UNDERDETERMINED PRAXIS AND POLYCRISIS OF MODERNITY

Abstract

Abstract: This paper develops a version of critical theory as determination of praxis, where praxis is defined as a change made via intellectual activity of understanding and explanation. It uses the commemoration of 15 years from the death of Belarusian social philosopher Vladimir Fours to reflect on the transformations of social theory in the 1980s–2020s. It approaches Vladimir Fours as a constructivist social philosopher of emancipation and as a contributor to conceptualizations of late modernity’s disorganization. This paper highlights that the spread of constructivist social research very much coincided historically with the momentum of neoliberal doctrine worldwide and with tangible underlying strategies to undergird and reinforce neoliberal doctrine. The lack of recognition of these underlying strategies behind the constructivism-emancipation nexus has resulted in often disembedded agency and underdetermined praxis of the mainstream social theory. This becomes especially apparent in light of the currently encountered polycrisis of modernity, defined in this paper as fusion of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath — namely, the growing
incommensurability between global finance and national politics; the rise of digital platforms — as business models, new power agents, and critical scaffoldings of everyday experience (contributing to the erosion of gridlike modern statehoods); growing momentum in the recognition of climate crisis as a critical issue (revealing the limits to laissez-faire market logic); and Russia’s challenge to the post-WWII political order (strategically undermining the principle of the right of nations to self-determination by a permanent member of the UN Security Council). This paper presents a showcase of developing configurations of embedded agency and of determined praxis aimed at adequately confronting the polycrisis of modernity, along with its prevailing tendencies of neoliberalization and militarization. From this perspective, it advocates for a stronger emphasis on an infrastructural lens versus a constructivist turn, personal data versus
identity, critique of extractivism versus decolonization, and planetarity versus globalization.