On June 8, 2018, Telos celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at a special event held in New York City. Speakers included Telos Press publisher Maria Piccone, Telos editors Russell Berman, Tim Luke, David Pan, and Adrian Pabst, as well as Jacob Siegel, who delivered a talk on “Telos, Post-liberal Politics, and a Veteran’s Reading of Ernst Jünger.” Videos of the event are available at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website. Telos 183 (Summer 2018), our fiftieth anniversary issue, is available for purchase in our store. Presented below is a revised transcript of Tim Luke’s remarks at the anniversary event.
To address the history of Telos, I will open this brief account tonight about the journal by recalling my history with Telos since 1975. As a new cadre in “the St. Louis TELOS group,” I began by unloading boxes of Telos 26 (Winter 1975–76) from a panel truck early on a Saturday morning during the winter break outside of McMillan Hall, where Paul Piccone and the Telos office were embedded in the Sociology Department of Washington University, St. Louis. Working then as what we call an “intern” today, I soon was translating “into” the American English various versions of different draft manuscripts. Many articles at that time came through the mail as pages of disorderly text that another individual, like the author or an associate, with some English skills translated “out of” Czech, German, Hungarian, Italian, or Polish into a global semi-Anglophonic creole.
This labor was intellectually stimulating, but challenging work due to Paul’s desire to have clean clear copy created out such chaos almost immediately. Interspersed between these assignments, one would get frequent opportunities to proofread typeset versions of these “constitutively edited” articles, as Paul called the products of this process, in the Telos office. As anyone can testify after reading through any back issues of New German Critique or Telos from those days, this work usually had an 80 to 85 percent accuracy rate, since so many graduate students with Telos ties were pressed into completing this work willy-nilly by Paul Piccone after he nabbed them from the hall walking to or from the McMillan Café intent on doing other things. Those other things had to be put on hold, because being dragooned by Paul outside of his office meant it was “finish the issue” deadline time.
Please do not get me wrong. These were truly special moments since one had opportunities to hear Paul hold forth about how this or that world-renowned philosopher, famous dissident, or celebrated academic in Europe or elsewhere in North America was “a dumb bastard,” and manuscripts not accepted for eventual publication via this mode of production for New German Critique or Telos were “total bullshit.” Of course, he lobbed these rhetorical grenades as part of his slightly unorthodox style of doctoral mentoring. It was his icebreaker to spark discussions with any one of the students in his office about what they were proofreading, who in the world was really worth reading, how their studies were going, etc. The hours that I spent doing these duties eventually ended up as an assignment to write one of my first articles. After many intense protracted debates with Paul about Adorno, Bookchin, Gramsci, Hegel, Lenin, Marcuse, Marx, and many others in relations to “the crisis of one-dimensionality” (as he speculated about organic intellectuals, genuine resistance, and systemic social forces he had tagged as “artificial negativity”) for about a year and a half, I published, “Culture and Politics in the Age of Artificial Negativity,” in Telos 35 (Spring 1978) along with his very important paper on “The Crisis of One-Dimensionality.”[1] In addition, all of us with ties to the St. Louis TELOS Group had opportunities unexpectedly to meet many thinkers visiting with him in St. Louis, like Murray Bookchin, Cornelius Castoriadis, Ferenc Fehér, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Ágnes Heller, Doug Kellner, Herbert Marcuse, Gábor Rittersporn, Victor Zaslavsky, and many other individuals from the fluid but quite real Toronto, Texas, Montreal, Kansas, or Carbondale TELOS groups that Paul tried to organize and involve in sustaining the journal.
