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Radical Philosophy in the Great Crisis of the 21st Century

What do philosophers do? What can they do? And what should they do, if they are radicals?

These time worn questions cannot be answered in general and for all times.

Yet it is possible to find specific and timely answers to them.

In the present great crisis two contexts of doing philosophy seem to meet and to merge in a radically new way: The context of the ideological stateapparatuses (Althusser)which has been constitutive for traditional modern [neuzeitliche] and modern [moderne] continental philosophy, and the

context of the culture industry (Horkheimer/Adorno) which has provided the background for modern [moderne] anglo-saxon, mainly analytic and

pragmatist, philosophy.

The sovereign authority ideologically underlying the state apparatuses has to be deciphered as a secondary effect of regulating capitalist domination,

as well as other relations of domination constitutive for our concrete societies: The spontaneous ideological effects produced by the very structure of

elementary relations of domination (like the relation of wage labour to capital, or like the gender relations in a couple) are taken up and treated

to be normalized, to become productive of submission, and to become compatible with other relations of domination. This is done by officials,

i.e. professionals with authority conveyed by an office (in older types of societies e.g. priests and judges). And they are systematized into coherent

doctrines, and handed on authoritatively to new generations (or other newcomers, like migrants). However, the formal liberty and equality of market

processes pervading all kinds of societal exchange within societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production, as well as the mass-democraticpolitical forms conquered by the modern multitudes do put a real limitation to the efficacy of state apparatuses operating on the model of the church

or the school. It may be argued that the firms of the culture industry in its broadest sense do also function as state apparatuses in so far they

contribute to producing the same over-all effect: the reproduction of the domination in place. This does not take away their important difference in

basic structures and ways of operating: They act by producing and selling commodities, which have to be bought by their consumers (or by

somebody else who sponsors their consumption). This cannot, normally, disregard the liberty and equality of these consumerswho, not to fall

into liberal illusions, are permanently induced to accept the dominating ideologies by their very consumption of these ideologicalcommodities.

The liberty and equality of consumers as well as of producers operating in the culture industry has to be deciphered as the unavoidable entry point

into existing structures of domination and as the characteristic form of their reproduction: Liberated from traditional standards of quality and

tradition the individual consumers freely chose to buy ideological commodities the very consumption of which ordinarily ties them to the ideologies

of domination in place. Even without state manipulation or censorship, the free flow of ideological commodities produced by the culture industry

(and specially by its monopolies, like Bertelsmann, Disney and Google) shapes and reproduces the individual consumer as a willing subject to these

existing forms of dominationincluding their submissiveness to the secondary forms of political domination by and within the state.

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