The Constructive Turn: Christopher Norris and the New Origins of Historical Theory

Renate Holub

Massachusettes Institute of Technology
<rholub@garnet.berkeley.edu>

 

Norris, Christopher. Spinoza & the Origins of Modern Critical Theory. Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1991.

 

For those readers familiar with Christopher Norris’s intellectual trajectory, his most recent publication, dealing with Baruch Spinoza, a major seventeenth century exegete of Descartes and a contemporary of Locke and Puffendorf, of Newton and Leibniz, might come as a–perhaps unsettling– surprise. After all, most if not all of Norris’s critical work in the eighties made it its province to discuss what is known as “deconstruction,” a present-day form of critique intent upon discrediting, according to many of its critics, questions concerning origins, historical contingencies, ideological implications and other such forms of outdated inquiry. Yet even a cursory reading of the present book should quickly restore peace to temporarily unsettled minds. For one, Norris has no intention of leaving deconstruction behind, of betraying “theory,” to use reductionist speak, in favor of “history.” And for another, Norris is not in the least inclined to subvert his major research paradigm, which is, roughly speaking, the relation of literary theory to philosophy. Nonetheless, there are two aspects of Norris’s Spinoza which I find novel in his critical practice. One is his shift in emphasis from literary interests, or his interest in questions of reading, to the terrain of the epistemological, the ethical, and the ontological, a shift in emphasis from the literary to the philosophical that is. This shift is perhaps best reflected in the choice of a philosopher, such as Spinoza, and in the very title of the book.

 

The other related aspect concerns Norris’s explicit insistence on the political nature of his critical project. Indeed, he aligns himself, throughout the volume, not with the “political” %tout court%, but with a quite specific model of politicality, namely with the unfinished project of Enlightenment thought. What is then remarkable about this shift is that Norris appears %nolens volens% as a conscious historical agent, so dear to the marxist and idealist tradition, one who intentionally intervenes in or makes history (history of critical theory) as he is writing about it. Theory’s task is here to affect history. This gesture strikes me, if I may say so, as thoroughly non-postmodern. Simultaneously, the tracing of Spinoza’s role in the formative pre-history of critical theory, and the historical reconstruction of Spinoza’s arguments, amounts to nothing less than Norris’s equally strikingly non-postmodern turn towards explicitly constructionist practices. Given that recently Norris had directed his attention, in his What’s Wrong With Postmodernism?, to what is wrong with postmodernism, it might not be difficult for some readers to read his even more recent Spinoza as a sequel which now essays that which is right with modernity. His reiteration of the necessity of interventionism in human affairs, of strategically relating theory to politics, and of subscribing to an enlightenment paradigm surely lends itself to such a reading. Other readers might simply reflect, in more than one way, on the historical contingencies of critical theory in general. Specific cultural, institutional, and political contexts, or specific structures and substructures of everyday life, seem to effect the way in which critics raise or avoid social questions. Time, place, and other such structurally configurative contingencies seem to figure in the forms of social critique, of politics, of non-literary and literary critics alike. So it is apparently not only theory which can or should effect history. This is the story Norris is about to tell with his Spinoza. History also apparently effects theory, not only in Spinoza’s, but also in our time. It is to his credit that this is a standpoint which Norris, all formidable postmodernist pressures to the contrary, does not suppress.

 

