The solicitation of the trap

on transcendence and transcendental materialism in advanced consumer-capitalism

Steve Hall

pp. 365-381

in: Ronnie Lippens, James Hardie-Bick (eds), Transcendence and transgression, Human Studies 35 (3), 2012.

Abstract

This article argues that a transcendental materialist conception of subjectivity can move us beyond the orthodox idealist theories that dominate progressive thought in advanced consumer-capitalism. This position can shed new light on current forms of subjectivity that seem to prefer life in consumer culture's surrogate social world rather than active participation in cultural and political resistance and transformation, which requires far more than simply "transcending the norm'. The rebirth of creative political subjectivity is impossible unless the subject is prepared to risk a traumatic encounter with the Real, the fundamental indeterminacy that exists not in the ideal-symbolic but the material realm, and prepared to reject liberal-postmodernist identity politics to participate in the construction of a coherent alternative ideology.