Book by Iaan Reynolds
Papers by Iaan Reynolds
Thinking Togetherness. Phenomenology and Sociality, 2023
In this paper, I explore the approaches to methodological abstraction and self-alienation develop... more In this paper, I explore the approaches to methodological abstraction and self-alienation developed respectively in Karl Mannheim’s early sociology of intellectuals and in Edmund Husserl’s late transcendental phenomenology. In Mannheim’s early and experimental works, the resistance to abstraction and alienation is located in a stratum of intellectuals able to meaningfully combine diverse cultural currents in a social process of cultivation (Bildung). In Husserl, to contrast, this resistance is grasped as a constant crisis in the methods of pursuing philosophical truth. While these approaches seem difficult to reconcile, I suggest in closing that this difficulty can be related to their shared emphasis on a theoretical response to the practical and historical reality of self-alienation.
Theory & Event, 2023
This essay considers the catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change in relation to two possible ... more This essay considers the catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change in relation to two possible critical-theoretic dispositions. The first, represented by an emblematic passage from Adorno, retains the hope for the realization of a "rational society." The second, represented by a complementary passage from Foucault, enjoins critical theory to abandon any ambition toward criticizing or transforming society at a totalizing level. We argue that the unfolding climate catastrophe demands a conception of critical theory more in line with the first disposition, and that the relevance of the skeptical disposition is likewise seriously undermined if climate change is taken into account.
Radical Philosophy Review, 2023
This paper discusses two thinkers who locate the possibility of revolutionary historical change i... more This paper discusses two thinkers who locate the possibility of revolutionary historical change in political projects oriented toward the formation of subjects and cultivation of sensibility. I begin by considering the relationship between historical violence and education in the works of Walter Benjamin. After introducing the provocative association of education with divine violence found in "Toward the Critique of Violence," I expand on Benjamin's conception of pedagogical force. Highlighting the centrality of education in Benjamin's early work, I argue that his account of learning does not depend on the mastery of students by teachers, nor more generally on the mastery of objective reality by a sovereign subject, but on the mastery of the educational relationship by tradition. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois' discussion of the abolition of slavery, I close by describing the revolutionary cultivation of sensibility as a dynamic and collectively achieved mode of historical learning.
History of the Human Sciences, 2023
The final version of this article can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951221146657
Th... more The final version of this article can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951221146657
This paper examines the differences and affinities between Karl Popper's critical rationalism and Theodor Adorno's critical theory through renewed attention to the original documents of their 1961 debate. While commentaries often describe the Popper-Adorno encounter as a theoretical disappointment, I reveal a confrontation between conceptually opposed programs of social research. Though both theorists are committed to critique as a political and epistemological struggle for human freedom, their conceptions of this struggle are starkly different. In the original seminar papers, we find a conflict between critique as a practice of social rationality (Popper) and a critique of social rationality itself (Adorno). The versions of critical rationalism and critical theory meeting in this debate thus emphasize opposite dimensions of a reflexive practice of immanent critique. In closing, I suggest dissolving this conceptual tension by recovering the educational orientation of critique.
Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 2022
Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 2021
This paper studies the relationship between consciousness and social existence in Georg Lukács’ e... more This paper studies the relationship between consciousness and social existence in Georg Lukács’ early Marxist works through a consideration of his concept of reification. Understanding reification as the process underlying capitalist society’s immediate form of objectivity, I designate dereification as the cultivation of a mediated form of consciousness. In order to better understand the experiential aspects of this cultivation, I supplement my reading of Lukács’ theory of reification with attention to Walter Benjamin’s treatment of experience in capitalist society. I argue that Benjamin’s distinction between experience as the shock of isolated events [Erlebnis] and experience as a long-term practice [Erfahrung] helpfully illuminates Lukács’ conception of dereification, allowing us to see the latter as a long process of cultivation. This account ultimately leads to a consideration of the formal role played by the party—as the facilitator of the working class’s self-education—in Lukács’ philosophy of social praxis.
