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October 12, 2010
I'm taking advantage of Sage offering free trial access to its journals until the 15th October to explore Thesis Eleven. I rarely have access to this journal these days because it is behind a paywall and I do not belong to a university library.
Thesis Eleven refers to Marx’s eleventh Feuerbach thesis, which states that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’. Taken literally, this means that people should stop being philosophers (and by extension, social scientists) and engage the world practically.
Martin Jay in The Moment of Thesis Eleven in Issue 100 February 2010 says that since its appearance in l980, Thesis Eleven has joined two other comparable journals, one British, the other American, as a leading clearing house for the reception and development of critical social theory in the English-speaking world, and more. Its elder brothers, New Left Review, founded in 1960, and Telos, begun in l968, served as the conduits of a welter of ideas from the European New Left, while struggling mightily to apply their lessons to conditions in their respective countries.
Jay adds that unlike New Left Review or Telos, the Australian Thesis Eleven never adopted a truculent, politically aggressive tone or polemicized with other currents on the left:
Thesis Eleven made the transition to non- dogmatic, post-Marxist critical thinking with considerable grace and agility. It thus continues and deepens the tradition begun by NLR and Telos of acting as a clearing house for and analyst of the most advanced ideas that emanate from Europe and North America, as well as doing something they never did: providing the rest of the world access to the most trenchant Australian con- tributors to the larger international conversation.
In Issue 100 February 2010 Peter Beilharz's Countereditorial looks back over the trajectory or history of the journal that started in 1980. He says:
One fundamental task we set ourselves in the first editorial was to engage thoroughly with everyday life. Julian Triado and I began a major paper called ‘Theses on Everyday Life’, which was consigned to the gnawing criticisms of the local possums. What did happen, as far as I can tell, is that our imperative to take a political turn eventually was confirmed as a cultural turn. This much was entirely consistent with our firmer moorings, in western Marxism and critical theory. After all, Gramsci’s signal orientation was towards western culture, in contrast to the disastrous Soviet turn to the east. Yet to take culture seriously would also mean taking our location in Australia or in the antipodes seriously. And this would remain a major creative tension for the journal, dealing with our European and transatlantic roots while seeking to make sense of our own locations and later of other, alternative modernities, from Latin America to Asia.
The earlier issues--which I read-- struggled with the creative tensions of centre and periphery, being European in the broad sense, located closer to Asia, looking sideways at Latin America, all this from the antipodes. It was the usual story: whatever appealed in the centres would bore the local audience, and the other way around.
Thesis 11 provided a fascinating and unique window on Australia and Australian theory, it described itself from the start as both Australian and international, and understood Australia to be located at the ‘edge of empire’ with the United States understood to be the ‘centre of empire’. I respected the journal because it has been interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, bringing together thinkers from the social sciences and the humanities in new and surprising constellations and its exceptionally broad and generous practice of transla- tions enabled an Australian audience to follow theoretical developments abroad. Given the central role played by Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, György and Maria Markus, émigré members of Lukàcs’ Budapest School, the journal has also been intercontinental, keeping the rest of the world informed about the extraordinary theoretical work being done in Australia.
As George Steinmetz points out in 30 years of Thesis Eleven: A Survey of the Record and Questions for the Future in this issue the journal’s core concern wavers between social theory and critical theories of modernity. By 1996 social theory was becoming the journal’s overarching focus and critical and Marxist theory the subordinate categories .In 2002 the journal revised its subtitle to ‘critical theory and historical sociology’. This entailed a reassertion of critical over social theory and the journal was now associated with a specific academic discipline, sociology, for the first time since its founding as a pluridisiplinary journal.
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