Grounding Critique: Marxism, Concept Formation, and Embodied Social Relations makes a major contribution to social theory across a very wide range of disciplines and sub-disciplines as we have them in the global academy. These include sociology, political studies, cultural studies, human geography, policy studies, women’s studies, and no doubt other stops in the A-Z lists of universities and colleges. However, that kind of claim, across that kind of list, sets up precisely the kind of tendentious parcellation of understanding and knowledge that Tanyildiz challenges.
The title references Marxism as an on-going intellectual tradition, but for me the primary identification in the book is with Marx himself. Marx had no interest in, or patience with the (very few) academic boundaries of his day. In Grounding Critique, however, Tanyildiz has considerable interest in, and patience with, the sub/disciplinary empires within which the primary contemporary readership lies. However, his project here is not to address readers in familiar terms and comfort zones. Rather the goal is to stretch our minds across society as a subject, by including ourselves in it as participant-observers. In that way – as Hobbes advised, quoting the ancients – nosce teipsum: we read ourselves. How then does this work?
Central to Grounding Critique is a way of looking at how methodology is understood and used within social theory, the social sciences, and human studies more broadly. Hence in the book we are offered a ‘view’ [Ansicht] or ‘outlook’ [Aussicht] or ‘conception’ [Auffassung]. I am quoting Marx’s own self-characterisations here, which, as Tanyildiz makes clear, stand opposed to the deployment of an already validated set of ontological presumptions and epistemological protocols. On that conventional model ‘a researcher’ ‘applies’ these methodological ‘tools’ to an ‘external’ object of study, and truthful results are supposed to emerge. Tanyildiz’s argument, however, is that research objects in social theory are not ‘external’ but rather internal to the researcher who is part of, but necessarily intervening within, the conflictual and reparative activisms of the moment. That approach rules out the deployment of ontological and epistemological presumptions and claims as ‘givens,’ or are unselfconsciously and factitiously ‘deployed’ – an understanding which is also integral to Marx’s own method.
Tanyildiz’s approach arises through the nexus of subject-formation, rather than disembodied subjectivity-formation, because subject-formation takes place as human embodiment in social relations. The embodied subject is thus enacted conceptually as lives-the-way-they-are-actually-lived, including the
However, it is also the case that Tanyildiz’s approach derives just as much from feminist, and particularly from women-of-colour and Black feminist understandings of embodiment. This latter encompasses racializations, as well as gendered and sexualized differences, including further conceptualizations of physically experienced and socially referenced identifications, commonly understood as ‘identities.’
Tanyildiz is rightly critical of the use of intersectionality in relation to liberal, social-democratic and other ‘inclusive’ critiques of exploitation, exclusion, and oppression in so-called liberal-democratic or ‘free market’ capitalist societies. Alternatively, the book points us to the political utility of intersectionality, if understood within its original context, as subverting the race-only/gender-only modes of legal and policy reasoning. The argument of Grounding Critique emerges so effectively because the objects of interest are concepts, such as oppression, intersectionality, and social reproduction, that are currently both controversial in themselves and reference points in practice. This focus on everyday sensuous practice as embodied social relations, a covering-term through which gender, race, class and ability are variously articulated, holds the author’s critiques together.
Indeed, that focus fosters a novel critique of the meta-critiques of intersectionality. The author’s edifying discussions of embodied social relations, sensuous practical activity, and contingent processes of subject-making, speak very directly to how the reader sees and re-visions the social world. This is a powerful contribution to scholarship.
Tanyildiz’s argument emerge with great clarity from critical engagement with two specific bodies of work. One is a selection of contemporary Marxist-feminist treatments of intersectionality, where critique is misunderstood as a process of negation and clarification. And the other is with articulations of social reproduction theory, where critique is contrarily misconstrued as a process of positivity and sublation. Tanyildiz argues instead for a kind of theorizing that explores the gap between the objectified and ideological forms of life – just as Marx was doing when exploring the materialized sensuousness and symbolically effectual character of ‘the commodity.’ Thus, Tanyildiz urges us to reject foreclosure and purification, and explanation as tautology, and get to grips with the ‘excess’ in society-making as knowledge-making. In a revisioned social theory, we should be seeing not just the praxis that lives the
Thus, Grounding Critique redefines concept-formation in a way which transcends the usual distinction between methodology and application, and makes reflexive sense of embodiment and agency. That analytical capstone demonstrates exactly why the author’s critical examination of the two intersecting theoretical/political positions holds together so well.
Critique is a cliché in social theory. But whose work is ‘uncritical’? Grounding Critique resolves that issue synoptically and convincingly.
Terrell Carver
Bristol, UK