Practice of Cognitive Estrangement Kapusta, Stephanie Julia
Australasian philosophical review,
20/1/2/, Volume:
3, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Haslanger presents social meanings as cultural tools for social coordination. One of their main features is 'naturalness' of use in cognition and practice. Some cultural tools undergird unjust social ...practices, in which case they constitute an ideology. In my commentary, I wish to investigate the notion of cultural tool, and consider how the break-down of these tools is often a pre-requisite for conducting ideology critique. I take naturalness to be a quality possessed by social meanings that consists in a) their taken-for-granted character as unarticulated significance-granting entities; and b) their unquestioned character. When these features are lost to a member or a group of society, we have what I call their cognitive estrangement. Estrangement consists in two processes that 'de-naturalize' social meanings: first, the articulation of previously inarticulate social meanings, and, second, their emergence as something that is earnestly interrogated. Articulation and earnest interrogation are necessary steps in developing an ideology critique. I contend, further, that estrangement can itself be a social practice. In the latter case both orthodox and heterodox groups participate in estrangement, since-in as much as both interact with each other-both are exposed to the earnest interrogation of hitherto taken-for-granted social meanings. I consider some consequences of this perspective in situations where, due to marginalization, the discursive resources for articulation have themselves been unjustly limited.
Marcella Althaus-Reid offers a Marxian critique of the production of theology. This article offers analysis of three aspects of this critique: First, it describes how Althaus-Reid diagnoses the ...intertwined realities of capitalist economies, heterosexual patriarchy in societies, and hierarchical theologies. Second, it traces her use of ideology critique as she adapted Marx's critique of the Young Hegelians as part of her own critique of Liberation Theologians. Third, it explains her account of the production, marketing, and consumption of theology in relation to her uses of economic metaphors derived from Marx. By isolating the Marxian influence on Althaus-Reid, the article develops an account of her critique as an undressing of theological method that echoes Marx's critiques of political economy as an unveiling of hidden mechanisms that can be applied more broadly as well. Her critique is then related to how theology can be practiced in more self-aware ways.
The bioeconomy, a recent addition to the political project of ecological modernization, is largely premised on the widespread use of biomass. Biomass is presented by bioeconomy proponents as ...renewable and, therefore, sustainable. However, a large body of academic and non-academic literature questions this sustainability, citing the negative socio-ecological aspects of biomass use. Given this contradiction, we ask how the key institutions of the innovation system (government, science, and industry), construct and uphold the image of sustainability of biomass use in the bioeconomy. Through an analysis based on ideology critique, we look at the broad field of biomass policy in Germany, including official bioeconomy strategies and biomass potential calculations, expert portrayals of biomass use in the bioeconomy-themed Year of Science, and an iconic biomass-based commodity. We identify four central ideological strategies that uphold the image of sustainability and contribute to creating political consent for the political project of the German bioeconomy: seeking managerial solutions, relying on technological innovation, relegating solutions into the future, and obscuring the materiality of nature. We discuss how these strategies are upheld by the wider discourse and institutions of ecological modernization and argue that particular attention should be given to the biophysical materiality of living nature in this context. The materiality of nature represents both an obstacle to the ideological strategies identified, and a starting point for envisioning alternative society–nature relations.
This paper analyses how the discursive construction, valuation and subjective experience of human capital is evolving in parallel with crises of capital as a world-system. Ideology critique provides ...tools for analysing policy 'fictions' that aim to sustain investment in human capital through education. Foucauldian analytical tools enable analysis of how human capital has become a project of self-appreciation and cultivation of positive psychological traits. We argue that the work of Lauren Berlant provides an important complement to these approaches and enables us to analyse how crises of capital are being lived as the cruelling of optimism about social mobility through investment in oneself as human capital. The paper points to an educational politics and pedagogy for living through infrastructural breakdown in darkly uncertain historical times.
Andrew Feenberg is a pioneer in the development of the philosophy of technology. Before his retirement, he was the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication, ...Simon Fraser University, where he also directed the Applied Communication and Technology Laboratory (ACTL). He is the author or editor of thirteen books on Critical Theory, Western Marxism, and the philosophy of technology, including
Lukács, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory
(1981),
Critical Theory of Technology
(1991),
Technology and the Politics of Knowledge
(ed with Alastair Hannay) (1995),
Questioning Technology
(1999),
(Re)Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies
(ed with Norm Friesen) (2012) and
Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason
(2017).
This article expands upon the notion of ideology as a material phenomenon, usually in the form of institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices. It draws on Herbert Marcuse and related thinkers to ...conceptualize technological solutions to environmental problems as materialized ideological responses to social-ecological contradictions, which, by concealing these contradictions, reproduce existing social conditions. This article outlines a method of technology assessment as ideology critique that draws attention to: (1) the social determinants of the given technology; (2) whether the technology conceals or masks social-ecological contradictions; (3) whether the technology reproduces existing social conditions; and (4) whether the technology may be used for more rational or emancipatory ends in different social conditions. The examples of solar geoengineering and agricultural biotechnology are examined and it is found that, in each case, these technological solutions conceal social-ecological contradictions and support the current economic system and those benefiting from it, while precluding other alternatives.
The central ideas of early object relations theory are heavily inflected with Christian anti-Judaism, particularly as found in the work of Ian Dishart Suttie, now credited as the founder of this ...tradition. The critique of Freud launched by Suttie repudiates Freudian theory as a “disease” inextricably connected to Freud being a Jew. Suttie’s portrayal of Judaism both conforms to and replicates those theological commitments that privilege a triumphalist, supersessionist Christianity that breaks with Judaism, understood as devoid of love, ethics, and social justice interests. The paper argues that the elements organizing the central concepts that structure Suttie’s Christian prejudice constitute distorting ideological interests that circulate and shape important strands of contemporary object relations theory. Central to the authors discussed is a repudiation of Freud’s theory of unconscious drives on the basis of privileging love and intersubjectivity as the motivators of human psychological development made possible by Jesus and Christianity. The paper demonstrates that contemporary object relations theory remains heavily indebted to Suttie while remaining oblivious to his explicit anti-Judaism.
In this article, we argue that the concept of racial microaggression is a white supremacy construct that is an ideological and discursive anti‐Black practice. We discuss how microaggressions’ ...reduction of historical and hegemonic white supremacy to everyday relations that are merely performative, not integral to sustaining such larger forces, is an analytical shortcoming. We contend that without the adequate heft of historical white supremacy as a part of capitalist and colonial expansion, genocide, and Indigenous erasure, microaggression scholars will remain enthralled with the idea that individual behavior changes can eradicate anti‐Black violence.
Being critical does not come easy, not even within Critical Theory. In this article I respond to criticism of my book from 2019, Capitalism, Alienation and Critique, arguing that contemporary ...Critical Theory has something to learn from the founding fathers. Firstly, for Adorno immanent critique has metaphysical implications beyond Honneth’s critique of bourgeois society as inconsistent in terms of its professed ideals. Secondly, immanent critique is not the same as ideology critique, and when it comes to Horkheimer and Habermas, they conducted the latter rather than the former. Thirdly, even though today nature must be our concern, answers are to be found in politics and metaphysics rather than science. Finally, critique of neoliberalism should be conducted as critique of political economy, that is, ideology critique, rather than sociological descriptions of the empirical details of globalized capitalism. Denaturalizing economics is a condition for economic democracy.
PDF
