#title Critical Self-Theory
#subtitle & the non-ideological critique of ideology
#author Jason McQuinn
#SORTtopics critical theory, Modern Slavery, Modern Slavery #3, ideology, postmodernism, poststructuralism, Max Stirner, egoist, egoism, autonomy, kin, philosophy, Immanuel Kant, ideology, experience, capital, production, institutions, control, capitalism, critique, reification, abstraction, perspective, symbolism, imagination, resistance, civilisation, society, civilization, slavery, self-alienation, enslavement, alienation, submission, tradition, history, story, god, religion, politics, subjectivity, relativity, rationalism, transcendentalism
#date Spring-Summer 2014
#source Modern Slavery #3
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-01-24T21:54:51
#notes “A brief history of theory” is a multi-page sidebar beginning about halfway through the text. The original text has two inline references to footnote 12; I’ve removed the first (following the line “using laws to enslave themselves and others”), as the text of the footnote more directly relates to the second reference, and it was causing problems with the software here. The inline reference to footnote 14 does not appear in the original text; I’ve added it where it seemed to fit best based on content/context, but there are other places between the references to 13 and 15 it could work as well.

* Critical Self-Theory

& the non-ideological
critique of ideology

<quote>
“Free — from what? Oh! what is there that cannot be shaken off? The yoke of serfdom,
of sovereignty, of aristocracy and princes, the dominion of the desires and passions; yes,
even the dominion of one’s own will, of self-will, for the completest self-denial is nothing
but freedom — freedom, namely, from self-determination, from one’s own self. And the
craving for freedom as for something absolute, worthy of every praise, deprived us of
ownness: it created self-denial. However, the freer I become, the more compulsion piles
up before my eyes; and the more impotent I feel myself. The unfree son of the wilderness
does not yet feel anything of all the limits that crowd a civilized man: he seems to him-self freer than this latter. In the measure that I conquer freedom for myself I create for
myself new bounds and new tasks: if I have invented railroads, I feel myself weak again
because I cannot yet sail through the skies like the bird; and, if I have solved a problem
whose obscurity disturbed my mind, at once there await me innumerable others, whose
perplexities impede my progress, dim my free gaze, make the limits of my freedom painfully sensible to me.” — Max Stirner, <em>The Unique and Its Own</em> (1844)
</quote>

Critical self-theory is intentionally presuppositionless, non-ideological theory. It
is, most broadly, <em>consciously or critically thinking for oneself</em>. It includes the
set of all non-ideological critiques of ideology. As such, it is the only consistently self-critical and non-self-alienating form of theory — including critical theory.[1] By default it
is a libertarian or anarchistic theory, if only because it begins not just from outside any
and all ideological premises, but by definition from each of our own lived experiences in
opposition to every form of dependency or enslavement — that is, to every self-alienating
form of institutional or ideological submission. It is the critical theory of the common
person and common people, and not of the privileged elite or their lackeys — who attain
their status through their complicity with the institutions of modern slavery — because
through it we refuse any identification with these institutions. It is the critical theory of
the insurrectionary who rejects all overlords, not of the ideological revolutionary who
seeks to install a new form of overlordship. It is never
the theory of the academic, expert, professional or
bureaucrat, the politician, boss or ideologue — when you
can even distinguish one of these roles from the others
these days.[2] It is the particular, conscious expression of
the everyday rationalities that are not just embedded in
our lives but — more importantly and accurately — are
created, revealed and expressed through <em>all</em> of our
life-activities. It is, therefore, for each of us — to the
extent that we <em>do</em> refuse ideology — also our own non-ideological theory and critique of everyday life, just as
it includes the entire set of non-ideological critiques of
each of our own everyday lives. Through it we make no
pretense to any final religious, metaphysical or scientific
universality. There is no need to do so, since it applies
first and always to our own lives (including our relations
with others) in order to express anything and everything
that we each understand and know, including the implicit
limits of our understanding and symbolic knowledge.
Critical self-theory is a type of consciously practical
(instrumental) activity and thus has no goal of its own
outside of how we each choose to use it or not. It makes
no demands on us — whether religious, metaphysical,
moral or ideological — since it is our own situated,
critical thinking about our world, through which we
refuse pretense to anything else. Because it begins from
our Own non-conceptual lives as their expressions, it can
be used to facilitate our rebellion against every possible
form of fixed ideology or institutional domination and
exploitation. It is thus the most consistent form of
conscious resistance to the ideological foundations of the
ubiquitous institutions of modern slavery — upon which
modern civilization is always founded, both historically
and organizationally. And, as such, it can also facilitate
our self-liberation from all the institutions of that
enslavement: the liberation of our thinking, our activities
and our relationships, each on our own terms in our own
manner to whatever extent we have and use our own
powers with and without others.

One could — naively — ask why anyone would ever
really need anything that could be called “critical
self-theory”? However, the far more interesting
question for all of us ought to be why, in a world
awash in mountains of theory of nearly every
type and description, no one ever speaks of such a
thing, even as a possibility? What is it about theory
that, even when it claims to be critical, the prefix
“self” is automatically to be avoided? Is this more
indicative of an innocent oversight or a highly
revealing taboo? Why do we have religious theories
(doctrines and theologies) for every sect and
schism large and small, philosophical theories for
principles (fixed conceptions) of every shade and
hue, scientistic theories (reifying instrumentalist
conceptions of natural and social processes)
throughout the entire spectrum of the sciences, and
professional theories for every semi-respectable
institutional con-game around, but no recognized
name for the theory for our own lives, beholden to no
outside, heteronomous organizations, forces or powers?
Why is ideology so ubiquitous, but our own non-ideological thought kept so invisible?

*** <em>Self</em>-theory

<em>Self</em>-theory is, most broadly, thinking for oneself —
though not necessarily consciously or critically.[3] At the
most fundamental levels each of us can experience our
world practically from only one possible perspective —
for each of us our <em>own perspective</em>, shaped through our
own inalienable, embodied sensation-and-movement-in-our-world. These fundamental levels of practical
experience are always present, though rarely themselves
a focus of observation or discussion. Yet even within
these most fundamental levels of experience, a primitive
sort of theory already exists prior to the development
and use of explicitly symbolic systems like languages.
(This becomes obvious with the more social species of
mammals, especially the primates and hominids.) In fact,
all explicitly symbolic systems rest upon these levels of
tacit, preconceptual, experiential understanding.

When we move to the level of symbolic systems,
there are <em>two</em> possible perspectives through which we
can view or portray our world <em>theoretically</em>. The first
would be, once again, for each of us through our <em>own</em>,
embodied, personally lived, first-person perspective.
The second — though it could be considered and labeled
a number of different ways — we can most simply
classify as any other <em>imagined</em> perspective, whether
we imagine it as seeming to actually exist somewhere
in time and space, or instead as something purely
fictional existing outside of our own lives and worlds,
but nowhere specific at all. Imagined perspectives can
include anything and everything from those of our
own selves construed as objects (in our self-reflection
or self-consciousness) or those of other people, to
those of spirits or gods or those of grand abstractions
like Nature or Society, to those of particular groups
or organizations.[4] The most important aspect of the
relationship of people’s <em>self-theories</em> to <em>theories focused
on imaginary perspectives</em> is the necessity for the latter
to always rest on the foundation of the former — and
never vice versa, because all imagined perspectives
must be constructed from our own original, lived
perspectives. But if we take a close look at the great
majority of the theories people consciously hold in
modern societies — whether social, scientific or technical,
religious, political or economic, aesthetic or moral, we
tend to find — especially in the more highly-regimented,
industrialized societies — that they most often center
on and are organized around imaginary perspectives
rather than our own implicit, lived perspectives. This
may not really be unexpected, since many of these
theories involve highly intricate, highly-rationalized
modes of apprehension, classification, interpretation,
negotiation and interaction with complex natural
and cultural objects, as well as with other people
who are also required to operate on a similarly
sophisticated level of cultural and institutional
practice. However, when we actually apply these
theories in our lives we always have to reinterpret
them by shifting to the more fundamental level
of immediately practical, first-person theory in
order to incorporate them into our actually-lived
perspectives and thus make them usable for us. On
the level where we must decide what to do, where
to go, when to communicate, and how to go about
pursuing complex projects — on the level of this
fundamental, actually-lived, practical activity — we
can’t rely on theories centered on merely imaginary
perspectives. We need to translate them into an
immanent level that includes — and centers on — our
own practical sensations, perceptions, understanding,
motivations values and powers. This is always the
nearly-unspoken, but unavoidable, level of self-theory.
Though it must also be pointed out that the “self” in
“self-theory” doesn’t denote any objectified concept of
the self. It instead denotes the autonomous generation
and deployment of theory — theory implicitly and wholly
engaged within our life-activity, and thus self-created
seamlessly within our own lived perspectives. Even
though this fundamental level of theory is itself very
rarely described or explicitly theorized, we could not
function without the most fundamental levels of self-theory. Without self-theory, the interface between all the
theories centered on other imagined perspectives, values,
goals and our own life-activities would be at best highly
disjointed and incoherent, or even impossible. But, what
is more interesting is the very fact that this plethora
of other-focused theories has become so prevalent,
to the extent of seeming to increasingly displace and
overwhelm what in the past must have been once the
primary — and at an even earlier time (before the creation
of symbolic communication) the only — mode of theory.
It should not be unexpected that with the ever-increasing
displacement of self-theory (by imagined theories) and
as part of this same development, we have also seen
ever-increasing levels of self-alienation, disorientation
and anomie in modern societies.

*** Anatomy of self-theory

Self-theory is the theoretical moment of our self-activity, and our self-activity is the self-creation of our
lives. At the pre-symbolic level (we could say “pre-theoretical” level), our self-theory (or self-pre-theory)
can be seen as higher level organismic functioning
that involves complex adaptation and organization of
perceptual-motor abilities (including communicative
efforts) to live in our world (our natural and social life
context). At this level the schematic anatomy of self-theory is: nonsymbolic-desire-or-problem <em>therefore</em>
particular-practical-activity. To the extent that the
practical activity is satisfactory (satisfies the desire or
solves the problem) its use is reinforced as an option for
similar situations. To the extent that it is unsatisfactory,
it may be reconfigured or even avoided in similar future
situations. Note that in this typical self-theory schematic
there is no real need for consideration of the nature or
meaning of any abstract concepts like self or world. All
that is involved is purely practical reason using implicit,
embodied subjectivity and implicit, practical objects
(not requiring complex or abstract symbolic constitution
in a foundational, structural symbolic field), a practical
reason that is implicit in our self-creative life-activity,
and not to be found or applied from outside.

Interestingly, at more complex, symbolic levels our
self-theory <em>remains characterizable</em> as higher level
organismic functioning that involves complex adaptation
and organization of perceptual-motor abilities (including communicative efforts) to live in our world (our
natural and social life context). The only difference is
that any communicative efforts now include to some
degree the use of symbols or symbolic systems. At this
level the schematic anatomy of self-theory is: complex-nonsymbolic+symbolic-desire-or-problem <em>therefore</em>
practical-activity-including-symbolic-activity. To the
extent that the practical-symbolic activity is satisfactory (satisfies the desire and/or solves the problem) its
use is reinforced as an option for similar situations. To
the extent that the activity is unsatisfactory, it may be
reconfigured or even avoided in similar future situations.
Note that in this typical complex self-theory schematic
there is most often still no real need for consideration
of the nature or meaning of any abstract concepts like
self or world. All that is involved is still purely practical reason, though a practical reason that may include
complex symbolic operations, and that is implicit in
our self-creative life-activity, although some theoretical
aspects may be found and/or applied from outside. These
latter theoretical aspects include parts of other people’s
self-theories or <em>imagined</em> theories which must then be
appropriated for personal, practical use.

*** Theory and language

We often only speak of theory as existing once
symbolic systems exist in which it can be independently
embodied, even though — as we have seen — something
very like theory, which we might then call “pre-theory”
or “the pre-theoretical,” must also exist — as the
base upon which the constructions of symbolically-embodied theory can be constructed.[5] This all depends
upon our definitions and understandings of the nature
of concepts and their relationship to symbols and
language. But regardless of where we might want
to draw distinctions here, it is abundantly clear that
most of what is commonly called “theory” is directly
dependent for its existence on language systems. This
makes our understanding of the nature and development
of language-use a central part of our understanding and
critique of theory. Just as critical self-theory is based
on the conscious use of theory — considered as a purely
human, self-constructed set of techniques, it is also
based on our similar understanding of language-use.

For each of us, individually, it can seem as though
we are born into an already complete linguistic <em>system</em>
(or into complete <em>systems</em>, for the multi-lingual). But
upon critical examination we find this is not at all the
case. Just as when we take a genuinely self-critical
approach to theory we recognize it is not something
created — already complete and handed down to us —
by gods, genes, society or any other reified entities,
we also recognize that language is not something
created and handed down to us by any of these reified
entities. Instead, since language does not exist for
us as a thing-in-itself, but only as a highly variable,
disparate and ever-changing collection of practices of
relatively independent human beings acting in varying
relationships to each other, there is no — and can be no —
complete system of any particular language that we can
ever locate — even ideally — in any one place. Instead,
what we actually find phenomenally or empirically is
the collection of linguistic practices engaged in by each
and all of those individuals using different languages
in whatever ways and for whatever purposes they
wish. Recognized in this light it becomes clear that
structuralist (and post-structuralist[6]) dogmas regarding
language have no basis beyond the extent of their
reification of actually-existing language-use.

When we look at how people actually acquire
linguistic competence, we see that it is a process of
<em>mutual</em> communication and action. Children don’t
mechanically memorize words and their meanings,
learn the rules of grammar, and then start talking on that
basis. They engage in a complex process of interactive,
experimental, communicative give and take, just as they
do in all other facets of learning about their parents,
their siblings and the environments in which they find
and create themselves. Just as children’s pre-theoretical
interactions provide the foundation for the development
of symbolic theory, their prelinguistic communication
provides the foundation for language development.
Children are already active agents engaged in developing
their own self-theory as they explore their worlds. They
don’t need to be taught language since they are already
involved in learning how to communicate, as one aspect
of their explorations through which they gain increasing
understanding and abilities to manipulate their worlds.
This means that in practice they develop their own
linguistic abilities by <em>re-creating for themselves</em>
language-systems comparable and compatible with the
language-uses to which they are exposed and interact.
As they come into contact with more and more people
throughout their lives their own language systems and
linguistic competencies deepen to whatever extent
they successfully communicate and manipulate their
environment using their language skills to expand their
own language systems. Language-use and self-theory are
seamlessly integrated parts of this communication and
manipulation.

