Imagination and politics: A study in historical ontology

The following dissertation, Imagination and Politics: A Study in Historical Ontology, deals with, in a first moment, the origins of the bourgeois public sphere in early modern Europe as an institutional mechanism for the homogenization of being (and beings) in accord with the dictates of a certain stage of capitalist accumulation. In a second moment it introduces the problematic of the fundamental transformation of that public sphere, starting in the late 19th century, under the pressures of increasingly sharp class antagonisms that resulted in the emergence of new methods of control and extraction such as Taylorism and Fordism, as well as new means of rerouting and re-articulating mass desires (advertising, marketing, etc...). What happens, in short, starting in the U.S. during the Progressive Era, is the beginning of the autophagy of the classical bourgeois public sphere, the self-cannibalization by capitalism of its own limit: that separating private and public. Once desire itself becomes directly an object of manipulation in public discourse and spaces its traditional status as the sine qua non of bourgeois intimacy along with, conversely, reason's status as the summit of legitimate authority can no longer maintain their integrity. Subject and object begin melting into each other.;These transformations, however, immediately raise the class struggle to another level, one in which the production of subjectivity and the politicization of everyday life take centerstage. The imagination, the exclusion of which had been the condition of possibility of the constitution of a rational bourgeois public sphere in the 17th century, regains centerstage first as a form of mass social and political practice with Black nationalism in the 1920s (particularly Marcus Garvey's UNIA) and culturally with the Harlem Renaissance. African American politics during this period produce the first counter-public---i.e. the first self-institutionalized sphere of discourse within bourgeois society that organizes itself autonomously from the dictates of bourgeois normativity, according to different standards of expression. The Black counter-public, it is argued, was the precursor to the world-wide movement of revolt that spanned the period between 1956 and 1979 and which I summarize under the heading of '1968.' The historical moment of 1968 marks the invasion of the university, sanctum sanctorum of bourgeois publicity, by the class struggle concomitantly with the proletarianization of intellectual labor, a process that finds its origins in the post-World War II transformation of capitalist society. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).