Pioneer of car theory: Didier Eribon tells social theory based on his family biography.
Photo: IMAGO / Horst Galuschka
When the German translation of Didier Eribon’s “Return to Reims” was published in 2016, the left-liberal public was thrilled. Eribon talked about the alienation of the Parisian intellectual from the parents of the small-town working-class milieu, who had lost their political identity and ultimately voted right-wing. He condensed his personal observations into a social diagnosis, which from then on was presented in feature articles and podiums on the future of Europe and democracy. A whole boom of “new class politics” took off from Eribon’s suggestion that the left had betrayed the workers. He replied modestly that he had only written a book about his family.
What was so fascinating about Eribon’s chosen form of theory has developed over the years into an independent genre of auto theory, the scientific counterpart to literary autofiction: the subject’s personal world of experience becomes the starting point for a generalizable interpretation of the world, for example when the political theorist Lea Ypi talks about her “growing up at the end of history” or the sociologist Steffen Mau write about his “life in the East German transformation society”. An approachable, modest theory that can also “pick up” those people who like to hear the life stories of their youth idols told on Netflix or listen to stars on podcasts doing free association.
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However, this attractiveness of the “weak” theory is now also arousing mistrust. Recently, for example, the literary scholar Carlos Spoerhase in the “SZ” attested to auto theory’s “unfounded tendency to view the problems of the individual microcosm and the macrocosm of global society as deeply structurally related.” What particularly bothers Spoerhase is that these diagnoses, as personal experiences, escape general criticism. But there is a fundamental problem in drawing conclusions about the world from yourself. Because wasn’t it the case that our consciousness is first determined by social existence?
The criticism of auto theory is currently mainly based on the book “Immediacy” by the Chicago English professor Anna Kornbluh, who, among other things, recognizes in it the social trend of the aesthetics of immediacy. The signature of disaster capitalism is the unconditional urge for intensive and unmediated experience, which is why thinking ultimately turns against its own medium of theory. For them, autotheory is “anti-theory” because it abandons the mediation of the individual and society in favor of a direct cognitive experience.
Of course, this cannot exist and was rightly considered a fetish by Marx, Lukács and Adorno, against which they had to put in the effort of theory. And yes, the current lack of such effort is really a problem – but not just since the boom in car theory. Therefore, their criticism must honestly admit: They have no counter-proposal at hand.