*** Recognition and reification

At the dividing point between every self-theory and
imagined theory are choices that we continuously make.
From a consciously critical perspective these decisions
are not objectively evaluable as right or wrong, true
or false, rational or irrational. They are instead basic
existential choices reflecting each of our own attitudes
towards our lives and worlds, just as our attitudes in
turn reflect the history of our manifold choices. Through
these choices we determine to what extent we prefer
to navigate our worlds through recognition (practical
understanding through interaction and dialogue) or
reification (indirect, reified modes of recognition).
There may be reasons that we can give or discover for
which of these we choose in any particular instance, but
whichever we choose remains an existential choice in
the social and historical processes of our self-creation.

<em>Recognition</em> is the self-creative process through which
we discover our worlds — and, especially, ourselves
and other beings as autonomous agents in our worlds.
It includes every aspect or moment of our interactions
with everything with which we interact. It describes the
dialogic process of understanding we undergo in each of
our encounters, in which we learn the extent of our own
powers and the powers of objects, including the extent of
their abilities to act intentionally. There is no guarantee
that any given human being will ever recognize him or
herself or others, given the possible failure of this developmental process through accident, death or disease. But
some form of recognition of the agency of other persons
is necessary for any form of social life, and otherwise
healthy infants already begin the process of personal
recognition (especially voice recognition) even before
birth and vastly expand their powers of recognition
upon birth. Recognition requires at its most basic level
the direct or indirect encounter and perceptual-motor
engagement with an object. As such, recognition in its
entirety can be seen as coterminous with life-experience
itself (and we can imagine this as being the case down
to the simplest forms of life like prokaryotes or even
viruses). Beyond basic recognition of relatively inanimate objects, it also extends to animate, living objects:
ourselves and other living beings, who are distinguished
from the relatively inanimate world by some degree of
autonomous agency. Although none of us can directly
experience the autonomous agency of another (or we
would then <em>be</em> that other), we all have the power to recognize our own agency and the agencies of others in our
day to day interactions over our lifetimes. We recognize
our own agency directly — through our experience of
our own interactions with others — and others’ agencies
indirectly through those same interactions by constructing them imaginatively and reflectively by analogy with
our direct experiences.

<em>Reification</em> is the interactive process through which
we can reduce our full experience of recognition in
some way in order to make it more abstract or passive,
less intense or direct, or interpret it as less real by
rationalizing (conceptually fixing or hypostatizing)
one or more aspects of the experience. Rationalizing
reification involves <em>choosing</em> a reductionist, self-alienating (disowned) mode of recognition rather than a
wider, non-reductionist, non-self-alienating (owned or
self-responsible) mode. Although it is rarely analyzed,
the process of rationalizing reification necessarily
(analytically) includes two correlative moments
(mirroring the two central moments into which our
life-experience is generally analyzed, the objective
and the subjective): a reductive moment and an
animative moment. This is because it is precisely
our life-experience that is reified, and our life
experience can always be described in terms of
subjective and objective sides, aspects or moments.
On the one side an activity is <em>reduced</em> to a passive
object, and on the other side the activity that is
removed from the then passively-constructed
object is projected onto a <em>symbolic agent</em>. The two
great archetypal models for reification in practice
are slavery and religion: slaves and spirits.[7] By
<em>reducing</em> the actual agency of humans, other living
beings, or natural objects of our experience to the status
of slaves, symbolic agents are created — from that newly
appropriated agency — in the form of imagined statuses,
fetishes or spirits (the imagined <em>status</em> of slave owner,
the imagined <em>sanction</em> of slave-ownership by gods, or
the imagined <em>granting</em> of slave-ownership by law, for
example) or institutions (imagined, symbolic group
spirits). Reification can be employed consciously or
not. As long as it is deployed for a particular purpose
with awareness of its limitations as a truncated form
of recognition (that it is an imaginary, conceptually-mediated process), it can allow people to take particular
behaviors largely for granted under certain conditions
and contexts, allowing people to focus their practical
activity and consciousness on other more significant
areas. However, when it becomes habitual — through
repeated obsessive-compulsive or compulsory-submissive behavior — and no longer consciously
purposeful, reified forms of recognition can be mistaken
for fully-attentive recognition and this can lead people
to begin believing that the reifications are more “real”
than the evidence of their own senses — especially
when forms of reification are reinforced by large-scale
institutional systems of ideology, coercion, exploitation
and enslavement. Given how completely essential
reification has become for ensuring the voluntarily
submissive behavior required for the maintenance of all
the institutions of modern slavery, there is now hardly
any aspect of contemporary life left untouched. (See
Ron Sakolsky’s “Mutual Acquiescence” in <em>MS</em> #1.) With
habitual reification nearly everywhere, examples abound.
Pick any aspect of life where forced labor, domination,
mass culture or ideology is found (pretty much
anywhere) and reification is right in the center of things
helping glue it all together. Here are two examples.

<em>Wage work (wage slavery)</em>. Wage work requires
unfree, relatively unconscious and nonrebellious people
to consistently act as slaves in workplaces, but ignore
the fact that if they wanted to they could organize and
live for themselves instead of allowing state-regulated
capitalist businesses to so easily rule their lives, control
most of their productive powers and render them
robotic. In order to <em>become</em> workers (as opposed to
reluctantly choosing to work while refusing and resisting
identification with the role of worker), people agree to
treat their own life-activities as not their own, as owned
by their bosses or hierarchy. They <em>reduce</em> their own lives
(and those of everyone else inside workplaces) to a large
degree to the status of productive machines, and in the
process give capitalist managers and state regulators at
all levels the gift of their <em>workday agency</em> by imagining
that they (and others) have no choice but to submit
to the daily wage-slavery regime. What is called “the
economy” in capitalist, socialist and communist societies
consists of all the institutions of forced labor, and rests
on such reifications at every level of their existence.

<em>Commodity consumption</em>. Instead of freely
cooperating with others to directly produce and
distribute the essentials we need to live — food,
clothing and shelter, production and distribution of
these essentials are basically outlawed outside of their
state and corporate ownership and regulation (through
refusal of people’s autonomy, forced denial of access
to materials and opportunities to create them,
and elimination of commons and unregulated
wilderness). These essentials are then mass
produced, commoditized and rationed through
heavily rigged and unfree (but euphemistically
called “regulated” or “free”) markets (usually
under the names of “capitalism” or “socialism”
of one form or another), or they are mass
produced, commoditized and rationed more
directly through bureaucratic channels in more
dictatorial economies (as in “communist” North
Korea). In each case people largely <em>reduce</em> their
life-activities (and those of other people) to the
required roles of largely passive “consumers”
within the respective modes of rationing in the societies
in which they live. Once again they make a gift of their
self-alienated <em>agency</em> to the organizers and enforcers
of their respective rationing institutions (through the
mediation of imagined, symbolic identities under which
the institutions operate). Since participants in these
institutions often perceive them as more real than the
people involved, they then begin to treat other people
and themselves as mere institutional cogs.

These examples are all fairly complex, each involving
multiple levels of reification in which people are reduced
to roles and expected to act in particular venues in
compulsive and repetitive, machine-like ways. People
are expected to treat other people the same ways they
treat themselves, in order to maintain and expand
multiple subsystems along with the overall systems in
which they operate. These examples are also remarkably
effective and we see little conscious protest at their
overall modes of operation, and even relatively little
protest of often quite obvious particular problems
in their everyday operation. This is because those
who participate have largely refused to ever become
conscious of their own self-alienated participation in the
constitution and reproduction of these reified systems.

*** <em>Heteronomous</em> theory and ideology

<em>Heteronomous theory</em>[8] is, most broadly, thinking
for oneself through submission to theories centered
somewhere else besides one’s own life (on imagined,
often symbolic, agents) — through the self-alienation
(disowning) of one’s perspective. Heteronomous theory
is another name for ideological theory (in the most
generally <em>critical</em> sense of the word “ideology”). The
descriptor “heteronomous” denotes “subjection to
something else” or “subject to a law or standard external
to itself.”[9] “Ideology,” on the other hand, originally
comes from its use by Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1796)
as a term for the study or science of ideas. However, it
is an extremely contested word, meaning that different
people use it in widely different ways for vastly
different reasons. It first acquired its enduring negative
connotation through Napoleon’s condemnation of “the
ideologues” of the French Convention (including de
Tracy) who opposed his edicts. Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels then popularized (mostly) critical forms of the
concept that continue to be primary influences on its
uses today.[10] During its long history, the major struggle
has been between positive (or neutral) and negative (or
critical) conceptions and uses of the term. It will here be
used in its most general critical form to refer to <em>imposed
idea systems</em> (heteronomous theory) in contradistinction
to autonomous use of ideas (autonomous — or self —
theory). Despite the obvious centrality of the distinction
between <em>imposed external idea systems</em> and <em>the implicit,
autonomous use of theory</em> for any genuinely conscious
and critical investigation and discussion of the meanings
of ideology, this distinction is generally evaded or
ignored. Just as with the absence of any significant
investigation or discussion of the existence and nature
of self-theory, the critical conception of ideology as
heteronomous theory is also largely invisible. This is
because first of all the entire organizational structure
of modern civilization is fundamentally reliant on the
free and unquestioned functioning of a multitude of
competing and cooperating heteronomous theories and
the reifications on which they are built. This fact is a
central part of the ultimate public secret of the modern
world. The secret that cannot ever officially be named
for what it is: <em>modern slavery</em>. At the heart of modern
slavery, at the heart of every institutionalization of the
enslavement of human beings in modern society, is
the transubstantiation (reification) of life through the
self-alienation and appropriation of agency (people’s
self-reduction to passive objects submitting to imagined
symbolic statuses or agents). To <em>be</em> a slave (as opposed
to being captured and continuing to consciously resist
one’s captor) is in practice to <em>identify oneself</em> as a slave
(under whatever name) and to accept the control of one’s
activities by those who have appropriated one’s self-alienated agency. The function of every ideology — from
religions to liberalism, from nationalisms to Marxism or
even libertarianism — is to symbolically formulate this
transubstantiation of life in relatively fixed dogmas that
sugarcoat the required submissive and self-reductive
moments. And, for this transubstantiation of life to
be effective, any genuine self-understanding of the
existence and nature of self-theory and heteronomous
theory, the self-alienation of agency, or their places
in the ubiquitous social constitution of institutions of
modern slavery must be suppressed by all those who
participate in the maintenance and reproduction of these
institutions. Each individual ideology or heteronomous
theory may or may not be open to questioning or
criticism, depending upon how liberal the ruling regime
might be. But regardless of any possible openness
to particular questions and critiques, all regimes
will attempt to suppress non-ideological criticism of
ideologies along with both theoretical and practical
critiques of currently favored forms of modern slavery.

*** Anatomy of heteronomous theory

If <em>self</em>-theory is the theoretical moment of our
<em>self</em>-activity, and our <em>self</em>-activity is the <em>self</em>-creation
of our lives, <em>heteronomous</em> (or ideological) theory is
the theoretical moment of our <em>self-alienated</em> activity,
or the <em>self-alienation</em> of our <em>self</em>-theory. Because our
pre-symbolic or pre-theoretical activities are entirely
immanent and inseparable from our physical, bodily
activities, it is extremely uncommon for people to
<em>self-alienate</em> their <em>self</em>-activity at the pre-symbolic or
pre-theoretical levels of life except in extreme situations
(in which intense fear, pain, violence or suffering may
possibly lead to dissociative experiences). However,
once people develop complex, socially-interactive
cognitive abilities to richly <em>imagine</em> (reconstruct,
or <em>recognize</em>) other perspectives that other people
(and other nonhuman living beings) appear to hold
analogous to their own, it becomes a much easier step
to further <em>imagine</em> that one is beholden to other, more
speculatively constructed, fetishized statuses or beings.
The beginnings of complex symbolic communication
through development of languages must have sooner or
later led to the prehistoric <em>imaginative recognition</em> of
not only human kin, but animal and plant kin, and even
kinship with natural objects, materials and land- and
water-forms (rivers, lakes, valleys, mountains). But,
eventually, this sensible, understandable and in many
ways very useful animist consciousness had to have
extended beyond everyday sensory interactions to more
tenuously <em>imagined</em> encounters (influenced by dreams
and altered forms of consciousness) with <em>living</em>-dead
ancestors, ghosts, nature-spirits and eventually gods. As
long as each of these <em>imagined</em> perspectives remained
useful or enjoyable as finite, speculative constructions
in story-telling and primitive attempts at empirical
natural explanation their animism did not require self-alienation. But it was with the birth of religion — in the
sense of <em>fixed belief</em> in the extra- or supernatural <em>reality</em>
of such entities — that self-alienation on a cognitive
level initially appears to have taken hold. With the birth
of religion people abandoned their own personal and
immediately communitarian uses of their conceptual
creations and instead <em>imagined</em> that some self-alienated
conceptual creations were even more real than their own
lives. It is this inside-out relation of conceptual creations
over their human creators that defines conceptual self-alienation and heteronomous or ideological theory.