Norris, I think, might be quick to point out that he himself never had a problem with the relation between theory and history, or history and theory, or with non-postmodern critical strategies for that matter. His books on deconstruction were above all political books, carefully designed to emphasize the political edge of the deconstructionist project in the face of all those intellectuals who either breezily embrace historical (marxist and idealist alike) solutions to social problems, or who legitimate such problems by pointing to their inexorably ontological/ physiological roots (Nietzschean epigones, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard). Deconstruction, or rather, and here Norris is always precise, the capital proponents of this movement of thought–Derrida, de Man–offer an irresistible political program. So Norris pointed out throughout his books in the eighties. Their political program consists not in adjudicating matters of truth and falsehood. Rather, the political program of genuine, non-vulgar deconstruction, such as theirs, consists in not attaching truth value to any question, answer, or method or things of the sort but rather in attaching truth value to %the right% to raise questions. In short, Norris claims that what Derrida and de Man are about is freedom of speech, and, moreover, that genuine deconstruction amounts to a libertarian project, and, finally, that freedom of knowledge, opinion, and belief, good old enlightenment habits of thought, are part and parcel of what is right with postmodernism: its modern legacy. For this reason, Norris makes sure to disassociate those postmodern thinkers from deconstruction–such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard–whose inordinately positive disposition towards the powers of the body, powerfully disguised in their rejection of the transcendental subject and in their abandonment of critical reason, concedes little to an egalitarian and democratic project. For the same reason, Norris now upholds Habermas, whose theory of communicative action promotes free and equal discourse of various interest-groups, political viewpoints, or specialized communities of knowledge. Yet if Habermas’s theory represents “a limit-point of speculative reason which as yet has no model in the history of social institutions,” why not experiment for starters with his model, with a critical theory of old modernity, rather than with that of Spinoza, originating in the young days of modern theory? Norris explicates: Habermas “pitches his claims at the highest level of abstract generality, and offers little help toward a better understanding of nuances, the detailed practicalities, or the essentially contingent character of real-life ethical choice” (183). In other words, Habermas runs up against having too much mind and not enough body, like most philosophers of the modern kind, among whom Norris places not only Descartes and Kant but also Hegel. Feminist critiques of Habermas, such as those of Nancy Fraser and Iris Marion Young, have raised quite similar objections, and justifiably so. Spinoza, on the other hand, is of a different philosophical lineage. In his non-dualist, non-phenomenological, and non-dialectical philosophy, the material (%res extensa%) and the ideal (%res cogitans%) appear to amalgamate into a complex process in which the dualist and the phenomenological co-exist, yet where the dialectical, and this is what Norris does not tell his readers, does not yet exist. “Substance thinking substance extended are one and the same substance, comprehended now through one attribute, now through another,” is one of the Spinozist propositions Ethics II, p. 7) Norris cites (32) in a chapter significantly entitled “Spinoza versus Hegel.” Claims to the superiority of Spinoza over Hegel, the leitmotif of much of French structuralist and poststructuralist interpellations, seem to propel Norris’s enterprise as well.

 

So it seems that Norris takes recourse to Spinoza because his theory makes allowances for the powers of the mind as well as of the body, because his epistemology is grounded not in a simple but in a complex ontology, because his metaphysical rationalism grounds emotions and reason alike. Surely, Norris could not have taken recourse to this seventeenth century philosopher because he relates epistemology to ethics, because Spinoza reflects on and theorizes the implications of a theory of knowledge on the ways in which humans run or should run their social affairs. Reflecting on the dangerous relation of knowledge to political power, on theory and politics, or epistemology and ethics, is the key not only to Spinoza and his philosophy but to all those critical intellectuals who were faced with certain persecution or even with death when going public with their ideas. The relation of knowledge to freedom, prominently placed in Norris’s interpretation of Spinoza’s significance, is a relation which commands structure and substructure of most critical texts written at the dawn of modernity, if by critical we mean oppositional, subversive, liberational attitudes vis-a-vis %auctoritas%. The texts of Descartes, Kant, and, yes, also Hegel, fall into this category.

 

If critical theory is above all libertarian philosophy, as Norris would have it, why Spinoza over Hegel, or are we again treated to a displaced replay of Spinoza over Marx? A reader would be quite mistaken to assume that Norris rejects the Hegelian project because of its adherence to an absolute or transcendental spirit gradually evolving from and ultimately commanding historical matter. For Norris’s Hegel is not the one who almost flunked the entrance exams to the Frankfurter Schule, but the one who graduated with honours from the Ecole Normale. It is Kojeve’s Hegel and Hyppolite’s, the Hegel of those two formidable scholars who have brought to the surface the tendentially self-propelling materialist drives of Hegelian phenomenology, such that reason’s unbound desire remains always already challenged by natural bounds not of a physical but of a social kind. It is also that process that Althusser sees, beyond Hegel, in Marx Lire Le Capital). Both systems are unable to resist mechanical structurations of history which true science alone is able to discern, to adjudicate in matters of historical relevance and irrelevance, and to challenge. Similarly, one of the greatest Italian Spinoza interpreters, Antonio Negri, first established the determinist character of Marx’s Grundrisse before offering Spinoza not as a libertarian but as a radically liberational solution to self-propelling systematizations in his L’anomalia selvaggia. Saggio su potere e potenza in Baruch Spinoza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981). But what if neither Hegel nor Marx qualifies for an unqualified determinist reading of his texts, and what if Spinoza’s intransigent materialism does? What if we choose Marx’s theses on Feuerbach, where he addresses epistemological problems not dissimilar to Norris’s concerns, namely how to think a materialism without falling prey to an idealist transcendence, and without falling prey to an equally transcendent mechanical immanence based on the laws of atomism and physics? Part of Marx’s solution to the problem was the notion of human or social (material) practice for one, and its dialectical nature for another. While material or general practice produces or effects certain conditions, it is also the effect of ideal or individual practice:

