Lukács's Notion of “Concrete Totality” as Logos in the Age of Fragmentation. The Precariat as the Road to Knowledge
Abstrakt
Logos in the shape of the thought of the whole is, besides other things, represented by Lukács's philosophy. This theoretical line has nearly vanished in contemporary social thought - witness a critical stance on the idea of the whole in post-Marxism. I sketch Badiou's set criticism of the concept of the whole and conclude that his criticism involves a performative contradiction. I argue that Badiou's criticism does not hold for Lukács's concept of the whole. With recapitulating Lukács's theory I highlight "imputed class consciousness" as a precondition for opening the perspective of the social whole.
The object of this article is to transpose Lukács's concept of the whole to presently fragmentized social being that I conceive to be "a cold multitude". Two antinomical tendencies, that are neoliberal individualist tendency and communality one, coexist here. Capitalist platforms such as Google and Uber can be seen as an embodiment of these two tendencies. I introduce the term of class localization and argue that the precariat is the class locus which may render the contemporary social whole visible. There are two preconditions for this achievement: imputation of class consciousness (generalization) and voicing its social living experience (concretization).