At the level of heteronomous theory our self-theory
still <em>remains characterizable</em> as higher level organismic
functioning that involves complex adaptation and
organization of perceptual-motor abilities (including
both presymbolic and symbolic communicative efforts)
to live in our world (our natural and social life context).
The big difference is that our world itself has now
been turned inside-out conceptually and a level of
non-sensible, imagined being is prioritized as more
real than our sensible everyday life. The schematic
anatomy of <em>heteronomous</em> self-theory is: complex-nonsymbolict+symbolic-desire-or-problem <em>within the
context of</em> submission-to-a-higher-priority-more-real-entity <em>therefore</em> practical-activity-that-may-include-symbolic-activity <em>only within</em> the-limits-dictated-by-the-fetishized-entity(ies). To the extent that the resulting
practical activity still manages to be satisfactory
(satisfies the desire or solves the problem) its use
is reinforced, despite its potentially disabling, self-alienating moment. But to the extent that the activity
is unsatisfactory, only factors outside of belief in the
fetishized, potentially disabling entity can be considered
without generating high levels of discomfort and anxiety
because one has now personally and existentially
<em>identified</em> with the fetishized conceptual entity. Note
that in this typical complex <em>heteronomous</em> self-theory
schematic consideration of the nature and meaning
of abstract concepts — like self, world and especially
the fetishized abstract entity — now become of <em>central</em>
importance. All that is involved is fundamentally still
practical reason, but a practical reason that now includes
complex self-alienating symbolic operations, through
which one’s implicit, embodied subjectivity is largely
overridden by theoretical structures imposed (by oneself)
from an outside perspective. Everything that was once
relatively simple, has now been made highly complex,
convoluted, and more difficult by the felt necessity to
make an alien perspective the center of one’s conceptual
theory, which also means that to maintain the integrity
of one’s ideology, one will submit to the orders
of those who successfully claim to represent
and control that imagined center. Believers in
ideologies have placed rings in their own noses,
and have announced that they want to be led by
those who have claimed the proper ideological
authority to represent their self-alienated agency.

*** Primitive, ancient and modern slavery

It should at least seem curious, though not
necessarily unexpected, that there is little or
no research and investigation of the generally
concomitant development of institutions of
enslavement and civilizations. After all, the
representatives (leaders, servants, lackeys, etc.) of
civilized institutions have many reasons to hide
the embarrassing fact that for the most part civilization
has just been another word for societies employing
slave labor (forced labor). Nor is there much significant
research on the historical <em>continuities</em> of the various
forms of enslaving institutions — especially when it
comes to the transition from indentured, chattel, bond
and related forms of slavery to the very <em>unfree</em> “free
labor” and “democratic” institutions of the enlightened,
modern age of wage, debt and prison slavery. Even
among libertarians, who are often quick to attack the
nation-state for its manifold crimes, there is most often
a knee-jerk identification with the myths of civilization
— in which it is always portrayed in glowing, ethereal
terms, no matter how dismal and disgusting the facts
on the ground <em>always are</em>. The fact that no civilization
— now or historically — has ever existed without an
<em>extensive</em> foundation built on dispossession, forced labor
and plunder imposed upon the majority of its population
is easily documentable, but rarely mentioned. This is
because — as many do not, but all <em>should</em> know — it is
never the job of academic, religious or government
scholars to point out that modern slavery not only exists
but has enveloped the world more fully and intensively
than any other forms of slavery in the past have done.

Evidence for slavery amongst the most primitive of
peoples, undomesticated gatherers and hunters living
in small bands, is rare to non-existent. If it can be said
to exist at all it had to be unstable and fleeting, needing
to be practiced by a small band without any further
institutional means for its maintenance. The earliest
forms of institutionalized slavery are not found until the
Neolithic breakdown of the original free band societies
(of gatherers and hunters) with the development
of increasing animal and plant domestication, and
ensuing sedentary living patterns under more and more
hierarchical chiefdoms supported by religious ideologies.
These conditions correspond to the development of
the earliest forms of the state and civilization. Slavery
in ancient civilizations eventually differentiated, as
technologies and hierarchical social institutions became
more variegated, allowing people to be controlled in
new ways (physically and ideologically) while being
forced to perform new types of labor. During this time
the status of freedom and unfreedom also became
increasingly differentiated, until just about everyone
under the power of state systems (and increasingly even
those tribal societies not yet completely swallowed
up by them) became less than fully free in both
ideological and hierarchical social practice, with the
vast majority of people being forced into some degree
of slavery — but most often under a euphemistic title.
(See Winogrond, Joseph, “Slavery and Slack” parts 1 &
2 in <em>Modern Slavery</em> #2 & #3.) With the breakdown of
the medieval civilizations, the onset of modernity made
more and more of the old forms of slavery increasingly
obsolete. With enclosures of commons, the progressive
depopulation of the countryside, the acceleration of
scientific understanding and growth of technological
powers, the development of industrial scale commodity
production and growth of trade and markets, and the
intensification of ideological powers through increasing
mass literacy and eventually schooling, mass media
and other technologies of social control, wage slavery
became the dominant form of forced labor in the modern
world, and continues to grow to this day as the last
frontiers of remaining communal self-sufficiency at the
peripheries of enslaving civilizations are undermined,
breached and overtaken.

*** Engendered resistance to slavery

But just because we can fairly and accurately construct world history since the end of the Paleolithic in
terms of the proliferation of progressively more sophisticated institutions of enslavement, does not mean that the
path has been without difficulties for the slavers. At each
stage of the way people have resisted to the best of their
abilities, granted that their abilities have also waned as
their kinship bands, self-sufficient life ways, connections
with the land, and non-ideological self-understandings
have been undermined and destroyed. In the earlier
stages of the civilizing enslavement of the planet the
dominant response was open refusal through warfare,
mutinies, insurrections, evasion and escape. But as the
structures of slavery encircled the world and began to
colonize every aspect of human life, the dominant forms
of resistance had to increasingly come from within,
since that is where most surviving humans now find
themselves trapped. To be enslaved is to be humiliated,
exploited and dominated. But even when enslaved
people do their best to submit to enslavement, forget
their predicament, and hide their suffering, there are
always expressions — feelings and thoughts and acts of
engendered resistance — that sometimes extend to acts of
refusal, rebellion or revolution. Even though the world
may currently be enslaved, as long as human beings are
still capable of living their own lives, resistance in one
form or many forms will continue. And because slavery
is comprised of a set of historical institutions, it <em>will</em> end.

*** <em>Critical</em> theory: The development of immanent critique

Most broadly, critical theory can be considered
the theoretical moment of any and all forms of
resistance to enslavement. From its beginnings,
critical theory has had two defining moments: a
goal of practical <em>autonomy</em> and a method of <em>immanent critique</em> (critique from within rather than from
outside). The pre-history and history of self-organized resistance to heteronomous institutions of
Slavery is largely unrecorded. This is because most
early forms of self-organized resistance have been
orally-based and not textually-based, simply as a
reflection of the fact that inscribed symbolic systems were largely developed and primarily employed by
participants in the institution and maintenance of slave
systems until modern times. Therefore, the recorded
history of <em>critique</em> (in the very broadest sense) largely
begins with the questioning of religion <em>from within</em> these
same circles by religious believers who were trained in
the use of these symbolic systems. Historically, since
religious texts (stories, poems, sayings) were among the
first to describe formal doctrines, they were also among
the first to both be criticized by — and include criticisms
of — doctrinal rivals. In the west, <em>formal</em> critique in
philosophy was eventually pioneered especially by the
ancient Greeks and Romans, but otherwise elsewhere
largely developed through the doctrinal disputes between
and within religious factions of Judaism, Christianity
and Islam. <em>Transcendental</em> arguments — criticisms from
outside, arguments from external dogma or a claimed
superior standpoint — were often the dominant form
of traditional, theological criticism, as proponents of
religious hierarchies and religious revelations fought
between themselves to proclaim <em>the revealed Truth</em>
against all uncivilized heretical or pagan deviations or
rivals. However, within Christian doctrines themselves,
the <em>immanent</em> divinity of the doctrine’s man-god — God’s
son incarnated as man — was proclaimed within the
larger transcendental division between humans and God.
And the influence of this doctrinal <em>immanence within
transcendence</em> eventually contributed throughout Europe
to the increasingly successful rebellions of millenarian heretics and Protestant factions against the Roman
church, based on forms of <em>immanent critique</em> made
through direct interpretations of the Bible that dispensed
with the Roman hierarchy.

Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, among the many other
Protestant critics and millenarian heretics, remain the
unacknowledged popularizers of immanent critique,
which became the core method of all modern critical
theories. Modern forms of immanent critique thus
developed both within traditional Christianity[11]
<em>and</em> within the critical thought of Enlightenment
philosophers and the Romantics — many themselves
heavily influenced by Protestant and millenarian themes.
Self-consciously critical use of immanent critique can be
found as early as both Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s seminal
<em>Second Discourse</em> (on inequality) and Immanuel Kant’s
critical philosophy of enlightenment, although Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is often given the greatest
credit for its explicitly modern development.

However, the convoluted Hegelian dialectical
synthesis of history and metaphysics — developed
through the phenomenological immanent critique
in his <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em> — was soon in turn
deconstructed through the immanent critiques mounted
by the post-Hegelians, who argued that Hegel’s “Spirit”
(with its ambiguous relation to Christianity) constituted
a hypostatization or reification of the true, self-creating
subject-object of history. David Friedrich Strauss and
Ludwig Feuerbach contributed post-Hegelian immanent
(anthropological) critiques of Christianity, arguing that
the human species, not God, is the hidden subject-object
of all religion. Bruno Bauer turned from his defense of
the Hegelian rationalist interpretation of Christianity
against David Strauss, to an explicitly atheistic reading
of Hegel, and finally to an ultra-Hegelian philosophy
of Pure Criticism. And Max Stirner simply dissolved
metaphysics and philosophy in their entirety through an
immanent critique of Hegel, Feuerbach and Bauer, which
pointed out that (the non-conceptual, actually-lived) <em>I</em>
am the only one who can ultimately be the <em>creator</em> of
my thoughts for myself in my world, neither God nor
humanity, nor any other abstract conception or object
can ever be that concrete, living creator.

It was after this point, during the buildup to the
1848 revolutions and subsequent reactions, that Karl
Marx largely completed his own contribution to <em>critical</em>
philosophy begun in his early writings (including
“On the Jewish Question” and the “Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts”) by authoring the <em>The German
Ideology</em> with Friedrich Engels, before abandoning
philosophical discourse for political economy when
they failed in their efforts to get their nearly unreadable
manuscript published. The Marxist version of immanent
critique argues, similarly to Feuerbach’s anthropological
materialism, that the human species is the true
subject-object of history, but in a more radically
<em>historical</em>-materialist manner emphasizing class
divisions. Despite the fact that <em>The German
Ideology</em> didn’t appear in full until well into the
20<sup>th</sup> century, Marx’s philosophical writings (along
with his political economic writings) became
the bases for Georg Lukács’ phenomenological
Marxism, Karl Mannheim’s sociology of
knowledge, and the Frankfurt School’s own
incarnation of “critical theory” (most notably
formulated by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno,
Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse,
and Jürgen Habermas). During and since this time,
<em>critical</em> theory has become synonymous with an
ever widening range of particular critiques of
alienation and domination. By the late 20<sup>th</sup> century
these critiques expanded especially into identity studies
(race, gender, etc.), cultural studies, environmental
studies and post-structuralism, including post-Marxism.

*** <em>Critical</em> theory: Reclaiming autonomy

Modern <em>critical</em> theory began largely as an
Enlightenment project of reclaiming personal autonomy
on the heels of the Protestant Reformation, the
beginnings of mass literacy, the scientific revolution
and the industrial revolution. It championed critique of
traditional religion (primarily that of the Christianity
of the Roman church) and the medieval social forms
(monarchical feudalism) within which it was embedded.
As the Enlightenment progressed and its contradictions
became more visible, <em>critical</em> theorists turned increasingly towards self-reflection, self-criticism and social
criticism. With the earth-shaking (though mixed)
successes of the English, American and, especially,
French and Haitian revolutions in destroying many
pillars of the old order and beginning the consolidation
of a new capitalist order of nation-states, <em>critical</em>
theory became increasingly identified with the rise in
consciousness of those excluded from power in the
modern regimes. Initially this focus was especially on
the various strata of workers. Of most often secondary
— but later increasing — importance were the status
of women and children, religious minorities (most
importantly Jews early on), non-dominant ethnic groups
(especially where codified by differing skin colors),
cultural minorities (including minority forms of diet
and sexual expression) and those resisting or refusing
capitalist industrialization and the nation-state on a wide
range of levels. What all varieties of <em>critical</em> theory share
is a commitment to some form of <em>autonomy</em> (refusal
of enslavement) coupled with an attempt at <em>immanent
critique</em> of religion, philosophy and other forms of
ideology that can help ground practical resistance to
varying conceptions of alienation and institutional
domination — although many recent forms of critical
theory have been retreating toward relatively pessimistic
and increasingly impotent ironic or nihilistic positions.

The commitment to autonomous or self-conscious
activity was most famously formulated by Immanuel
Kant in “An answer to the question: What is
Enlightenment?” (1784) There Kant argued that
enlightenment meant overcoming immaturity by using
“one’s own understanding without the guidance of
another.” According to Kant autonomy is following
laws that one agrees to give oneself according only
to the dictates of (universal) Reason, since for Kant
every other source of law is “heteronomous.” For
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, historicizing Kant’s
perspective, subjective autonomy must be situated and
actualized only through the process of identifying with
the (rational) substance of one’s developing social
totality. For Ludwig Feuerbach, criticizing Hegel from a
perspective of a sensuously materialist humanism (on his
way to naturalism), autonomy is the human individual as
constituting species-being. While for Bruno Bauer
it is only the critical critic, who has integrated his
particular interests into the historically developing
rational universality who is truly autonomous.
And for Karl Marx any genuine autonomy under
capitalism is relegated only to species-being
divided into class organizations or, alternatively,
to abstract individuals expressing their roles as
class-conscious species-beings. Actual flesh-and-blood human beings conscious of their own lives
and relationships while expressing ideas, values
and goals of their own need not apply. According
to Marxist dogma they are merely abstractions,
because they don’t acknowledge their properly
assigned places in the historical unfolding of
dialectical Reason! (The only exceptions for
actually-existing human beings are for those in the
drivers’ seats of class ideologies and organizations, since
they’re not mere abstractions, unlike all the rest of us.)