 

The materialist doctrine that human beings are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed human beings are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is human beings who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator him/herself. [. . .] The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally un- derstood only as revolutionising practice. (Marx, Third Thesis on Feuerbach)

 

Educating the educator is of course also what Norris has in mind with the liberational project inscribed in his Spinoza, but why plead for free will, intentionality, and choice on the basis of an author who categorically denied the existence of free will? Norris’s answer is prompt: Spinoza not only discussed the origins and nature of emotions, thereby anticipating the ultimate materialism (desiring bodies) of Deleuze and Guattari and other such French poststructuralist thinkers intent on effacing moral accountability. Spinoza also discussed the origin and the nature of the mind in ways which anticipate Husserl’s epistemological processes of eidetic inspection, uncontaminated by contingent factors of historical time and place. In short, what Norris would like to argue is that there are two Spinozas in one, such that Spinoza’s ethical and determinist program does not contradict but co-exists with his liberatory epistemology, since this seventeenth-century precursor of critical theory apparently corrects present-day, over-confident rationalism and delusionary nihilism at one and the same time.

 

Norris has, as is his style, competently, elegantly, and honestly directed his attention to what mattered to him: that which mattered to Spinoza, and the extent to which his contribution to critical theory should matter to us. Spinoza is, as are most of Norris’s books, a pleasure to read. It is extraordinarily informative and knowledgeably relates the discussion of Spinoza’s complex writings on epistemology and ethics to major twentieth century movements of thought (speech act theory, deconstruction, structuralism, universal pragmatics and so forth). The question I would like to raise in conclusion is the extent to which Spinoza’s philosophical preoccupations are politically relevant for us to the degree Norris claims. That Spinoza’s philosophy emerges at the beginning of modernity, also known as the beginnings of the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois liberal state, is a historical detail which I consider relevant in determining the political dimensions of his thought. His discussion of the emotions in relation to divine truth, human knowledge and human action I see as one of many attempts of critical movements of thought–from humanism of the proto-capitalist era in Italy to German, French, and English rationalisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth century–to gradually subvert the apparently inexorable fetters of the ideological and philosophical hegemony of the church. Questions of epistemology and their relation to ethics, and questions related to the conditions of possibility of an individual’s access to knowledge and action were, at the origins of modernity, mostly political questions, and, therefore, inherently dangerous, as long as the relation of %civis% to %auctoritas% remained uncontracted, as long as the individual philosopher/scientist was subject to unmediated power, that is. Accordingly, intellectuals directed much effort to disguising their true opinion of the relation of knowledge to politics (Vico), and they continued to reflect on this relation when immediate danger had passed (Newton). Critical theory today does not work under similar conditions (pace Norris’s discussion of Salman Rushdie). Questions concerning the relation of epistemology to ethics in the larger sense are, therefore, not so much of political interests, but mostly of historical and philosophical ones. A political project which elaborates on the various paths to knowledge and action I am afraid cannot explain why some groups (or classes, or nations), all normative epistemological and ontological equality to the contrary, have privileged access to action and others do not. Critical theory, so Horkheimer wrote a while ago, is critical to the extent that it reflects on the social function of its project. What I would like to add to this is that critical theory today is critical to the extent that it reflects on its position not in relation to old orders of inquiry and knowledge, however radical and revolutionary, but rather on its relation to the recently pronounced and enacted New World Order. I would not be surprized that this is indeed one of the motivating forces behind Christopher Norris’s Spinoza. By relating Spinoza’s story, originating at the beginnings of modernity, to our time, Norris evokes the historicity of all theory. What is critical in different historical epochs and places, and what might, can, or should become political in our place and our time is the historical challenge critical theory faces at a moment when critique has all but surrendered to the violence of present-day hegemonic rationality.