Consecutio Rerum: Rivista critica della Postmodernità, 2022
Beginning with Freud's treatment of identification as an ambivalent process, we explore identific... more Beginning with Freud's treatment of identification as an ambivalent process, we explore identification's polarization between narcissistic idealization and melancholic division. While narcissistic identification can be seen as a strategy adopted by the ego to avoid the educational development of its drives and to maintain itself either in whole or in part in an infantile state, melancholic identification activates a tension between the ego-ideal and the real ego at the expense of the latter. After discussing the ambivalence of identification, we review Freud's discussion of mass formations as group identifications, arguing that the work of facilitating a productive sublimation of the drives cannot be reduced to a strengthening of the artificial masses represented by social institutions such as the church and the educational system. Instead, the difference between mass formations allowing for collective sublimation and those suffering from narcissistic or melancholic blockages must be found in the productive qualities of the mass itself. In closing, we outline a few ways in which we might begin to understand the political contribution of masses to the maturation of human drives.
Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, 2021
Pre-proof version - find the final version at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2021.2000663
Beg... more Pre-proof version - find the final version at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2021.2000663
Beginning with the influential discussion of the dialectic of progress found in Amy Allen's The End of Progress, this paper outlines some difficulties encountered by critical theories of normative justification drawing on the early Frankfurt School. Characterizing Adorno and Horkheimer's critical social theory as a dialectical reflection eschewing questions of normative foundations, I relate their well-known treatment of the dialectic of enlightenment reason and myth to their critique of capitalist society as a negative totality. By exploring the concepts of historical development used by Adorno and Horkheimer to describe both the progressive domination of capitalism, and the formation and cultivation of reflective consciousness, I trace the importance of progression and its inseparable relationship to regression in these early versions of critical theory. The dialectical social theory found here recognizes the persistence of social contradictions on both a methodological level and on the level of theory's development and expression, a connection potentially obscured by a division of historical progress according to its temporal orientation. Particularly in Adorno's later work, an opposition to the negative social totality requires notions of cultivation and learning which work against the prevailing forms of conceptual thinking, including the concern for the stability of rational foundations.
Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 2023
Pre-proof version - please find the final version at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.19914... more Pre-proof version - please find the final version at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1991420
This paper studies the conflict between critical rationalism and critical theory in Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno's 1961 debate by analyzing their shared rejection of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. Despite the divergences in their respective projects of critical social research, Popper and Adorno agree that Mannheim's sociology of knowledge is uncritical. By investigating their respective assessments of this research program I reveal a deeper similarity between critical rationalism and critical theory. Though both agree on the importance of critique, they are less concerned with the development of critical consciousness as a focus of this project. In this way, Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, particularly in its formative stages, revolves around a set of problems relatively inaccessible to critical rationalism and critical theory, since it is centrally concerned with identifying and cultivating the possibility of critique in society. In closing, I gesture to the importance of political education in Mannheim's early work, suggesting that a return to these experimental texts will yield resources for political thought today.
Studia UBB. Philosophia, 2021
Phenomenological critique attempts to retrieve the lived experience of a human community alienate... more Phenomenological critique attempts to retrieve the lived experience of a human community alienated from its truthful condition and immersed in historical crises brought by processes of objectification and estrangement. This introductory article challenges two methodological assumptions that are largely shared in North American Critical Phenomenology: the definition of phenomenology as a first person approach of experience and the rejection of transcendental eidetics. While reflecting on the importance of otherness and community for phenomenology’s critical orientation, we reconsider the importance of eidetics from the standpoint of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, highlighting its historical and contingent character. Contrary to the received view of Husserl’s classical phenomenology as an idealistic and rigid undertaking, we show that his genetic phenomenology is interested in the material formation of meaning (Sinnbildung), offering resources for a phenomenological approach to a materialist social theory.