Since its founding on May 1, 1968, within the maze ways of the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York-Buffalo and its Philosophy Department, Telos has been associated with small groups of graduate students led by Paul Piccone. It continues with Russell Berman as editor and Mary Piccone as publisher, who avidly have recruited new “interns” since 2005. Because of Paul’s initial leadership, Telos also has been committed to, as its first issue announced, “philosophical synthesis” that signaled a deep concern for offering “alternatives to many forces operating to further the existing fragmentation of knowledge and human existence,” while emphasizing “that ‘philosophical synthesis’ is not intended to exclude any philosophical school: it is directed against only those philosophical efforts which are solely technical, and thereby isolated, achievements.”[2]
In an academy as smitten by Anglo-American analytical philosophy in 1968 as it still remains in 2018, Telos was launched with a few brief articles that anticipated some of the major influences in its future. The issue included pieces by S. K. Wertz on Franz Brentano’s notions of “intentionality,” which influenced many of his students, like Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, and Rudolf Steiner, among many others; J. C. Robbins’s critical assessment of Wesley Salmon’s analysis of Karl Popper on the “degree of corroboration” in political and epistemological thinking; Ingrid Poole’s study of German Idealism and Romanticism based on a comparison of Goethe’s Faust and Hegel’s Phenomenology; William F. Edwards on Averroes’s thoughts on science (a.k.a. Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd), the philosopher and jurist of the Andalus under the Almohad Caliphate who left a major intellectual impact on modern European science; and Paul Piccone’s “Toward a Social-Historical Interpretation of the Scientific Revolution,” which also is the opening essay in Gary Ulmen’s collection of Paul’s writings, Confronting the Crisis.[3]
For five decades, it is fair to say Telos has kept true to this critical mission, first under Paul’s direction and then Russell’s leadership since 2004, by critically exploring, while not simplistically endorsing, the cultural, economic, social, and political alternatives to the larger forces in modernity that are always hard at work fragmenting human knowledge and existence. Reading through 50 years of Telos issues, one witnesses many different events and ideas that have attracted the journal’s attention, but this openness to “philosophical synthesis” and “alternatives to many forces” fragmenting contemporary modernity is a perspective that remains constant in the writings about, to mention only a few:
- Western Marxism, Soviet Marxism, Third World Marxism
- The Second and Third International, the Soviet Union, Bolshevism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, neo-Stalinism, and, more recently, Putinism
- German, Italian, Spanish, and other variants of industrial, agricultural, and postcolonial fascism
- The Frankfurt School with its many members, associates, and fellow travelers before and after World War II
- Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and the European Union
- The American New Left and French New Right
- Anarchism, authoritarianism, Catholicism, Confucianism, capitalism, communism, communitarianism, environmentalism, industrialism, liberalism, modernism, populism, Protestantism, realism, secularism, surrealism, universalism, and other “isms of interest”
- Agamben, Adorno, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Bobbio, Bourdieu, Castoriadis, Deleuze, Heidegger, Habermas, Foucault, Freud, Gramsci, Gorz, Korsch, King, Lasch, Landauer, Lukács, Lyotard, Marx, Marcuse, Paci, Simmel, Schmitt, Weber, Wittfogel, Zaslavsky, Zerzan, and countless other thinkers
- Expansive thematic issues with great editorial focus and thematic sweep from its earliest days in the 1970s, and more prominently, since 2005 with Russell as journal editor, looking at major developments in critical scholarship, global thought, or regional politics, like the West, original sin, the Anthropocene, democracy, the New Regime, China, cultural revolution, law, religion, the New Class, terrorism, aesthetic theory, intellectuals, or nature, among others, to reframe “the critical theory of the contemporary”
Never politically correct, hardly ever professionally correct, always controversial, usually a bit baffling, and fiercely independent, Telos has been, is, and will be a fascinating project. Moreover, it still remains a very unique American enterprise. Always independently owned and operated, this publication has thrived thanks to the entrepreneurialism and acumen of Paul and then Mary Piccone. Many, if not all of the journals that Telos engaged in competition and conversation from that time are long gone (Socialist Review, Ramparts, Kapitalistate, democracy, etc.) or restructured, reorganized, and refocused (Aut Aut, L’Autre, New Left Review, The New Republic, etc.).