*** Heteronomous <em>critical</em> theory

Heteronomous <em>critical</em> theory is <em>critical</em> theory in
the service of heteronomous “autonomy” — or in the
service of heteronomous agency dressed in symbolically
“autonomous” clothes. The defining difference between
genuinely critical <em>self</em>-theory and everything else that
has traditionally gone by the name of “critical theory”
consists in the unyieldingly persistent assertion of
<em>actually-lived autonomy</em> and refusal of submission to
<em>any</em> form of heteronomy — any form of determination
by external imposition — within critical <em>self</em>-theory.
All other (heteronomous) critical theory asserts
forms of <em>merely supposed</em> autonomy that are actually
heteronomous substitutes for my <em>actual</em> autonomy, your
<em>actual</em> autonomy and our <em>actual</em> autonomy. And these
ersatz, reified forms of autonomy are then employed
in recuperative, short-circuited forms of immanent
critique, which deny actually-lived autonomy in favor
of self-alienated forms meant to serve real or imagined
heteronomous agents. All critical theory that is not
consistently critical <em>self</em>-theory then consists in critiques
of particular forms of enslavement merely in order to
substitute other forms of enslavement rather than to
<em>abolish all enslavement</em>. This is a lesson we should
already have learned from religious conflicts, where the
object is never to reclaim our actually-lived autonomy,
but to substitute one form of religious self-alienation
for another. Ultimately, just as all religions are forms
of heteronomous theory, all recuperative critical
theories are also forms of heteronomous theory. But
whereas traditional religions and premodern theories are
usually oriented towards the defense of earlier forms
of enslavement, heteronomous critical theories are
always oriented towards the defense of forms of <em>modern</em>
slavery, and most often towards supposedly ever “freer,”
more “progressive,” forms of modern slavery. This
means that nearly every heteronomous critical theory
is connected — either implicitly or explicitly — to leftist
political-economic theories based in the liberal tradition
of the French Revolution. There the formal differences
of capitalist liberalism were institutionalized in the
seating arrangements of the National Assembly, where
those supporting traditional, monarchical-feudal forms
of order sat on the right side of the speaker and those
advocating radically reformist measures sat on the left.

At least since the French Revolution, just about
every form of critical theory includes assertions by its
authors of the importance and value of at least some
degree of autonomy. Especially since Immanuel Kant’s
critical philosophy, a degree of autonomy has generally
been seen as requisite for the exercise of theoretical
and practical reason. But, at the same time, within any
and every critical tradition of religious, philosophical
and socio-political ideology this degree of autonomy
has also been highly circumscribed or eliminated in
actual doctrines and their practices, whether this is
acknowledged or obscured. Even when it is not made
explicit within critical traditions of theory that there are
unquestionable commands to which one must submit and
dogmatic boundaries beyond which one is not allowed
to think and act, these commands and these boundaries
to thought and action remain in force, and the moment
the partisans of a particular ideology gain any degree
of social, political, economic or military power their
support for modern slavery is revealed according to the
methods with which they participate in or direct the
management of forced labor, resource rationing and
ideological discipline to maintain one or another form of
capitalist, wage-slave regime in power.

Immanuel Kant’s own commitment to autonomy
and maturity extended primarily to the critique of
only the most obviously irrational forms of religious,
metaphysical and moral belief, while demanding
<em>voluntary submission</em> to moral and political laws —
justified through a metaphysical, reified conception of
Reason — and thus to the rationalized power of those
using laws to enslave themselves and others. This
failure to follow through by advocating autonomy (and
maturity) for everyone at every level and in every aspect
of life <em>for themselves</em> continues to haunt all forms of
heteronomous critical theory, where complete, self-creative autonomy is <em>aways</em> hedged through a number
of strategies for a wide variety of reasons. Ultimately
these reasons are all related to concomitant failures in
critical practice that attempt to shield one or another
form of self-alienation from self-consciousness and self-critique, thus allowing for manipulation by ideologues
who understand how to harness this self-alienation to the
institutions of modern slavery — and also how to exploit
it to their own profit.

In fact, since heteronomous theories of every type
basically function as confidence games, they are often
even more effective largely operating at more implicit
levels under the threshold of conscious awareness. Either
way, whether experienced as explicit or implicit, the
commands and boundaries are always enforced zealously
by all the “progressive” institutions of modern slavery
— with any necessary tactic and tool for ensuring compliance and disciplining deviance. The vehemence with
which any serious deviance from heteronomous critical theory is met can often surprise those who naively
take their first forbidden, autonomous step in defiance
of enslaving institutions. Where logical argument is
inadequate (almost always, since the logic of personal
autonomy is ultimately not on the side of slavery, not
even for the most “progressive” forms of slavery), any
and every form of fallacious argument or <em>ad hominem</em>
attack may be employed without embarrassment or
acknowledgement of its invalidity. The point will be to
bully or beat the heretic into submission or to discredit
the heretic through the sheer weight of an avalanche of
fallacious reasoning and personal attacks, each often
mixed with tons of dirt and mud. When necessary
heretics are physically silenced, tortured, imprisoned,
assassinated or massacred in the fine tradition of
enlightened, civilized “argument” (that is, they are only
punished “for their own good” and for “the good of
society,” etc., or for any other allowable heteronomous
rationales). This will nearly always have the salutary
effect of further discrediting the heretic’s obviously
erroneous and overly enthusiastic championing of her or
his own theoretical autonomy — and concomitant refusal
of heteronomous (critical) theory — in the eyes of most
witnesses. When the powers of (un)reason and (il)logic
are not enough, the power of violence always remains
the final solution. There we initially find the inquisitions,
penal colonies, torture chambers, gulags, psychiatric
wards and re-education camps, backed by police, secret
police, institutions of mass-surveillance, and all the tools
of militarized violence — mass murder and terror through
bullets, bombs, poisons, starvation and death camps.

*** <em>Critical</em> theory: Marxist social theory

Marxist ideologies have constituted a wide range
of the most dominant and successful forms of
heteronomous critical theory. Karl Marx (along with
his sidekick and funder Friedrich Engels) managed
to construct a theoretical system claiming the best
of multiple worlds that thereby appealed to several
distinct groups, from working-class activists and liberal
reformists to displaced intellectuals and would-be
bureaucrats of socialism. Even a large number of pro-revolutionary radicals have attempted to employ Marxist
means in multiple countries over the last century and
a half. The primary promise of Marxist ideology has
been the completion and fulfillment of the supposedly
implicit goals of the bourgeois revolutions — in the case
of the French Revolution, for example, the goals of
liberty, equality and fraternity — through the progressive,
capitalist development of the productive forces of the
economy. Onto this was grafted a secondary theme of the
realization of a relatively undefined — but rationalized
— utopian communism that would supposedly coincide
with or immediately follow the realization of bourgeois
capitalist technological development, allowing
mature capitalism to then be consciously redirected to
progressive human social development. Best of all for
displaced intellectuals, Marxism provided the rationale
for intellectual direction of working class organizations
and parties, since deployment of the dialectical Hegelian
philosophical categories of historical materialism (to
“realize” philosophy or Reason in society or history)
translated into the (pseudo-) scientific language of a
simultaneously realist and utopian political-economic
doctrine would be a bit much for your average, everyday
non-intellectual to be expected to understand or master.

Marxist ideologies have historically tended to crystallize around three axes of orientation: parliamentary
multi-party-state social democracy (Kautsky), single-party-state social democracy (Leninism, Trotskyism,
Maoism), and all of the forms of council-communist
social democracy (Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Korsch).
Empirically, ideologies around the first axis have been
the most successful in supporting full development
of the bourgeois capitalist forces of production in the
central imperialist nation-states of Western Europe,
while those of the second axis have been most successful
in developing the capitalist forces of production (instead
of the bourgeoisie) in the less economically developed
nation-states, especially in Asia, Eastern Europe and
Africa. Ideologies of the third axis have been relatively
unsuccessful in supporting <em>or</em> developing the bourgeois
capitalist forces of production anywhere due to their
larger commitments to the secondary (utopian) theme of
Marxism as both means and end. They have generally
been better at disrupting bourgeois capitalist development than at supporting it, as would be expected due to
their tendency to prioritize the realization of a rationalized utopian system of production over the progressive
development of bourgeois capitalist productive forces.
When examined we see that even council communist
forms of social democracy retain essential Marxist
ideological categories and goals. But, whereas the
squalid histories of Marxist social democracy in multi-party-states and the catastrophic histories of Marxist
social democracy in totalitarian one-party-states has long
been rather obvious, any remaining rationalist-utopian
hopes embodied in Marxism are now uneasily sustained
in council-communist ideologies where disillusionment
with their recuperative practices has never (yet) had time
to fully develop due to their rather fleeting episodes of
political-economic realization.

It was in the years following the successful coup
d’état of the Bolsheviks over the socialist Provisional
Government followed by its takeover of the councils
(Soviets) in Russia, and following the defeat of German
council communist tendencies by an alliance of the much
larger Social Democratic Party (SPD) with the military
in Germany, that the Institute for Social Research (ISR,
better known in the US as the Frankfurt School) was
founded. Despite the clear and consistent emancipatory
failures (mostly disasters) of Marxist ideologies in
every instance they had attained political power, the
Frankfurt School was devoted to an independent
program of interdisciplinary academic Marxist research
in support of the various Marxist political tendencies.
However, with the change of the Institute’s directorship
from Carl Grünberg to Max Horkheimer in 1930,
Grünberg’s emphasis on productivist Marxism was
replaced with Horkheimer’s emphasis on what he called
“Critical Theory” in a successful attempt to distance
the Institute from Marxist orthodoxies, while opening
it up to new influences: Weberian sociology, Husserlian
phenomenology, Freudian psychoanalysis, along with
re-encounters with Kant’s critical philosophy and
Hegel’s dialectical idealism. However, once again (as
with the council communists), the essential Marxist
ideological categories and goals were largely retained,
leading since to ever more convoluted defenses of the
foundational dogmas in order to preserve them (and
the self-alienation they require) relatively unchanged.
Centrally, for the Frankfurt School critical theorists,
this has meant retaining the primacy of the fetishized
metaphysical Hegelian collective subjectivity in one
“materialist” ideal form or another, along with the
requisite reified forms of social Reason. However, as
the fundamental Marxist categories and goals of the
Frankfurt School theorists became more and more
detached from any actually-existing reified (collective)
intersubjectivities in the real world they progressively
retreated towards impotent social-philosophical
speculation — nearly wholly transcendent of the
immanent present by the end of Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno’s careers. As Martin Jay notes in <em>The
Dialectical Imagination</em>, his history of the Institute for
Social Research, “Horkheimer and the other [Frankfurt
School members] were never willing to ... [unmask]
Marxism as just one more ideology among others.”
(p. 63) Traditional Marxist ideologies may be kept
alive largely on academic life-support these days, but
a few zombies still attempt to embody their dogmas.
The progressive irrelevance of the Frankfurt School is
now represented mainly by Jürgen Habermas’ dreary
philosophy of communicative rationality (locating
a reified reason in structures of reified interpersonal
communication) and Axel Honneth’s incoherent and
highly reified philosophy of recognition.

*** Postmodern critical theory: Structuralist and post-structuralist ideologies

With the contemporary exhaustion of traditional
Marxist ideologies and stagnation of Frankfurt
School critical theories, postmodern critical theories
have progressively claimed center stage in the
recuperative arena. Instead of the line from Kant to
Hegel through Feuerbach to Marx and the Frankfurt
School, postmodern critical theorists have tended to
take a number of lines from Kant and Hegel through
Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, or then through Darwin and
Brentano to Freud, or through Brentano and Husserl to
Heidegger, or often various combinations of any or all of
these with or without encounters with strands of Marxist
critical theory (as in the post-Marxisms). A central
influence shared to some degree by theorists following
most of these lines has been a historical movement
through structuralism to post-structuralism. Structuralists
— like Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Piaget, Althusser,
Barthes, Lacan and Foucault — attempted to explain
human socio-cultural life in terms of occultly abstract
structures — often supposed linguistic structures — that
are neither material nor ideal. While post-structuralists
— like Althusser, Barthes, Baudrillard, Lacan, Deleuze,
Derrida, Butler and Foucault (obviously including
many former structuralists) — increasingly questioned
certain aspects of structuralist dogmas and reifications,
especially the exclusionary, ahistorical, asocial and/or non-embodied nature of many structuralist theories.
The large number of directions taken by postmodern
or post-structuralist critical theories makes any unitary
characterization of their underlying similarities difficult.
But they most often share one or another form of
reactive critique of structural determinations that still
preserves those determinations, merely in some sort of
modified, more fluid ways. The glaring excesses of the
structuralist reduction of human life to determination
by abstract structures has given way to various earnest
(or occasionally playful) partial critiques of structure
that are often comparable to negative theologies in that
they chip away from the outside by describing what <em>isn’t</em>
the case in attempts to indirectly reveal what might still
be left. The most widely influential post-structuralist
stances belong to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and
Michel Foucault’s archeological/genealogical projects.

Deconstruction can be understood as relentless
critique presupposing that (<em>reified</em>) language (or <em>reified</em>
representational) structures — at least <em>mediate</em>, but in
Derrida’s archetypal version — <em>create</em> all meanings.
(No consideration is given by Derrida that <em>non</em>reified
language use can ever exist.) Deconstruction thus
functions as a more radical or self-critical version of
Heidegger’s <em>ontological</em> understanding that “language
speaks” (“Die Sprache spricht.”) Within this reified
understanding, we don’t create linguistic conceptions,
linguistic conceptions create our cultural world, which
then appears trapped within a predetermined linguistic
web of reified meanings that construct our lives. The best
we can do is to maintain a critical stance towards and
refuse any possibility of “presence” (without “absence”),
any possibility of life prior to an ontological mediation
of language. Deconstruction represents the recursive
nightmare of a self-alienated, “...rationalist mirror-world
[where] Truth, Value and Reality are all representations
rather than lived activities themselves.”[12]

Foucault’s archeology and genealogies similarly
presuppose that “epistemic structures” or “historical
<em>a prioris</em>” or “grounds of truth and falsehood”
(or “problematizations”) can be uncovered that
(autonomously or through “power/knowledge” or
“practice”) historically determine or construct empirical
subjectivity and objectivity, although Foucault always
seemed to leave at least some tiny bit of wiggle room
for the possibilities of personal power (as “resistance”
to power) as he analyzed and criticized “regimes of
practice” (institutions, ideologies, etc.). In his own
academic-practical regime Foucault provided semi-critical histories of madness and the clinic, a somewhat
brilliant though aporetic structuralist account of the
historical stages of (<em>reified</em>) knowledge in Europe
since 1600 (in <em>The Order of Things</em>),[13] and histories/critiques of modern forms of discipline and punishment,
and of ancient and modern sexualities (as modes of
self-production). But he made it clear that he was
neither ready nor willing to leave philosophy and
ideology behind, ultimately reproducing somewhat
more interesting and convoluted arguments that remain
trapped within the boundaries of reified thought with
only self-contradictory hints of any possible way out.