Co-Edited Special Issues by Iaan Reynolds
Studia UBB. Philosophia, 2021
As a critique of objectification, phenomenological methodology offers resources for a disruption ... more As a critique of objectification, phenomenological methodology offers resources for a disruption of sedimented or instituted meanings and practices that are hindering the access to a shared life-world, where self-exposure, hesitation, and vulnerability shape our human connections and the practice of our freedom. Relying on the methodological directions sketched in this special issue, we argue in favor of a phenomenological approach to a materialist social theory. For the genetic perspective we indicate, normative imperatives – even if they are limited to a specific social context – tend to cover over living processes of collective emancipation, in the same way in which for Husserl theoretical substructions obscure the realm of the life-world, veiling its intuitive evidence and disorienting the critical work of clarification. If this theoretical tendency toward abstraction is rooted in the actual conditions of the production and reproduction of the social world – a process closely tied to what some have called “real abstraction” – a materially-oriented phenomenology can provide an indispensable set of resources for critical theory, allowing for an in-depth investigation of the lived experience of social forms such as reified individuality and abstract labor.
Book Reviews by Iaan Reynolds
Constelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica, 2023
Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, 2023
Radical Philosophy Review, 2023
Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, 2021
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2021
Conferences by Iaan Reynolds
Biennial conference of the RPA, which was hosted by Utah Valley University's Department of Philos... more Biennial conference of the RPA, which was hosted by Utah Valley University's Department of Philosophy and Humanities and held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City from October 10-12, 2024.
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Book by Iaan Reynolds
This is a preview of the front matter and Introduction. For the full version, please see: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538171882/Education-for-Political-Life-Critique-Theory-and-Practice-in-Karl-Mannheim%E2%80%99s-Sociology-of-Knowledge
Papers by Iaan Reynolds
This paper examines the differences and affinities between Karl Popper's critical rationalism and Theodor Adorno's critical theory through renewed attention to the original documents of their 1961 debate. While commentaries often describe the Popper-Adorno encounter as a theoretical disappointment, I reveal a confrontation between conceptually opposed programs of social research. Though both theorists are committed to critique as a political and epistemological struggle for human freedom, their conceptions of this struggle are starkly different. In the original seminar papers, we find a conflict between critique as a practice of social rationality (Popper) and a critique of social rationality itself (Adorno). The versions of critical rationalism and critical theory meeting in this debate thus emphasize opposite dimensions of a reflexive practice of immanent critique. In closing, I suggest dissolving this conceptual tension by recovering the educational orientation of critique.
Beginning with the influential discussion of the dialectic of progress found in Amy Allen's The End of Progress, this paper outlines some difficulties encountered by critical theories of normative justification drawing on the early Frankfurt School. Characterizing Adorno and Horkheimer's critical social theory as a dialectical reflection eschewing questions of normative foundations, I relate their well-known treatment of the dialectic of enlightenment reason and myth to their critique of capitalist society as a negative totality. By exploring the concepts of historical development used by Adorno and Horkheimer to describe both the progressive domination of capitalism, and the formation and cultivation of reflective consciousness, I trace the importance of progression and its inseparable relationship to regression in these early versions of critical theory. The dialectical social theory found here recognizes the persistence of social contradictions on both a methodological level and on the level of theory's development and expression, a connection potentially obscured by a division of historical progress according to its temporal orientation. Particularly in Adorno's later work, an opposition to the negative social totality requires notions of cultivation and learning which work against the prevailing forms of conceptual thinking, including the concern for the stability of rational foundations.
This paper studies the conflict between critical rationalism and critical theory in Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno's 1961 debate by analyzing their shared rejection of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. Despite the divergences in their respective projects of critical social research, Popper and Adorno agree that Mannheim's sociology of knowledge is uncritical. By investigating their respective assessments of this research program I reveal a deeper similarity between critical rationalism and critical theory. Though both agree on the importance of critique, they are less concerned with the development of critical consciousness as a focus of this project. In this way, Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, particularly in its formative stages, revolves around a set of problems relatively inaccessible to critical rationalism and critical theory, since it is centrally concerned with identifying and cultivating the possibility of critique in society. In closing, I gesture to the importance of political education in Mannheim's early work, suggesting that a return to these experimental texts will yield resources for political thought today.
