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 state apparatuses (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-democratic political 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 consumers who, not to fall into liberal illusions, are permanently induced to accept the dominating ideologies by their very consumption of these ideological commodities. 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 domination including their submissiveness to the secondary forms of political domination by and within the state.

The contribution of the activities of philosophers to these processes of reproducing domination has to be analysed in two dimensions: an ordinary dimension in which philosophers operate through given institutional channels referring to the current practices in these domains (scientific research, education, literature and media), and an extra-ordinary dimension in which great philosophers are called upon to address themselves directly to the multitudes of people active in the reproduction processes of their respective societies which are being disturbed by the on-going crisis processes. In both dimensions, it is possible (and urgently needed) to distinguish the processes and activities of truth politics, into which some philosophers typically try to intervene with regard to the ideological state apparatuses, from those of truth marketing, into which other philosophers try to intervene. It is of decisive importance that the intervention of both kinds of philosophers is of a secondary character: there always are already primary processes and activities taking place, before philosophers intervene into them. This is true of truth politics as well as of truth marketing. Radical philosophy has to understand what philosophers do do today in order to build a specific capability of countering these on-going interventions coming from philosophy as it is. Because philosophy, as it is, has always been in the last instance busy in the affirmative reproduction of domination. Critical marxists, radical feminists, radical ecologists, anti-racists and anti-imperialists should begin to understand that this is a common and important cause: to build a space and the substance of a radical philosophy capable of effectively countering the specific activities of the philosophers in place and their affirmative contributions to the reproduction of the present plural configuration of domination.