Postmodern critical theories thus generally defend
anti-humanist (structuralist/post-structuralist) forms
of autonomy supposedly revealed through their
fragmentary, multi-directional, immanent critiques of
structural bases. But these forms of autonomy are never
my autonomy, your autonomy or our autonomy. They are
tortuously abstract conceptions from impossibly-other
<em>imagined</em> perspectives, constructed through the never-ending interplay of structures and critiques. They are
all thus reified, heteronomous forms of critical theory
— consciously remaining within the symbolic realm of
philosophy or religion, and thus of ideology. In fact
many claim it is impossible to ever leave this realm,
despite the fact that most also claim that this realm is not
and cannot be ahistorical, making it hard to explain how
an historically-constructed realm can develop that, once
constituted or entered, suddenly has no possible exit!

*** Ideological critiques of ideology: Recuperation through <em>critical</em> ideologies

In a world of near-universal slavery anything but
genuinely autonomous, self-directed activity is expected.
And this expectation will invariably be expressed in
any and every institutionally tolerated form of thought.
This includes every tolerated form of critical thought.
To be tolerated each form of critical theory must
pledge allegiance at the least to the need for universal
enslavement (though rarely in such explicit language
— both modern slavers <em>and</em> slaves definitely prefer
euphemisms). Each form of heteronomous critical theory
must include dire warnings against deviating from any
path that doesn’t obsequiously quaver before the proper
universal (or universally anti-universal) abstractions
embodied by absolutely necessary hierarchical,
bureaucratic institutions. (This goes even for too many
self-described anarchists, who cannot conceive of the
supposedly-desired absence of the state without also
proclaiming the absolute necessity of bureaucratic,
[self-]governing bodies to ensure human submission
to the needs of society, particular social classes, a
socialist economy, political democracy and/or other
unquestionably “necessary” abstractions employed
to conceal their underlying hierarchical, institutional
assumptions.) Each form of tolerated thought, critical
or not, must demonstrate a commitment to universal
slavery by expressing identification with it in one
or another predictable form. Most of these forms of
identification with universal (or universally dispersed)
slavery — in these modern (or post-modern), enlightened
times — will themselves be characterized as modes of
freedom, self-realization, self-determination, or other
highly deceptive conceptions. Let’s face it, slavery itself
is a hard sell. But slavery dolled up in the modern guise
of freedom, self-realization or self-determination — no
matter how unbelievably (consider “the commune” or
“communization,” “<em>différance</em>,” “ecological democracy,”
“body without organs,” etc.) — will nearly always be
more attractive to the average gull preferring a “50%-off
Sale” price to the same price offered without a “Sale!”

The only intolerable form of critical theory (for
every theologist, philosopher, ideologist and any other
consciousness cop) is critical self-theory — theory which
implacably proposes my, your or our perspective, and thus
refuses any form of enslavement and cannot be recuperated
without transformation into heteronomous self-theory.

The typically illogical critiques of any attempts at
genuinely non-ideological self-theory usually include a
redefinition of the individual human being as necessarily
isolated and/or unnaturally autonomous or self-sufficient (somehow unaffected by natural objects, other
humans, etc.) in order to then claim that the individual
human being <em>of the non-ideological self-theory</em> is an
“abstraction,” while ignoring the fact that it is the
<em>ideological critic</em> of non-ideological self-theory who has
created the reified definition that is then castigated!

*** Slave theory: Religion, philosophy and
ideology

We live in a shared social world in which slavery
(systematic relations of domination and submission)
is a taken-for-granted fact of life that is enforced
and reinforced at every turn in every institution of
modern civilization. But in modern everyday discourse
Slavery has become invisible, except as a marginalized
concept applicable only to the very worst instances of
enslavement in other times, other places or the furthest
reaches of today’s criminal underworld. The deliberate
and pervasive construction of the invisibility of modern
slavery in everyday life has proven the most effective
and enduring strategy for maintaining the existence of
enslaving institutions to the extent that it defines the
modern social era. It is now nearly impossible to find
defenders of slavery beyond the more disconcertingly
honest of religious, philosophical or ideological fanatics.
The world of religious fanaticism (those willing to vow
complete submission and enslavement to gods as the
highest form of virtue), philosophical fanaticism (those
proclaiming their absolute submission to the laws of
Reason and Morality), and ideological fanaticism (those
proclaiming suicidally murderous devotion to parties
or nation-states) is increasingly alien to the spirit of the
modern age. The world of explicitly <em>savish</em> fanaticism
remains a more and more incomprehensible relic of the
premodern and early modern ages. In the enlightened,
fully modern (or postmodern) age everyone wants to
be “free.” But freedom is a very slippery and highly
contextual concept (consider the opening epigraph to
this essay). Thus “freedom” makes a perfect disguise
for any and all forms of enslavement — a perfect means
for hiding or minimizing the existence of fundamentally
enslaving political, economic and ideological systems,
by portraying them as “free” in particular arrays of
non-fundamental, relatively superficial, contexts. But
the nearly-ubiquitous success of this strategy always
depends directly upon an underlying, unspoken, but
continuous agreement that each person must identify
implicitly and unquestionably with the ultimate
necessity for his or her dependency and enslavement.
Wherever and whenever it happens, the absence of such
agreement — and, especially, its flaunting — places the
entire modern system of slave discipline in question.
Therefore it is plain to every loyal functionary within
the institutions of modern slavery that this is <em>the</em>
most crucial of social taboos to uphold. And each
modern slave — each individual person who implicitly,
unspokenly and continuously identifies as a slave (a
“citizen,” a “free woman” or “free man” <em>under the law</em>,
etc.) within the institutions of modern civilization — also
understands the necessity for defending this taboo from
any challenges, although most often as a function of the
passive aggression of their resentment at anyone not
playing by the same rules of submission they feel they
have been forced into, rather than as a result of their
total identification with their ideological and institutional
masters.

“Slave theory” is another name for heteronomous
theories, but putting the emphasis on their underlying,
common social/institutional function <em>along with</em>
the displacement of autonomy emphasized by the
“heteronomous” label. Slave theories, however central
or peripheral, simple or complex, coherent or incoherent,
all serve to displace lived (subjective/objective)
autonomy, and do so by attributing it instead to some
abstract, imagined subjectivity. Slave theory includes
every religion that claims any transcendent spirit(s),
god(s) or planes of existence that are supposed to be
completely beyond any human experience (or whose
existence in our life-world amounts to no more than
wishful thinking or pure fiction). Slave theory includes
all of philosophy, if philosophy is defined as the pursuit
of absolute or transcendent Ground, Truth, Value, Being,
Subjectivity, Number or Concepts. And slave theory
includes every other form of ideology, in which theory
is constructed around any form of imagined subjectivity
that is intended to displace anyone’s actually-lived self-theory, as in any form of modern liberalism including
all types of Marxism, all types of radical or reformist
environmentalism, all types of identity politics, etc.[14]

Ultimately, every form of ideology or heteronomous
thought <em>is</em> self-alienation in the realm of conceptual
thought, and this conceptual self-alienation is a reflection
in theory of the self-alienation that is a predictable result
of every institutional practice of modern slavery in a
world of slaves and commodities — and their respective
prices. However, this self-alienation is not the reified,
abstract alienation of theology, philosophy or social
ideologies, in which a reified subjectivity is conceived as
being alienated from some sort of larger, more objective
abstraction like god or spirit, society, species-being,
reason, etc. It is simply the <em>self</em>-alienation involved in
each person choosing to refuse responsibility for his
or her life-activities and to instead carve out some tiny
area of privately-claimed — but relatively impotent —
subjectivity, while submitting to (and thus attributing his
or her actions to) one or many outside, occult force(s).[15]

This self-alienation essential to every ideology,
requires the (self-)creation of some sort of central
conceptual gap, split, rupture, dehiscence or dualism
between one’s reified subjectivity (or tiny self) and
the portion of one’s life and acts one disowns in order
to submit to. Absent an absolute need expressed for
submission to an abstract enslaving master, ideologies
are simply illogical and nonsensical. But given
the overarching desperation inherent in existential
submission, this illogic becomes the central logic of
all conceptual life — and in a world of near-universal
modern slavery it becomes the central logic of all social
life. Given the social unanimity required to maintain
the illusion that modern slavery is sane and rational
and should remain invisible at all times, it should
then not be in the least surprising that any violations
of this institutionally-enforced unanimity will meet
with suppression or censorship whenever possible, or
wild misrepresentations and denunciations when
necessary. Therefore it should be understood that
for all ideologists, including philosophers and
theologists of whatever denomination, critical self-theory (or in some cases, even of self-theory!) will
be seen as completely impossible or unspeakable,
and if it <em>were</em> (not that it ever really <em>could be</em>)
possible, then it would be pure egoism, and thus an
unmitigated evil that would have to be crushed.

This self-alienation must always include a
refusal of responsibility, a refusal to mature and
grow up, and a refusal of identity with one’s whole
self/world. Responsibility is then redefined as the
necessity for submission (to law, society, nature,
morality, or to one’s god or master), rather than
the ability to respond as an autonomous being
in whatever manner one deems appropriate in any
relationship into which one might enter. The refusal of
maturity (of the autonomous refusal of heteronomy) is
then redefined as the absolutely-necessary submission
required for anyone to attain true maturity under
god, under law, or under any other imagined master.
And the refusal to identify oneself conceptually with
one’s entire life/world is redefined as realism, as the
acknowledgement that humans are by nature divided,
crippled or suffering beings.

And, finally, this self-alienation leads to the
schizoid passive-aggressive, repetitive-compulsive,
sadomasochistic, idealistic-narcissistic styles dominant
within and shared by all contemporary ideologies.
Each of these ideological styles may emphasize one or
another of these moments above others, but all share
each of them to a significant degree. This is because
all ideologies share the same basic anatomy of self-alienation, and this self-alienation can be analyzed
phenomenally in the same basic patterns involving
unquestioned submission to and identification with the
idealized slave-master in order to share in the expression
of the master’s powers, the refusal to exercise one’s own
autonomy and responsibility by projecting this autonomy
and responsibility onto the idealized master — which then
allows one to act without guilt in attacking, torturing,
plundering and murdering any infidels, heretics, enemies
or egoists as long as it is done according to the will or
law of the idealized slave-master. This is the dominant
pattern of life under modern slavery.

*** The <em>reversal</em> of perspective: From self-alienating heteronomy to lived autonomy

Radically <em>reversing</em> perspective returns an inside-out, heteronomously-constructed world to its one and
only actually-lived perspective: <em>my</em> perspective for
me, <em>your</em> perspective for you and each of <em>our own
particular, inalienable</em> perspectives for each and all of
us. Instead of working against ourselves in attempts
to see and understand the world through the eyes of
slave masters (through God’s, Reason’s, Society’s, the
Economy’s or the Nation-State’s perspective, etc.) as if
we ourselves really only exist as their objects, critical
self-theory involves a complete and permanent reversal
of perspective through which we consistently refuse to
believe that we are primarily the objects of others rather
than self-creators responsible for our own lives, choices
and actions — living with other self-creators who <em>with us</em>
can refuse, resist and together hold the key to abolishing
the worldwide hegemony of modern slavery.

This world-shaking reversal of perspective reduces
Immanuel Kant’s “Copernican turn” (his philosophical
turn to examining empirical subjectivity to reveal the
transcendental conditions of knowledge) to a relatively
minor status in the history of philosophical slave theory.
And it does this for each of us the moment we take it
up for ourselves, with a clarity and power that have
to be directly experienced to be appreciated at all. To
understand what is at stake, Kant’s “Copernican turn”
in philosophy needs to be briefly reconsidered and
compared to critical self-theory’s much more radical
<em>reversal</em> of perspective. Kant portrayed his turn or
revolution in <em>philosophical perspective</em> as analogous
to the supplanting of the Ptolemaic account of the
traditionally <em>geocentric</em> (stationary Earth-centered)
universe by the new <em>heliocentric</em> (sun-centered, Earth
moving) account “discovered” by Copernicus in the
16<sup>th</sup> century (<em>new</em> in the sense that it was systematically
defended in a newly more convincing manner than
heliocentric models of the previous two thousand years
had been). In this Copernican turn, Kant rejected the
possibilities of the speculative metaphysics of his time,
all the forms of “pure reason” — of idealism, realism,
and materialism then current — as presupposing forms
of knowledge not possibly available to us, leaving us
instead with assurance of only empirical subjectivity
(especially since Descartes’ <em>cogito</em> and Hume’s skeptical
empiricism) and what we can possibly know from the
perspective of this subjectivity. According to Kant we
can never possibly know the <em>thing-in-itself</em>, because
this necessarily remains hidden on the other side of our
experience — inaccessible to our point-of-view. What
we <em>can</em> discover in our experience, though, are
the transcendental “pure reason” or <em>a priori</em>
conditions of knowing that Kant considered
necessary for us conceive of ourselves and our
world at all. The great bulk of all the modern
and postmodern philosophical efforts since Kant 5
has been built on the immanent metaphysics of
these Kantian transcendental presuppositions, or
else to a large degree in response to them — and/or in response to those so influenced like Fichte,
Schelling, Schopenhauer Hegel, Kierkegaard,
Dilthey, Nietzsche, Husserl, Sartre and all the
rest.

