John W Grant

In this essay I reframe the Marxist tradition of ideology critique as it is practised by T. W. Adorno and Fredric Jameson. I argue that the phenomenon of replication is a dominant feature in their accounts of ideology, which I demonstrate through a comparative analysis of their work. Part one addresses Adorno's understanding of ideological replication especially in relation to philosophy and culture. Part two does the same for Jameson and examines his attempts to draw limits on Adorno's work. In the final section, I begin by arguing that Jameson misreads key Adornian themes such as the culture industry. Nevertheless, Jameson's critique of replication addresses important postmodern developments related to culture and multi-national capitalism. I conclude by addressing Adorno and Jameson's views on collective political action in the context of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). I argue that, taken together, their work offers a constellation of insights into the utopian and ideological features of OWS.

This paper reorganizes our understanding of dialectical thought and the work of Michel Foucault by addressing each one through the other. Foucault explicitly repudiates dialectics, and yet the dialectical implications found in his positions on power and resistance offer a contrasting understanding of his work. Although I do not claim that Foucault is in fact a dialectician, I show how he participates in dialectical thought through his programmatic arguments and in his genealogical histories. This requires elaborating an appropriate logic of dialectical relations that cannot be reduced to a logic of contradiction. The result is that a rapprochement between Foucault and proponents of dialectics becomes possible. It gives recourse to Foucault for those who see dialectics as a requirement of radical politics, while also providing a platform for future research that reconnects the study of power relations with dialectical themes such as experience, liberation and ideology.

An Unexpected confrontation involving Ernesto Laclau, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Herbert Marcuse serves as a testing ground for one of political theory's most basic tasks: to determine the concepts that are used to theorize politics. Laclau claims that. by relying on a concept of immanence, Hardt and Negri cannot account for the relational nature of politics. Defending Hardt and Negri by turning their work against itself reveals unacknowledged and unintended affinities with Marcuse's critical theory. Disclosing these affinities rescues a productive understanding of immanence from Laclau's critique. Moreover, the dialectical logic employed by Marcuse is notable for its ability to make sense of and articulate the politics of Empire and multitude. Following from Marcuse, the significant dialectical roots of Hardt and Negri's work display how a dialectical approach to contemporary politics can give an account of far more than just the labor movement.