What is “dialectics”? (in 23 tweets)

(obviously this is a hilariously implausible topic for twitter but i'm amused by the question.)

Dialectics step 1: we're all defined by our Others.

And our relations to the Other are mostly toxic relationships, drama-laden relationships, violence-prone relationships.

So you’re defined by that which you resist, by what you rule or what rules you, by your repressions, by your appropriations.

(It's a super cranky, dark, negative theory, let's be clear about that up front.)

(I would also stress that the Other in dialectics is never a given; it is a historical product of power, of racial and imperial economies, of gender and the division of labor, of culture and ideology.)

So for dialectics, the self and the world are bound up with each other.

Your very being is a history of struggles.

Dialectics names several things at once.

It describes a mode of history and of selfhood.

It designates a perceptible set of rhythms or patterns.

It evokes a certain sensibility in our observations of the world.

Dialectics is a weird word because we all can recognize these kinds of patterns — the dark humors of the world — but we don’t always name them or theorize them.

Dialectics tries. To put a name to patterns that don’t always get theorized.

It's a rubric — one among many, always open to contestation — for something we all know already.

To see things dialectically is to see things as fleeting and unstable, but not therefore as entirely groundless, senseless, or without truth.

Dialectics is not a pure relativism, but an effort to reorganize the truth of a world built on falsehoods.

(It probably finds relativism to be a limited and undialectical formation. But whatever — what dialectics affirms is often more interesting than what it rejects.)

Dialectics wants to say: the world is not fixed, is never fixed, but rather is unfolding anxiously, stormily, disastrously.

Dialectics: Basically it's 19th century emo as a theory of everything.

(The 20th century re-do was: the earth is “radiant with triumphant calamity.”)

Epistemologically speaking, dialectics insists, insists, and insists that our knowledge of the world is inseparable from the world.

So it opposes positivism, a priori knowledge, ahistoricism, apolitical knowledge.

There is no knowledge that is not historically emergent, socially positioned, and grounded in praxis.

This is a strong standpoint theory: we genuinely can't know the same things as each other, because we are not all equivalently positioned.

So the ensuing fight over standpoints is a real politics; the politics of theory are real politics; and the struggles against ideology are very real politics.

(But politics itself on this view is not sui generis, but in turn a product of other structural forces.)

Meanwhile, as a theory of self, “dialectics” is when one person gets to be something BY MAKING SOMEONE ELSE INTO NOTHING.

To make an Other, on this view, is always a negation.

Subjects get to be subjects by making you into their objects — objects of contemplation or of exploitation.

The world around this process is a disconcerting hall of mirrors.

It's hard to know if you're seeing the other or the reflected self. Things are mystified and incomplete by their nature.

To make sense of it all requires a project. Or a movement.

It's all a very ambivalent theory because in it, we're constantly dehumanized but fantasizing we're human, constantly alienated but dreaming of being whole, constantly toxic but holding out big utopian hopes.

For dialectics, we're all caught up in a big, brutal, totalizing system, but there are somehow always gaps in the system, potentials for dramatic reversals and revolutions.

Dialectics is the immanence of utopia in each disaster: the tempered optimism of each crisis.

Dialectics is an open invitation.

But I don’t always use the word “dialectics,” because of its capacity to obscure, or to become phallic jargon.

(It figures that it would be a dead end for "dialectics" to become a specialized and jargony subfield of radical philosophy.)

Still, it’s worth recalling that dialectics was also at the center of Fanon’s theory of race and Beauvoir’s theory of women — so let’s not let it be reduced to its most sectarian, brocialist, or Eurocentric tendencies.

“The cradle of the child is the tomb of the parents” (Fanon citing Hegel)

In that sense, maybe "dialectics" is still being reinvented.

"nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout," as they used to sing.