This is also true to a significant degree for
critical self-theory, although critical self-theory
grows far more out of preconceptual life-experiences and what remain of oral cultural
forms, than from the formal conceptual critique
of philosophical literature. Indeed, critical
self-theory is <em>not</em> philosophy (under any of
its most commonly-accepted definitions).
And the reason it remains outside of philosophy is its
complete reversal of perspective from all ideology, a
reversal of perspective that can, however, also be at least
partially illustrated in relation to Kant’s analogy of the
Copernican turn from Ptolemaic astronomy. The most
interesting aspect of the Copernican turn for critical
self-theorists is that neither Ptolemy nor Copernicus nor
any of their followers ever provide any real evidence
for an absolute, metaphysical center of movement.
Whether the Earth is still or the Earth moves, whether
the Sun and the planets are still or move, or whether
they all move are not questions that can be indisputably
answered. There can only be relative answers — relative
to perspectives, actual or imagined. But none of these
perspectives can possibly have any ultimate claim on
me aside from my own lived perspective, since I am
indisputably the center of my own world and my own
world is all that ever does or can exist for me (just as, by
analogy, I understand that your own world is all that can
ever exist for you). The Ptolemaic or Copernican theories
of astronomical movement are each of only <em>practical</em>
interest to me. I can use either of them (treating their
geocentric or heliocentric perspectives as imaginary),
or any other theories, as I please for my own purposes
and it is all the same to me if they each prove equally
effective. The only differences between theories that
matter to me are practical, and any significant practical
differences can always be proven <em>empirically</em> — that, is
proven in <em>my own life-experience</em>. Similarly, when I turn
to understanding myself in my world, I am interested in
only the practical effects (for my world) of this empirical
knowledge, not in any alleged purely rational or
transcendental laws (beyond any empirical verification,
beyond myself and my world) that are supposed to tell
me what I can and can’t do (which, instead I can always
discover empirically for myself). Kant’s transcendental,
theoretical or pure reason and his morality are merely
(self-)deceptive forms of practical reasoning whose
common purpose is self-alienation.[16] In them Kant and
all of his subsequent followers and critics are always
more interested in providing tortuously obfuscatory
justifications for the imagined external determinants
of their life-experience, which in Kantian theory are
imposed by supposedly pre-existing, timeless, purely
rational forms to which any given human experience
must conform. But any such external (transcendental,
<em>a priori</em>) determinants are never more than <em>imagined</em>
determinants, unless they themselves are part of our
empirical, phenomenal life-experience. Kant was
never able to apply his (really mostly Hume’s) astute
criticisms of the baseless fantasies of other people’s
“pure reason” to the fantasies of his own. The rationales
for every one of Kant’s transcendental <em>a prioris</em> (from
space and time to mathematics) are all just as weak as
were the rationales for the ontological arguments for
the existence of God that Kant criticized. Like every
other rationalist fantasy ever posited (from the first
god, to the idealist theories of Parmenides and Plato
to all of the postmodern critical theories), just because
they appear to provide possible desired solutions to
problems of philosophy or religion (slave theory) does
not mean that what they attempt to describe actually
exists! In fact, every worthwhile practical effect they
might possess can always be assessed by reducing their
statuses to actual empirical objects or by employing
them instrumentally <em>as purely imaginary</em> objects
(without ever presupposing any actual existence).
And whenever their (non-empirical) effects are not
worthwhile, they can always be just as easily ignored
with no untoward consequences ever ensuing (just like
ignoring Santa Claus, or any of the interminable god
theories, or realist theories of mathematics or logics, etc.
whose otiose existence is only ever missed for irrelevant
ulterior reasons). What is always actually being argued
with each and every rationalist presupposition (<em>a priori</em>,
absolute, ontology, morality, etc.) is that each of us is
fundamentally separated from some part of our own life
(of our subjectivity-in-our-own-objective-world), and
that our own life-activity is thus in one way or another
controlled or determined by — or depends in some
important way on — what has been so fundamentally
separated from us. While this alone is not an argument
for slavery as a social institution, it can always function
as (and is always immediately or eventually used as) an
excuse or cover or basis for enslaving institutions, thus
the appropriateness of the label “slave theory.”[17]

The radical <em>reversal</em> of perspective of critical self-theory is then, not any sort of change of one approach to
this kind of separation to another approach from another
side (as from geocentric to heliocentric, or even from
objective transcendence to transcendental subjectivity).
<em>It is the refusal of any and all separations of any part
of myself from myself.</em> Critical self-theory begins from
the integrity of my life-activity, my fully-embodied,
subjective/objective experience (or, better, presubjective
and preobjective experience). I am my entire world, and
my subjectivity and the objective world are both only
conceptual abstractions constructed symbolically from
my seamlessly lived, nonconceptual experience. This
complete refusal of any self-alienation in self-theory
is the minimal criterion for intellectual maturity — the
achievement of genuinely lived autonomy, just as it is
the necessary bedrock of any consistent refusal of <em>all
forms</em> of slavery in our social (intersubjective) practice.

*** Making a <em>first distinction</em>

Using critical self-theory allows one to be
aware that all living-experience and self-activity is
fundamentally and originally non-conceptual. It is
only when one — occasionally or frequently — begins
using complex conceptual systems for communication
within intricately-organized systems of exploitation,
domination and enslavement that one is forced to remain
vigilant at all times against all the traps set to disarm
one’s intelligence and resistance. Then it can become
critical to remember that within each nonconceptual
life-experience or self-activity in which one begins
using concepts, one always begins by making a <em>first
distinction</em>.

Within any ideological form of thinking (including
all religion and philosophy), this <em>first distinction</em> always
involves a fundamental self-division of one’s experience
of which one refuses and disavows any knowledge or
responsibility for making. This hidden, self-alienating
<em>first distinction</em> then becomes the logical basis for
any and every religious, philosophical or ideological
slave theories that might follow. (For a Kantian, if a
Kantian could ever even be aware of it, this <em>passive-transcendental</em> self-alienating move could be called
the condition of “transcendental slavery.”) That is
because this hidden, self-alienating <em>first distinction</em> is
the continuous and consistent premise always necessary
in order to conceive of oneself as a slave, rather than
identifying with one’s own self-creating activity in
one’s own world. More naive and less sophisticated
forms of traditional religion and philosophy <em>do</em> — as
Kant criticizes — concretize and reify abstract fantasies
out of pure imagination to create speculative objective
philosophies, cosmologies and religions to which
humans find themselves passively <em>subjected</em>. But the
Kantian turn to subjectivity merely concretizes and
reifies abstract fantasies of transcendental subjectivity
out of the same purely imaginary realm, to which
humans also find themselves passively <em>subjected</em>. Both
of these realms of subjection (in which human beings
always find themselves as passive sufferers) result from
hidden, self-alienating <em>first distinctions</em> between one or
another form of subjectivity and objectivity (self and
world, self and god, etc.) that each person <em>makes</em>, but
refuses responsibility for ever herself or himself making.

Using critical self-theory allows one to be aware
that this <em>first distinction</em> involves abstractly <em>self</em>-dividing one’s preconceptual life-experience in
two, usually (though not necessarily in all cases)
characterizing the resulting abstract parts using
concepts of subjectivity and objectivity in one form
or another. From that point on, whenever using
one or the other of these first conceptions one can
more easily understand that they are each self-constructed abstractions that have no real meaning
without each other, and no complete meaning
without an awareness of their abstract conceptual
nature and their intentionally self-constructed
origin from nonconceptually-lived-experience.
In addition, once one has conceptually broken
one’s lived experience into two abstract poles, a
<em>third term</em> is always generated that conceptually
connects them again into a conceptual (re-presented)
whole. This <em>third term</em> conceptual representation of the
whole should never, though, be confused with pre-distinguished, nonconceptual lived-activity, especially
when it has been reified. The entire history of religion
and philosophy and all of the grand ideologies can
be viewed from one’s own perspective using critical
self-theory as a necessarily unsuccessful history of
attempting in a myriad of ways to conceptually glue
back together to make a whole the abstract parts (using
some reified variant of the <em>third term</em>) that people have
unself-consciously severed in the first place in order
to create their own self-alienations upon which their
successful enslavement has always been built. The
hidden conceptual history of all of civilization has
been the development of more and more sophisticated
attempts to abolish the original self-alienation that
people have hidden from themselves by elaborating
more and more convoluted attempts at conceptual
resolution of the underlying, fetishized premise of
absolute self-division (using increasingly abstract
<em>third terms</em>). Critical self-theory is the dissolution of
the conceptual problem of civilization by refusing any
underlying, hidden division of one’s life — any original
self-alienation — each and every time one makes this <em>first
distinction</em> within conceptual life-activity. The simple
solution for abolishing human conceptual alienation?
First, <em>consciously stop</em> alienating your own conceptual
activity! Only then does it become more and more clear
how to take the next steps to abolish all forms of modern
slavery!

*** Anatomy of critical self-theory

Critical self-theory is the consciously or critically
theoretical moment of our self-activity through
which we refuse all self-alienation, and our unself-alienated self-activity is the self-creation of our lives
while understanding ourselves as self-creators. Like
symbolically-mediated self-theory, critical self-theory
can be characterized as higher level organismic
functioning that involves complex adaptation and
organization of perceptual-motor abilities (including
communicative efforts) to live in our world (our natural
and social life context). The only difference is that all
communicative efforts that include any use of symbols
or symbolic systems are consciously and critically
understood as our self-creations to the degree and level
of awareness that we feel are necessary to prevent
any self-alienation. The schematic anatomy of critical
self-theory is: complex-nonsymbolict+symbolic-desire-or-problem <em>within the context of consciously resisting
any</em> heternomous-theory-demands-to-submit-to-various-claims-of-higher-priority-more-real-entities. To the
extent that the resulting practical activity manages
to be satisfactory (satisfies the desire or solves the
problem) as well as fends off all attempts at dividing
oneself against oneself, and refuses any collaboration
with enslaving institutions to the best of one’s powers,
its use is reinforced. And to the extent that the activity
is unsatisfactory, it may be reconfigured or even
avoided in similar future situations. Note that in this
schematic consideration of the nature and meaning
of abstract concepts — like self, world and especially
abstract entities fetishized by other people (particularly
those providing cover to enslaving institutions) can
become of central importance for critique and refusal
of reification. All that is involved is still fundamentally
practical reason, but a practical reason that is threatened
by pressures demanding one’s self-alienation and
submission to heteronomous powers. Everything that
could be simple in a non-slave world, requires careful
negotiation, including deception and lying in some
circumstances, to avoid becoming victim to informers,
cops and other professional enforcers for enslaving
institutions. One may be forced to temporarily submit
to more powerful forces (usually made up of large
groups of ideological dupes — all the modern and post-modern zombie slaves) in order to survive and fight
another day; or one may be able to evade, criticize or
destabilize aspects of modern slave systems; or one may
€ven openly defy or destroy aspects of these systems,
depending upon one’s judgment of what is possible, how
Open those around are to resistance, and what one can
get away with in any given situation. But as long as one
resists and refuses the self-division of self-alienation one
may win or lose battles on any particular given terrain
but still continue to evade and live as autonomously as
possible while fighting to win the larger war against all
forms of modern slavery.

Critical self-theory is our early-warning and our
self-defense system, both of which are highly important
in a world of nearly ubiquitous self-alienation and
enslavement. In many situations critical self-theory is
unnecessary, depending upon where we are and with
whom we are associating and interacting. In relatively
transparent and convivial or in socially-isolated natural
surroundings dealing with sympathetic family and
friends or with primarily non-human beings, we may
need only rarely consider using critical self-theory in
our communications. But when dealing with politicians,
bureaucrats, the organizers and managers of wage labor,
commodity commerce, police and legal systems, soldiers
and military systems, etc. it may be necessary to keep
constantly on guard. And, especially, when dealing
with culture cops — journalism, mass entertainment and
popular culture, teachers and professors at every level,
priests and moralists and holy men, advertisers and
recruiters and salesmen — critical self-theory may be
essential to evading all the confidence games, keeping
oneself intact, and avoiding every attempt made to
neuter one’s critical self-consciousness and harness
oneself to every sort of heteronomously-directed
machine, cause and project.

*** <em>Critical</em> self-theory

<em>Critical</em> self-theory is consciously-employed self-theory, the use of self-theory with an awareness that it
is for each of us nothing more nor less than a technique
(or set of techniques) for our practical negotiation
and enjoyment of our world. Critical self-theory, most
broadly, is consciously and critically thinking for
oneself. At its deepest, most coherent levels critical
self-theory involves a systematically self-critical
attitude towards all of the tools we use to conceptualize,
communicate, analyze, investigate, and intervene in our
world. It does not stop short in order to leave any aspect
of theory out-of-bounds to critique and it does not stop
short from refusing submission to every heteronomous
power or dogmatic principle. It is our own theoretical
grasping of our own lives. When it is consistent and
complete it leaves no room for any self-alienating
theory: no religion, no ideology, no fixed reifications
of our life experience at all. That means there is then
no room for our manipulation or control by others
through ideology (which, of course, says nothing about
other power relations), because we already consciously
and critically reject — or appropriate and reinterpret
— every instance of reified language (and even non-linguistic symbols) from our own unself-alienated, lived
perspective. We use symbols and language and refuse to
be used by them.

Critical self-theory involves the refusal of any reified
(normative, prescriptive, reductionist) conceptions of
autonomy that most often bear little or no relationship
to people’s actually-lived intentions and desires. It
involves the use of immanent critique to recognize and
discover ways for actually-living people to claim or
reclaim their own autonomous powers for themselves
in their own particular relations with other people and
with their world. Critical self-theory is not a philosophy
or set of philosophies in any traditional sense of these
words. It makes no transcendent claims at all. It remains
completely an expression of one’s own immanent,
directly-lived experience, and is therefore an expression
of one’s own rationality, one’s own values, and one’s
own ways of living. Therefore it is not a philosophy of
the ego, a philosophy of individualism, or a philosophy
of anything else, since it proposes no fixed ideas, no
self-alienations, and no reified abstractions, unlike every
historical philosophy that has ever existed.

