Key MacFarlane

This thesis argues that the twentieth-century encounter between phenomenology and dialectical materialism provides vital resources for reconsidering the possibility of revolutionary consciousness as immanent to the daily life of struggle. In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács famously insists on establishing a distinction between empirical and revolutionary class consciousness; the latter, he says, is an objective possibility that must be rationally imputed to the proletariat in virtue of its position within the capitalist production process. My claim is that the fragmented history of phenomenological Marxism contains the lineaments of a revised approach, one that, while maintaining a critical distance towards the empirically given, attempts to rediscover the possibility of revolutionary consciousness, not merely in the objective situation of the proletariat, but in how that situation is actually lived in the historical force of its contradictions. The dissertation develops this approach across two parts. In Part I, I examine a pair of efforts, relatively neglected in the history of twentieth-century philosophy, to bring phenomenology and dialectical materialism into dialogue around the question of revolutionary subjectivity. Chapter 1 reconstructs Enzo Paci’s Husserlian reading of Marx, seeking to clarify the philosophical and political imperative at its heart: the imperative to return to the human subject whose historical operations constitute, but are occluded and negated by, the abstract categories of bourgeois political economy. Chapter 2 considers the underappreciated discussion of working class consciousness in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which I explicate in connection to his existential-phenomenological account of space as a site of social polarization and potential compulsion. In Part II, my aim is to open a line of inquiry between phenomenology and Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist critique of everyday life. Chapter 3 pursues this task by surveying Lefebvre’s forceful criticism of the phenomenological tradition, whose premium on contemplation, he argues, ultimately devalues everyday life in capitalist society as a one-sidedly trivial or inauthentic mode of existence. Focusing on Lefebvre’s dialectical conception of lived experience, I show how his project transforms the basic concerns of phenomenology within and towards a critical knowledge of everyday life inseparable from the action of its revolutionary rehabilitation. The final chapter investigates the concepts of residue and sedimentation in Lefebvre’s project, arguing that they are integral to his sustained effort to redefine class struggle on the worldwide level of uneven development. As a whole, the dissertation lays the groundwork for a phenomenological critique of everyday life, a critique that aims to salvage the possibility of revolutionary consciousness in the impoverished human core of capitalism, the mundane repetition of estrangement.

This essay examines the relationship between lived space and revolutionary consciousness in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Understood as the site of the subject’s gearing into the world, oriented by the pre-objective experience of depth, lived space lies at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological project but also, I argue, its commitment to Marxist dialectics. Historically polarized by the labor-capital relation, space in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis harbors the motivation for revolutionary movement. For this reason, it is integral to his efforts to rework Georg Lukács’s concept of class consciousness along phenomenological lines. Rather than imputing the consciousness of the proletariat on the basis of its objective position within the capitalist production process, Merleau-Ponty’s Marxist phenomenology aims to discover class consciousness within the historical obstruction of lived space. After laying out this argument, the second section of the essay then articulates the crisis character of lived space in terms of a dialectic between freedom and pathology. In Merleau-Ponty’s account, while lived space underpins freedom, it is also possible for the interval of freedom to collapse, giving way to a morbid proximity and sense of compulsion. In the essay’s final section, I return to the problem of class consciousness, considering the intellectual affinities between Merleau-Ponty and Lukács, while drawing attention to their diverging views on space and the aesthetic form of landscape.

In this chapter, I seek to reconstruct the lineaments of a theory of sedimentation in Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. Hardly a dominant feature of the work, Lefebvre’s references to sedimentation are relatively brief, fragmented and – as he often says of Marx’s own account of primitive accumulation and the state – incomplete. My contention, however, is that the problem of sediments offers a productive site for reevaluating Lefebvre’s Marxist project in our own moment of global crisis, particularly his conceptualisation of space as a concrete abstraction. Challenging more urban-focused readings of his oeuvre, Lefebvre’s account of sedimentation foregrounds the enduring role of precapitalist, rural and ‘regressive’ social forms within the continued reproduction of the capitalist relations of production.

This essay reviews Banu Bargu’s Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (2024), focusing on the role of phenomenology in the book’s articulation of global critical theory. I argue that Disembodiment offers a vital contribution to recent efforts to reclaim phenomenology as a radical form of critique. In my brief reflection, I consider the book’s engagement with the phenomenological problem of lived experience, its critical readings of the work of Helmuth Plessner and Frantz Fanon, and its attempt to locate the somatic history of suffering at the heart of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, especially as expressed in Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectics. At the end of the essay, I sketch three directions for further inquiry opened up by Disembodiment, those pertaining to the questions of space, political consciousness, and teleology.

This paper argues that the concept of residue is integral to Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist project and its attempts to redefine class struggle on the worldwide level of uneven development. After examining Lefebvre’s analysis of the spatiotemporal obstruction of everyday life in capitalist society, the paper’s second section considers the residual dimensions of his concept of the proletarian condition, surveying its affinities and divergences with Georg Lukács’s theory of class consciousness. In the third section, I reconstruct Lefebvre’s account of historical sedimentation and explore its implications for understanding class struggle amid the survival of precapitalist social forms. The final section investigates Lefebvre’s method of residues, which he situates at the heart of his metaphilosophy and its commitment to revolutionary possibility on a planetary scale.

The last 20 years have witnessed a deepening of the imbrication between capital and the university. This paper seeks to map one point at which this binding occurs: in critical theory. Recently scholars in strategic management have turned to processual and relational ontologies in an attempt to reimagine the logics of profit, value, and growth. These same ontologies have appealed to critical geographers as a means of reconceiving space as unfixed. Drawing on a case study of Deleuze’s appropriation in management literature, I show how such ontologies presuppose a vitalism that necessarily reproduces and obscures the structures of exploitation.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the geographies of electronic waste (e-waste). Several studies have examined how e-waste is increasingly exported to processing sites in China, India, Pakistan, Ghana and elsewhere across the global south, where it leads to devastating health effects. Through an interdisciplinary patchwork of human geography, public health, narrative theory, and philosophies of memory, this paper seeks to show how the export of e-waste to the global south—and the toxins it brings along with it—is part of what makes “resilient” urban growth and citizenship possible elsewhere, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. The surplus value of technological production is only recuperable, in places like Silicon Valley, if its toxicity is spatially and temporally displaced onto— and hidden within— surplus bodies who are cast into necropolitical terrains of ill- health and danger. Tracing this story of e-waste, which spans from the epigenetic to the geopolitical, from the San Francisco Bay Area to China’s Greater Bay Area, requires a method of empirical allegory that can detect global iniquities on the most granular of scales, and vice versa.