Co-Edited Special Issues by Iaan Reynolds
Book Reviews by Iaan Reynolds
Adorno and the Ban on Images
Bloomsbury, London and New York, 2021. 232 pp., $35.95 pb,
ISBN: 9781350129221,
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19788_adorno-and-the-ban-on-images-by-sebastian-truskolaski-reviewed-by-iaan-reynolds/
ISBN: 9781350103245
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19255_adorno-and-neoliberalism-the-critique-of-exchange-society-by-charles-a-prusik-reviewed-by-iaan-reynolds/
Conferences by Iaan Reynolds
This is a preview of the front matter and Introduction. For the full version, please see: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538171882/Education-for-Political-Life-Critique-Theory-and-Practice-in-Karl-Mannheim%E2%80%99s-Sociology-of-Knowledge
This paper examines the differences and affinities between Karl Popper's critical rationalism and Theodor Adorno's critical theory through renewed attention to the original documents of their 1961 debate. While commentaries often describe the Popper-Adorno encounter as a theoretical disappointment, I reveal a confrontation between conceptually opposed programs of social research. Though both theorists are committed to critique as a political and epistemological struggle for human freedom, their conceptions of this struggle are starkly different. In the original seminar papers, we find a conflict between critique as a practice of social rationality (Popper) and a critique of social rationality itself (Adorno). The versions of critical rationalism and critical theory meeting in this debate thus emphasize opposite dimensions of a reflexive practice of immanent critique. In closing, I suggest dissolving this conceptual tension by recovering the educational orientation of critique.
Beginning with the influential discussion of the dialectic of progress found in Amy Allen's The End of Progress, this paper outlines some difficulties encountered by critical theories of normative justification drawing on the early Frankfurt School. Characterizing Adorno and Horkheimer's critical social theory as a dialectical reflection eschewing questions of normative foundations, I relate their well-known treatment of the dialectic of enlightenment reason and myth to their critique of capitalist society as a negative totality. By exploring the concepts of historical development used by Adorno and Horkheimer to describe both the progressive domination of capitalism, and the formation and cultivation of reflective consciousness, I trace the importance of progression and its inseparable relationship to regression in these early versions of critical theory. The dialectical social theory found here recognizes the persistence of social contradictions on both a methodological level and on the level of theory's development and expression, a connection potentially obscured by a division of historical progress according to its temporal orientation. Particularly in Adorno's later work, an opposition to the negative social totality requires notions of cultivation and learning which work against the prevailing forms of conceptual thinking, including the concern for the stability of rational foundations.
This paper studies the conflict between critical rationalism and critical theory in Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno's 1961 debate by analyzing their shared rejection of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. Despite the divergences in their respective projects of critical social research, Popper and Adorno agree that Mannheim's sociology of knowledge is uncritical. By investigating their respective assessments of this research program I reveal a deeper similarity between critical rationalism and critical theory. Though both agree on the importance of critique, they are less concerned with the development of critical consciousness as a focus of this project. In this way, Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, particularly in its formative stages, revolves around a set of problems relatively inaccessible to critical rationalism and critical theory, since it is centrally concerned with identifying and cultivating the possibility of critique in society. In closing, I gesture to the importance of political education in Mannheim's early work, suggesting that a return to these experimental texts will yield resources for political thought today.
Adorno and the Ban on Images
Bloomsbury, London and New York, 2021. 232 pp., $35.95 pb,
ISBN: 9781350129221,
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19788_adorno-and-the-ban-on-images-by-sebastian-truskolaski-reviewed-by-iaan-reynolds/
ISBN: 9781350103245
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19255_adorno-and-neoliberalism-the-critique-of-exchange-society-by-charles-a-prusik-reviewed-by-iaan-reynolds/