Critical self-theory does not <em>summarily</em> reject
anything in any sensible (or halfway sensible, or
even nonsensical) form of thought or practice in the
world, aside from their dogmatic presuppositions, their
conceptual fixations, their required self-alienations,
and their unconsciously reified abstractions. Critical
self-theory is the method by which anyone can critically
appropriate any form of thought or practice by first
destroying and eliminating its heteronomous elements
and then making whatever of its aspects that one still
values one’s own in whatever manner one chooses.
Critical self-theory makes no pretense to a perfect
rationality according to any external measure. It is what
it is and needs to be nothing more nor less. Critical self-theory proposes no particular ontological theories about
who we are, no particular epistemological theories about
how we know anything, no particular axiological or
moral theories about what we need to do, no particular
political-economic theories about how we should
organize our lives together, and no particular aesthetic
theories about how we should feel about or interpret or
create works of art. Critical self-theory is merely the
refusal of every possible form of self-alienation in the
conception and practice of any of these theories. Critical
self-theory includes no particular theory of subjectivity
or objectivity or the self or world. But it does involve
an insistence that how we act, think, communicate and
identify ourselves is always a matter of our own choice
subject to no outside measure.[18]

Most basically, using critical self-theory means
the refusal to ever mistake one’s reflections — one’s
conceptions or representations — for one’s own lived-activity or lived-experience. It is to accept that I am
fully self-creating, fully responsible for myself, and that
I require no mediators in order to live my own life — no
figure or person or thing to hide behind, understanding
that I am my whole world and my whole world is my
own self to the extent of all my powers.[19]

[1] Critical self-theory is not a pre-constructed theory that is after-the-fact
given the name “critical self-theory.” It is merely the name for what
it fits and what fits it: intentionally (conceptually) presuppositionless,
non-dogmatic self-theory. Any non-ideological critique of ideology or any
non-ideological critique of everyday life, or any self-critical self-theory
is necessarily entailed through use of the name “critical self-theory” by
this definition. Conceptual presuppositionlessness entails a refusal of any
dogma — of any metaphysics or ontology, of any fixed epistemology, and
of any compulsory <em>a prioris</em>, laws, absolutes or moralities.

[2] This is not to say that no person who ever accepts a job as an academic,
expert, professional, etc. can ever construct or understand critical self-theory. But no person can do so while seriously identifying themselves and
their lives with some particular role as academic, expert or professional.
Critical self-theory is the theory of those who do not unself-critically
subject themselves to any sort of symbolic abstractions, including roles.
They may use roles, but they always understand they are not and cannot
actually be those roles. To the extent people are able to submit to and lose
themselves in compulsory roles, critical theory will be absent.

[3] Self-theory includes what is sometimes termed the “natural attitude”
in phenomenology and the sociology of knowledge, though without any
of their dogmatic presuppositions. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s
<em>The Social Construction of Reality</em> (1966) is an example of the various
phenomenological and sociological perspectives on everyday life and the
constitution of social reality that <em>claim</em> to describe our experience, but
completely fail to adequately capture the most fundamental and important
relations and conflicts between the pre-conceptual and conceptual
levels of experience, between recognition and reification, and between
self-ownership and self-alienation. And with no logical justification,
Berger and Luckmann insist on positing a reified “social objectivity”
rather than an intersubjectively constituted objectivity. Incredibly they
in all seriousness propose — with no evidence besides a vague reference
to the structuralist fantasies of Lévy-Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss and Piaget — a
speculative philosophy of history in which “the original apprehension of
the social world is highly reified” and that “<em>de</em>reification in consciousness
... is a relatively late development in history”! (p. 90) They simply give no
explanation how reification could precede the recognitions reified.

[4] Because they are never directly experienced by us we can only imagine
what these perspectives are like by putting ourselves in their centers
through fantasizing, although we can gain more or less realism in the
Process by making analogies between our actually-lived experiences and
those we are constructing with our imagination. That this is the case even
for constructing ideas of how other people’s perspectives appear in their
wn experience should be obvious, even if it is usually unacknowledged.

[5] When I speak of “pre-theory” or “the pre-theoretical” I’m not
speaking of pre-theoretical “beliefs,” “intuitions” or “commitments,”
but of embodied or lived preconceptual or pre-theoretical <em>techniques</em> of
perceptual-motor judgement that operate on a cognitive level prior to
(what is usually included in the idea of) conception or of any objectified
systems of symbolization like languages. From critical, non-ideological
perspectives, there is simply nowhere else for symbolically-embodied
theory to find a foundation other than in an already-existing pre-theoretical, embodied rationality. However, that does not mean there aren’t
plenty of other areas or contexts where the descriptor “pre-theoretical”
won’t be perfectly appropriate for use as well. For one example, the
“common sense” — where primitive consciousness originates in humans
and other animals — of Aristotle (see <em>De Anima</em>) seems to be close to or
overlap with “pre-theory” as used here. For another example, although
critical self-theory rejects the reifications of psycho-analytic theories,
the pre-theoretical can be seen as similar to psycho-analytic “primary
process.” And especially relevant are descriptions of perceptual-motor
function in Gestalt psychology and Gestalt phenomenology, for example in
the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. More importantly, the pre-theoretical
can be conceived as a level of highly-organized perceptual-motor
cognition between simple sensorimotor (non-cognitive reflex) functions
and complex conceptual cognition and symbolization. This level of
perceptual-motor coordination and cognition can arguably be described in
<em>either</em> non-conceptual or conceptual terms, depending upon the definition
of “concept” employed, but in either case it is certainly non- or extra-linguistic in its function, since it doesn’t require language acquisition. One
final note: the “pre-theoretical” herein is definitely not equivalent to the
concept under this name employed by Berger and Luckmann (see note 3
above), which appears to apply more to informal, incomplete or primitive
theorization rather than what is actually <em>prior to</em> (pre-) theory.

[6] Critical self-theory is definitely not post-structuralist, a very wide-ranging category of philosophical, literary and social theories and
practices that are possibly most united by their celebration of never-ending
levels of reifying obfuscation through intractable denial of the possibility
of self-creative autonomy.

[7] Slaves are reduced to relative, dependent objects, while gods are
invested with imagined animate, independent life. Slaves are in turn the
archetypal paradigm for modern machines under control of the priests
of technocracy. The development of complex technologies begins with
the correlative development of enslavement (systematically reductive
recognition) and religion (the systematic self-alienation of agency)
in tandem — in domestication of animals and plants, the systematic
domination (and exploitation) of dependents (children, women, etc), and
the systematic enslavement of humans. Each of these practices depends
at a certain level of intensity on the reifications provided by the religious
self-alienation of agency.

[8] In music theory, the term “heteronomous theory” has its own technical
meaning, and refers to music having extrinsic meaning or meaning outside
itself, rather than intrinsic meaning. Thus the meaning for music theory
is rather the opposite of intrinsic rather than the opposite of autonomous,
as it is employed here and — at least since Kant — in critical theory. (See
Immanuel Kant, <em>Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals</em> [1785].)

[9] For example, as given in the <em>Merriam-Webster Dictionary</em> or the <em>New
Oxford American Dictionary</em>.

[10] Marx’s original references to “ideology” are scattered, undeveloped
and inconsistent, given that they were not apparently intended to be central
parts of Marx’s theory. They were primarily used for ad hoc polemical
critique of what Marx and Engels saw as the competing theories of other
post-Hegelians: Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. There is
a vast literature on the subject exploring the inconsistency and incoherence
of Marxist views that I intend to survey in the future. Suffice it to say here
that a careful study of a founding (though late-published) text of Marxism,
<em>Die Deutsche Ideologie</em> (written 1846, published 1932), reveals that the
Marxist conception(s) of ideology primarily derive precisely from Marx’s
failed attempt at disposing of Max Stirner’s critique of heteronomous
theory in <em>Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum</em> (1844), which makes up the
bulk of Marx and Engels’ text.

[11] Minor forms of immanent critique have also originated and developed
within other religions and philosophies worldwide, even including
<em>within</em> the Roman Church itself. Consider, for example, the limited, but
longstanding, Franciscan currents and — more recently — the Catholic
Worker Movement, as well as Liberation Theology, to large degrees
operating within the formal bounds of the Catholic hierarchy. There are
also many well-established traditions of immanence in Eastern religion
and philosophy (where it is often harder to locate where religion ends
and philosophy begins than it is in the West) that have lent themselves to
varying practices of immanent critique.

[12] See my “Clarifying the Unique and Its Self-Creation” in Wolfi
Landstreicher’s translation of <em>Stirner’s Critics</em>, p. 17, note 17 for an
account of the “recursive nightmare” of rationalist reification. Derrida’s
silly, basically delusional, insistence that metaphysics is inescapable —
because even the nonconceptual is a <em>conceptual determination</em>, overlooks
the slight problem that when anyone besides a religious, philosophical
or ideological fanatic speaks of the nonconceptual the referent is less a
determined concept than the actual life we <em>live</em>. For Derrida the function of
reification is merely assumed to be universal, ubiquitous and compulsory,
and any attempt to exit from the structures of reified communication are
dismissed (unself-critically) as impossible in advance. Some of Derrida’s
most fundamental philosophical critiques are aimed at Husserl, Heidegger
and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophies. He sees them
as each making progressively more complete, but always necessarily
incomplete critiques of the self-alienations implicit in the construction
of Kant’s transcendental subjectivity. But his critiques do not touch the
nonconceptual of critical self-theory, nor of Stirner’s <em>Einzige</em> (Unique),
because these lie entirely outside of metaphysics and philosophy. As
Stirner notes, all conceptual development is impossible with the <em>Einzige</em>
because it is a completely nominal, “empty concept.” Stirner points
out in his major work that: “Your thinking has for a presupposition not
‘thinking,’ but you. But thus you do presuppose yourself after all? Yes, but
not for myself, but for my thinking. Before my thinking, there is — I. From
this it follows that my thinking is not preceded by a thought, or that my
thinking is without a ‘presupposition.’ For the presupposition which I am
for my thinking is not one made by thinking, not one thought of, but it is
posited thinking itself, it is the owner of the thought, and proves only that
thinking is nothing more than — property, that an ‘independent’ thinking, a
‘thinking spirit,’ does not exist at all.” (<em>The Unique and Its Own</em>)

[13] In <em>The Archaeology of Knowledge</em> Foucault admits to “avoiding the
ground on which [his discourse] could find support.” (p. 226)

[14] The liberal reformist critics of attenuated, narrowly-conceived
versions of “modern slavery” act as collaborators whose complicity
serves to minimize and hide the forms of enslavement now actually
dominant in the 21<sup>st</sup> century. They collaborate by attempting to reduce the
meanings of slavery to cover only a tiny fraction of particularly egregious
criminal practices, in return for funding and support from foundations,
corporations and governments which themselves rely on the maintenance
and reproduction of these dominant, but relatively invisibilized, forms of
slavery in large part for their <em>own</em> existence.

[15] I call this pervasive style of self-conception the “tiny self” theory.
It is the standard-issue theory of the self required for any ideological
form of thought and practice. The non-reified, anti-ideological style of
self-conception found in critical self-theories involves, on the contrary, an
identity of self and world, or of subjectivity and objectivity, each of which
poles are by themselves always abstractions. It is only my self as my entire
world that I care about, just as it is only my subjectivity to the extent that
‘tis embodied and intertwined within my world that actually exists for me.
It is the duty of ideological thinking to continually claim the impossibility
of anything but <em>tiny</em> selves, and the necessity of something inextricably cut
off from oneself that must be the <em>real center</em> of one’s world.

[16] As even Kant himself has noted, “pure reason” in its theoretical and
Practical manifestations only differs from purely practical understanding
in its much wider and deeper free play of abstraction and imagination. It
is “a single reason in different relations.” (Lewis White Beck, <em>A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason</em>, p. 50) Although for Kant
this wider and deeper reach includes an (imaginary) “transcendental,”
“pure practical reason” of “unconditioned conditions for voluntary action.”
(Beck, p. 41) It is this wider and deeper free play of abstraction and imagination that make theoretical reason so easily susceptible to unself-critical
reification, and thus also so susceptible to wishful thinking of all kinds,
as in religion, (Kantian and every other form of) metaphysics, morality
and social ideologies. Ultimately, all forms of reason can be understood as
forms of practical reason as soon as we refuse every impossible attempt
to prove that we can (in actuality and not just in pure imagination) reason
about that which we cannot ever experience. For critical self-theorists,
then, theoretical, moral and aesthetic reason are just particular modes or
aspects of practical reason, and this is easily understood to be the result
of reason itself (in all its manifestations) being constituted through its
abstraction from our life-activity as a whole.

[17] It is no coincidence that this simple, but devastatingly incapacitating,
inversion in the application of conceptual/linguistic rationality has
persisted and spread through religion and philosophy and all other
ideological forms of thought for over 10,000 years, ever since the dawn
of civilizations. It has been so persistent and successful because self-alienation is self-enslavement in the sphere of consciousness, and as such
it has been self-selected as the best match for the most comfortable forms
of slave consciousness for anyone submitting to institutionalized slave
systems. The pervasive absence of any easily available and understandable
(public) alternative is no mere coincidence. This has been a “culture war”
that was won by the slavers in the sphere of literacy from its beginnings,
and that has progressively isolated and expunged the continuing resistance
from within oral cultures, although it cannot triumph over our underlying
preconceptual life-activity itself without the complete extermination of
human life. The very structures of religion, philosophy and ideologies of
all kinds all boil down to the simple, so far successfully seductive, bargain
that if each of us will just agree to conceptually-alienate our life-activities
and submit to our locally prevalent forms of modern slavery, then we will
be allowed to “heal” the gaping wounds of this alienation through sublime
identification with the unity of grand abstractions, grand narratives and
grand institutions or identification with the postmodern sophistication of
the latest, most hip intellectual clichés. What more could we ever ask?

[18] “I am I only by this, that I make myself; that it is not another who
makes me, but I must be my own work.” — Max Stirner, <em>The Unique and Its
Own</em> (1844).

