Maya Krishnan é professora assistente de Filosofia na Universidade de Chicago. Seus textos também foram publicados em The Point e The Oxonian Review.
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