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22 Criticism, Inter-subjectivity, and Collective Enunciation T he fields specializing in the knowledge of agency-dependent reality include , familiarly, history, anthropology, psychology, political economy, the humanities, and the fine arts. I have tried to show that they all rely on a conception of sociality as inter-subjective activity, where the “inter” is not meant to indicate separable subjects. It follows that each discipline must be considered to be essentially inter-disciplinary. Their distinctiveness depends on the aspect of sociality under which each is incorporated. An understanding of the integrity of each discipline depends, then, on a self-critical attitude that embraces sociality as its object. By this I mean a sociological attitude that is at once philosophical (attentive to the sub-theoretical aspect of its subject matter ) and theoretical (concerned with and reflexive to the internality of relations brought to notice in the course of theorizing). It takes as its primary matter the knowledge-constituting aspect of human affairs in all respects insofar as those affairs are essentially social; and it takes as its secondary matter whatever appears , as things stand, to manifest or indicate that dimension and, in that respect, to constitute a problem motivating the activity of theorizing. A superficial reason for the claim that self-criticism is a necessary condition of such an attitude is the self-defeating aspect of the temptation to employ methods derived from sciences of agency-independent objectivity and therefore to rely on a corresponding epistemology incompatible with the study of agency-dependent objectivity. I try to show that this temptation is unavoidable within the course of theorizing and constitutes part of the critical tension intrinsic to its relation with the possibility of a product, a specific theory. It is unavoidable because of something about theorizing itself and not because of extra-theoretical tendencies to 378 Chapter 22 objectify, rationalize, or totalize. If so, then criticism must be thought of as a necessary feature of a course of activity and not something brought to it. What follows is a speculative account of the relationship between the idea of criticism, including critical knowledge, and the idea of the essential sociality of human affairs—where sociality is understood in regard to the idea of a multiplicity, which assumes both inter-subjectivity and a course of activity in contrast with action as a particular event. The basic idea is that criticism is an immanent feature of such a course and the source of its transferable knowledge. Critical knowledge can then be identified with the movement of subjectivity within the universe of agency-dependent objectivity to the extent to which it is a moment of, reflexive to, a course of activity. It is then reasonable to say that critical knowledge is no more distinguishable from the course of action of which it is a moment than, for the activity of dancing, the dancer is from the dance. It displays itself as a moment of knowing insofar as it extrudes from, and thereby violates, the course of activity and is, in the same moment, embraced within what then appears to be another such course for which the first appears as a virtual totality. In regard to the latter, critical knowledge can be said to confront its object; in regard to the former, it is available as knowledge only from within and as an immanent feature of the tensions that motivate intersubjectivity in the sense of constituting its momentum. For this to be workable, the familiar idea of criticism as reasoned judgment in regard to a standard must be brought more thoroughly into line with the idea of what is human about human affairs. I have described this according to certain commitments—for example, to the internal relation of life and situation, inter-subjectivity and what that implies for the relation of subjectivity to the sort of objectivity that constitutes a situation, the notion of a course of activity in contrast with action, reflexivity, and the essential incompleteness of all ostensible individual instances of agency and all ostensible total and self-identical objects. The principle of this list is that each item presupposes an agencydependent objectivity on which all the human sciences rely for their most general disciplinary claims and their relevance to our most comprehensive discourses on human affairs. The latter can be thought of as comprising a selfvalidating course of collective reflection. Reflection in this most general sense is qualified by limitations on doubt; and it involves interrogating, investigating, collecting, and other activities that reinforce, or...

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