[19] For those who have carefully read or studied Max Stirner’s works
you may recognize that my use of “self-theory,” “critical self-theory”
and “heteronomous theory” roughly mirrors the conceptual or theoretical
levels of Stirner’s “egoism,” “conscious egoism” and “duped” or
“unconscious egoism.” Stirner’s egoism itself is much, much wider in its
reference to all self-activity, applying primarily at a preconceptual level
as something similar to Brentano and Husserl’s intentionality as mediation
of subject and object, but <em>within</em> consciousness <em>and</em> every other activity.
However, while Husserl’s conception of intentionality originated from the
largely solipsistic and dualistic, subjective attitudes of Descartes and Kant,
Stirner’s egoism originated from the preconceptual unity of the Unique,
from within which the abstractions of subject and object are created, with
the concept of egoism linking them as their <em>conceptual</em> unity. Stirner’s
anti-Cartesian egoism can thus be taken in some contexts as prior to the
consciously conceptual division of subject and object coincident with
the self-creation of conceptual or linguistically-mediated consciousness,
although he also applies it to the conceptual (theoretical) level as well.
While critical self-theory is my own formulation of themes I’ve spent
a life-time developing, it obviously owes much to the world-historical
genius of Max Stirner (and those who influenced him, especially G.W.F.
Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer), as well as to the American
anarchist Paul Goodman (<em>Gestalt Therapy</em>, <em>The Empire City</em>) and the
Gestalt phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (<em>The Phenomenology of
Experience</em>, <em>The Prose of the World</em>, <em>The Visible and the Invisible</em>).

* A brief history of theory

This history of theory begins with me and with you
and with us (me & you & others) from within our own
living perspectives. I construct this history <em>first</em> for
myself — from within my perspective, according to my
own desires, using the words and language-system I have
already created for myself in my interactions and life with
others (and largely shared with them) — and <em>secondarily</em>
for you and others with whom I seek to communicate.
You construct this history for yourself — from within your
own perspective, according to your own desires, and by
reading these words and similarly making some sense of
them for yourself using the language-system you have
already created for yourself in your interactions and life
with others. Without all of this the history of theory I
am writing and you are reading would not exist for me
or for you or for us. This history of theory also begins
immanently, originally without presuppositions — without
any transcendent conditions, <em>a prioris</em>, necessities or
absolutes, because I choose to insist on none. You may go
along for the ride and construct this history for yourself
as well without presuppositions, or you may insist on
constructing it for yourself with presuppositions of your
own choice. I have no ultimate say on your end, just as
you have none on my end because each of us is ultimately
alone in our own experiencing, and only together
indirectly as our experience of each other’s behaviors
however we choose to recognize and interpret them.

This history continues with a speculative prehistory
of the self-creation of myself in my world as best I can
currently understand it by looking backwards, using all
of the empirical cues I have acquired during my lifetime
— and that I can recall here and now — to understand from
whence I come. When examined it will be clear that any
and everyone’s history is constructed upon a prehistory,
a background context from which one’s own history
itself emerges. From my self-creating experience — from
my experience of continuing self-creation — I have
come to understand that my self-creating began before
my current reflective consciousness of my self-creating
experience and beyond the explicit memories I retain.
But from interaction with and observation of others as
they have appeared with birth, matured and grown and
become increasingly self-conscious through reflection
and interactions, I can by analogy understand that I was
born already self-creating, although without the power to
retain much of my experience then as long-term memory,
and without many other powers that I have since attained
through physical maturation and my own interactive
self-development within my world in every sphere of my
activities. By analogous reasoning I can also understand
that all other living organisms appear to be self-creating
in similar ways to my own self-creating experience.
But each of us (self-creating organisms) appear only
as objects within each other’s self-creating experience,
although as complex objects whose unusual behaviors
can be interpreted sympathetically — and eventually
empathically — as self-creating analogously to my own
self-creating experience. My prehistory tells me that my
life-world includes my parents, siblings and relations
including everyone with whom I’ve ever come into any
contact — along with other non-human beings and objects
in nature, but gives no clues as to any <em>ultimate</em> beginning,
although it gives many clues as to a highly-probable
ultimate end in death. My prehistory does give many
clues as to <em>relative</em> origins of human historical life from
within the prehistoric, presocial life early humans share
with other social animals. From this prehistory I can flesh
out a few fundamental understandings about the origins
of my current historical understanding of myself, my
history and our histories, apart and together.

These fundamental understandings include the
inalienability of my own unique perspective which is
always there whenever I look for it in any of my life-activities, and would seem to always be there even when
I’m not looking for it, for example in my sleep or in my
infancy. Without my own unique perspective I find it
impossible to imagine that <em>I</em> could have any experience
of anything at all. These understandings also include
the immanence of my own rationality — along with the
immanence of symbolic conception and communication —
within all of my experiencing of perception and activity.
In almost every case I need not attempt to look outside of
my own body and memories for any reasons for anything
at all, except when I would like to access other people’s
conceptul maps and recipes for achieving complex goals
that require navigational skills I would rather not take
the time and effort to learn strictly on my own from
scratch. And by analogy I understand that the people
who developed these conceptual maps and recipes may
also at times similarly wish to learn from the efforts and
accomplishments of others in other spheres — sometimes
even from my own efforts and accomplishments. When
I now think of reason and rationality, in fact, it is always
only my own rationality and reason that I care about,
along with my own understanding of the rationality and
reason of other people and other living organisms with
which I may to some degree identify, sympathize or
empathize. Rationality or Reason outside of myself and
other organisms appears to be non-sensical, except as a
fantastical projection onto conceptual creations like gods,
spirits, other abstract constructions like nature or the
universe, or abstract collective or cultural constructions
like biospheres, species, societies, classes, nation-states,
economies, languages, etc. As we have just seen, these
prehistorical understandings are relatively continuous
with my current historical understandings, since they
have never been contradicted by them, but rather have
always been reinforced and strengthened by them.

This history of theory itself then continues with my
understanding that at one time human beings, already
living presocially, prerationally pretheoretically and
communicating directly but without use of conscious
symbols, created the first intentional symbols, became
increasingly fluent with them until they began to be used
habitually, and eventually wove them into relatively
systematic word usages understood by larger and larger
communities. Before this development there could be
no such things as conceptual creations like gods, spirits,
abstract beings like nature, or abstract collective beings
like, species, societies, classes, nation-states or languages
because all of these exist primarily as conceptions whose
realities exist only to the extent that they are parasitic
on the nonconceptual (actually-living) realm. With this
development of symbolic communication people were
able to coordinate their interactivities, moving from
presocial to interpersonal interactions and recognition,
from prerational to increasingly rational interactions
and recognition, and from pretheoretical to increasingly
theoretical activities. But this also made reification
possible, and with the creation of reifications, also
choices of conceptual self-creation or self-alienation.

Initially, the temptations of conceptual self-alienation
over conceptual self-creation were most likely fleeting.
Why create and brood over self-alienations unless one
is trapped and somehow unable to enjoy life with kins-people, animal and plant kin, and the world of plenitude
and play. With the development of generalized and
increasingly systematic word-usages communal stories
began to be created and told. Stories of travels and heroic
hunts, stories of occasional encounters with strange
non-kin people, and stories of animal and ancestors began
to be created and told. Story-telling became an art, along
with already present forms of tool-making, hunting, food
gathering and preparation, shelter-building, drumming,
humming, singing, dancing, etc. With the widening of
the conceptually communicative world, every sphere
of human life gained in conceptually-mediated range,
complexity and cooperative interactivity. But with
catastrophe, however occasional or frequent, and whether
through ravages of weather, floods, fires, pests, or even
self-created conflicts, injuries, death or destruction,
suffering and brooding must have eventually led to the
creation of stories of vengeful, vicious and violent spirits
and gods. But still, with good times these stories would
always recede, and be recounted only occasionally as
warnings. Until the <em>big</em> catastrophe hit, and one of the
story-tellers insisted that one of the vicious, vengeful
and violent spirits was at work behind it because the
spirit was angry with people. At first, only a few believed
this story-teller. But after more catastrophes hit over the
years and lifetimes, and were recounted around hearths
once fire was largely domesticated, the story-tellers were
now specialists, shamans. And by now some kinspeople
had become more powerful than others, even though
kept in — at times uneasy — check with increased obligations that people imposed with the increased status they
accorded them. And eventually, people learned how to
not only help favored plants grow, but to sow seeds, and
not only to hunt, but to domesticate the least-resisting
animals. Until at some point the kin-groups grew larger
and the occasionally-propitiated spirits and gods became
relatively permanent along with an increasing influence
of shamans or priests who spoke for them. The relatively
fluid roles of kin leadership became more and more
solidified in certain powerful figures, food gathering and
hunting became increasingly specialized in particular
groups, and occasionally — with the backing of priests —
intimidation or even violent force was used by the more
powerful to compel some people to work more than others at particular tasks for the gods and the kin-group like
monument building or collection of surplus food stores.
And, with the gods approval, sometimes conflicts with
other hostile neighboring groups led to the capture and
temporary enslavement of a few non-kin aliens, before
they escaped or were assimilated, traded or killed.

Then the <em>great</em> catastrophe hit: war, destruction, mass-captivity and relatively permanent enslavement! The most
vicious, vengeful and violent gods were now victorious
over both kin and the enslaved non-kin alike. The hierarchy of spirits and gods was solidified. The priests and
the warriors stood apart and above the common kin. The
non-kin slaves cowered below. This was the beginning of
civilization. And with civilizatiom came the aggregation
of subjugated kin-groups. Some were enslaved, others
became underling satellites or allies. Others were exterminated to the last child. Warfare enlarged, militarized
villages became city-states, the techics of war constantly
developed, including the technics of religious ideology
for kin social-control, non-kin subjugation and mass
mobilizations of all for great surplus-building projects
and great wars. The status of kin and slaves became
increasingly differentiated into degrees and types, with
some <em>slaves</em> ending up with higher status and powers than
lower-statuses of <em>kin</em> (until they eventually fused and all
kin and non-kin became free citizen-slaves in modernity).
The hierarchies, histories and laws of the true victorious
gods were systematized, indoctrinated and symbolized
in great temples and tablets, as well as the high prestige
and status of priests, chiefs and kings and emperors who
did their bidding, and sometimes even claimed godly
status. With the symbolic tabulation of grain stores, the
recording of hierarchies and dynastic histories, and the
compilation of the laws of gods and kings came the origin
of theology and the age of the great religions revealed
in the Word. And finally, all of the spirits and gods
of the peoples of the known world were defeated and
consolidated by the victorious One True God and his own
hierarchy of underlings, down to his priests. And each of
the One True Gods ruled and continue to rule wherever
(and to the extent that) their earthly minions hold power.

Occasionally, errant priests or scribes — or even self-educated sages — would take off on their own outside
the bounds of official state-religious hierarchies. Often
they were killed or imprisoned as heretics, but in some
places they were tolerated — or, rarely, even encouraged
— as long as they were no serious threat to the priests,
warriors and archons or kings. Although most initially
told stories of folk spirits and gods, or occasionally
stories of strange new gods or spirits, in particularly
encouraging circumstances in particular places like
ancient Greece they began to tell more intricate stories
whose logics worked their ways into areas of common-sense knowledge — or occasionally into hierarchical
spheres of knowledge — in sometimes powerful ways
and became known as philosophers. As the stories of
philosophers became more widespread as well as more
systematized they tended to follow either the primary
road of interpreting and reinforcing reigning theologies or
to some degree criticizing or challenging them — in order
to either promote alternative theologies or alternatives
to theological explanations. But all forms of ancient or
traditional philosophy retained two basic assumptions:
that some sort of reason or rationality is the ultimate
guide (whether it comes from Gods or Nature) and that
people are beholden to this reason, while reason is never
(aside from merely practical matters) beholden to people.

With the gradual advent of modernity the previous unities of religious, political-economic and cultural spheres
were fragmented and realigned with the replacement of
serfdom (forms of slavery tied to land), debt-slavery,
bond-slavery and chattel slavery with a wage-slavery,
that was effectively abolished from awareness simply by
renaming it “free labor.” The nation-state replaced kingdoms and empires, and eventually the liberal democratic
— or liberal social-democratic — nation-state became the
generally accepted state form, symbolically elevating first
property-owners and later wage slaves as well to electors
for governments, effectively creating, at least to some
degree, wage-slave republics, given the majority status
of the wage-slave populations in most nation-states.
(This was especially true once the peasantry was driven
from the land in many areas and replaced by agricultural
wage-slaves.) To do this the commons was progressively
abolished and appropriated by large property-owners and
industrialists, nation-states and local government bodies,
and what is left (the atmosphere, the earth’s core and
mantle, genetic codes, outer space) is still being progressively appropriated by modern corporations with the
help of governments at all levels. With the rise of market
capitalism, industrial commodity production, the increasing ubiquity of wage-labor, and the colonization and
displacement of folk cultures by compulsory schooling
and mass media (print, radio, cinema, TV, internet), the
development of social, political, economic and cultural
ideologies gained great importance for social control,
especially to replace the drastic decline in religious
control of many spheres. In Europe modern ideologies
were Often allied with, interpenetrated with, or were modeled on Protestant religious doctrines, which successfully
recuperated rebellious peasantries throughout Europe for
the evolving Christian capitalist civilization. The Protestant Reformation proceeded apace with the beginnings
of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, European
colonization and despoliation of the Earth, and the
reinvention of genocides and world wars on industrialized
scales. For a while it appeared that the burgeoning and
at times anarchic working class might successfully derail
this process, but the trade unions and social democratic
parties of the left — and in the extreme cases of social
revolution, the Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist and Maoist
parties — successfully reintegrated working class rebellion
to save civilization and keep it safe for modern slavery,
largely on the strength of their recuperative ideologies.

The relative mobility and protean instability of the new
capitalist orders in which resources, technologies, labor
and trade spilled across borders required new modes of
systematic social control to maintain elites in power over
the burgeoning multitudes of wage slaves. As military
and political power became increasingly dependent
upon industrial production and wealth, which were
in turn increasingly dependent upon resource control
and technical advances in production and distribution,
great advantages were conferred on those industries
and nation-states able to best integrate wage slaves into
their production, consumption and militarization cycles
in the most effective ways (Fordism or republicanism,
for example). At times this has led to the rise and fall
of various industries, nation-states, state alliances and
empires. The American empire is just the latest on the
cusp of collapse. But capitalist civilization continues
to survive despite its unstable foundations on modern
slavery — redefined as modern freedom and autonomy
by modern and postmodern ideologies. Although there
are always clouds on the horizon, no storm is yet
approaching. But what might happen when genuinely
critical forms of self-theory appear on the scene?