Beginning as a graduate student–managed journal of philosophy, striving to express “the critical theory of the contemporary” in May 1968, Piccone and the original TELOS group looked for guidance to Edmund Husserl’s unfinished critical explorations of “the philosophical-historical idea (or the teleological sense) of European humanity.”[4] As he expressed it in his 1935 “Vienna Lecture” and “Prague Lecture,” which are documented in the posthumously assembled and published The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology in 1954, Husserl broke with the technocratic progressivism of his time. He instead asserted that “the spiritual telos of particular nations and individual men . . . lies in the infinite, is an infinite idea toward which, in concealment, the whole spiritual becoming aims”; and, in gaining conscious recognition “in the development as telos, it necessarily also becomes practical as a goal of the will” for human individuals and groups to advance higher, newer historical stages of development “under the guidance of norms, normative ideas.”[5]
Rationalizing and revitalizing everything that continuously constitutes “the spiritual telos of European humanity,” as it appears to develop through the existence of particular nations and individual persons, is crucial, because it works to reveal “a new sort of humanity, one which living in finitude, lives towards the poles of infinity.”[6] Telos has outlined, debated, or articulated normative ideas and practical norms of/for/by humanity construed broadly—pace 1914, 1939, 1947, or 2001—as “Europeanized” European humanity around the world, from its base of operations in somewhat unusual places, like Buffalo, NY, St. Louis, MO, or Candor, NY.[7] By making the presence of spiritual transcendence in life more present to itself, in particular human beings’ origins, processes, goals—past, present, future—as a more potent regenerative presence, Piccone inferred from Paci and Husserl that Telos must seek to disclose “a horizon of life, meaning and purpose of life,” or in the final analysis, its defining “telos.”[8]
This engagement in history, with all its constitutive ties to human artifice and natural materiality, still provides Telos with one of the most definitive ranges for judging social conflicts and contradictions.[9] Whether it is disclosed by the crisis of the positive sciences and Marxism during the twentieth century—in works of negative philosophical thought, post-positivist science, or the philosophy of praxis—in Europe or whether it later is construed through Piccone’s reading of Paci’s investigations of “science and the meaning of Man,” much of the “telos” ahead of Telos boils down to developing never settled debates. In turn, their purpose is to articulate an always open critique, which has been interpreted variously by a range of readers as neo-traditional radical orthodoxy, the vanguard of populist opposition to neo-liberalism, or “phenomenological Marxism.”[10] Whether sociology or technology prove to be its key philosophical mediations, this ongoing search is centered on discovering “that collective self-consciousness whereby society would organize itself in the interest of human emancipation,”[11] with all of the contemporary era’s manifold ethical and political expressions of this faith. Most importantly, for humanity over the past fifty years, Telos, like Husserl, does not accept the spiritual crises of the modern age, since it refuses “to let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by ‘the prosperity’ they provided.”[12] This project is, has been, and must be what Telos‘s “critical theory of the contemporary” remains all about.
Our fiftieth anniversary issue, no. 183, which is released here this evening, follows parallel paths to the moral and intellectual goals outlined in issue no. 1. It also unfolds in the spirit of other key anniversaries that have been marked in the development of the journal, like Telos 50 (Winter 1981–82); Telos 75 (Spring 1988), the twentieth anniversary issue; Telos 101 (Fall 1994), looking back across 100 issues; Telos 131 (Summer 2005), which commemorates Paul’s influence not long after his passing; and the fortieth anniversary issue, Telos 143 (Summer 2008). We should anticipate that Telos 183 will prove to be another significant effort at “philosophical synthesis” for advancing “alternatives to the many forces fragmenting” our own times and conditions. Those are larger struggles that never end, and we must always bear down on them at Telos as we look ahead to our next benchmark, issue no. 200, during the 2020s.
Notes
1. See Paul Piccone, “The Crisis of One Dimensionality,” and Tim Luke, “Culture and Politics in the Age of Artificial Negativity,” Telos 35 (Spring 1978): 43–54 and 56–72.
2. See, for more detail, Telos 1 (Spring 1968), cover.
3. Paul Piccone, Confronting the Crisis: Writings of Paul Piccone, ed. Gary Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2008), 1–15.
4. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970), p. 269.
5. Ibid., p. 275.
6. Ibid., p. 277.
7. See Piccone, Confronting the Crisis, pp. ix–xi.
8. Enzo Paci, The Function of the Sciences and Meaning of Man, trans. and intro. Paul Piccone and James E. Hansen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972), p. 9.
9. Ibid., p. 10. Given these ethico-political aspirations, the fascination expressed in many issues of Telos with the larger forces of faith, religion, and tradition is not startling. For a comparable perspective, see James W. Laine, Meta-Religion: Religion and Power in World History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2015).
10. See Paul Piccone, “Phenomenological Marxism,” Telos 9 (Fall 1971): 3–31; and Ben Agger, The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 14–55.
11. See Paul Piccone, “For Sociology,” in Confronting the Crisis, p. 62.
12. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 6.
