David Harvey again

From Marxism 2009 last year. Though I'd heard of him and his excellent work before, I only really started to read some of Harvey when I was writing on Raymond Williams (Harvey has the single best piece on Williams--in Spaces of Capital--thinking through Williams' problematic "militant particularism"). I'm liking him a lot. Again, if you haven't seen the Reading Capital course, check that out. It's a good way to get through that book, which is one of those no one ever reads all the way through unless it's assigned (not unlike anything by Hegel). That's not always a bad thing, of course (certainly in Hegel, though only reading the master-slave passage in the Phenomenology or the beginnings of the greater Logic and thinking the dialectic is "therefore" necessary to "overcome" is pushing this way too far). I'm planning on going all the way through Capital 2 and 3 shortly (I've only really gotten through the beginning of 2 and the end of 3), so it's a great refresher and a good way to pick up those parts of the first book (especially part 7) I never made it through. I never touched anything really after the chapter on the working day (except some pieces of the machinery chapter and the amazing part on primitive accumulation), even when I reread it for exams last summer: in literary studies, due to Derrida and his specters, the focus is still on the first three chapters on use and exchange value (though not confusing the labor theory of value with the value theory of labor has enough attendant complications), often to the detriment of the theory of surplus value as a whole.

One more thing. Harvey above (and in a recent paper) talks about a transition from capitalism to socialism--revolution--taking just about as long (or at least involving as much complexity and work) as the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. This is a welcome comment (obviously drawn from Marx's sense of things itself) when revolution has always had the connotation of radical, instantaneous breaks on the one hand, and on the other has been conceptually discredited by the theoretical left itself in the US for about forty years in favor of micropolitical models of change (or a a dour sort of pragmatism, which turns quickly into a fatalism, rightly thrust to the fore for critical inspection at Planomenology--though one should also point out Zizek too often trades in this pessimism). To this, I would also just add a pragmatic remark about the relation of revolution to violence by by Fredric Jameson:

What is always at the bottom of the quarrel about the term [revolution--MJ] is the conception of revolution as violent, as a matter of armed struggle, forceful overthrow, the clash of weapons wielded by people willing to shed blood. This conception explains in turn of what may be called demotic Trotskyism, that is, the insistence on adding the requirement of "armed struggle" to whatever socialist proviso is at issue: something that would seem both to substitute effect for cause and unnecessarily to rase the ante on salvation. Rather, this proposition needs to be argued the other way around: namely that the other side will resort to force when the system is threatened in genuinely basic or fundamental ways...
 -"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 388

Then I would follow that up with how he shows, pointing rightly at Allande's Chile, just how plausible the beginnings of such a long revolution (Raymond Williams' term) actually are:

Left electoral victories are neither hollow social-democratic exercises nor occasions in which power passes hands definitively: rather, they are signals for the gradual unfolding of democratic demands, that is to say, increasingly radical claims on a sympathetic government which must now, in obedience to that development, be radicalized in its turn, unless it sells out to the appeal for order. The revolutionary process in this sense is a new legal dispensation in which repressed popular groups slowly emerge from the silence of their subalternity and dare to speak out--an act which can range, as in Allende's revolutionary Chile, from the proposal of new kinds of laws to the seizure of farm lands [which right now we find in Venezuela--MJ]; democracy necessarily means that kind of speaking out, which can also be identified as the truest form of the production of new needs (as opposed to consumerism).
-"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 391

So new laws, new freedoms, new regulations, alongside the building of new economic infrastructures under the emerging new state:

The legislature was passing the laws of eco-economics [...] They directed co-ops [...] to help the newly independent metanat local subsidiaries to transform themselves into similar cooperative organizations. This process, called horizontalization, had very wide support, especially from the young natives , and so it was proceeding fairly smoothly. Every martian business now had to be owned by its employees only. No co-op could exceed one thousand people; larger enterprises had to be made of co-op associations, working together. For their internal structures most of the firms chose variants of the Bogdanovist models, which themselves were based on the cooperative Basque community of Mondragon, Spain. In these firms all employees were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the equivalent of about a year's wages into the firm's equity fund, wages earned in the apprentice programs of various kinds at the end of schooling This buy-in fee became the starter of their share in the firm, which grew every year they stayed, until it was given back to them as pension or departure payment. Councils elected from the workforce hired management, usually from outside, and this management then had the power to make executive decisions, but was subject to yearly review by the councils.
-Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars, 296-7

And one more thing: this sort of conception of revolution concretely situates any cultural or discursive struggle--struggle on that level is only of finite use, and takes place at that level. Cultural politics is only politics (often just politicization, often just micropolitics) unless it also hits at or ties into economic levels--as Jameson (who some might call a mere cultural Marxist) never gets tired of saying.

But then again it is also necessary to register (with Harvey--see this lecture of his for an elaboration of his point about Ch. 15, footnote 4 in the short piece above--and Jameson) that there are many levels of struggle, and that no one who seriously is engaged in cultural Marxism believes they can turn the world around just at that level. No, it's often a micropolitical model that believes that--along with people who dismiss cultural Marxism as a safe or partial form of commitment. The dismissive sense of that last word shows that its positive sense--that indeed, as applied, it is a piece in a larger situation--isn't available from this perspective, one that also believes with the micropolitics of Foucault especially (and tendencies in critical theory in general) that institutions (the "academy") are what is big and bad, and moreover are what determine and compromise the situation of cultural anti-capitalist critique (rather than capitalism, which is precisely much larger--and smaller--than any institution).

My point is that "the production of new needs" is what cultural criticism is about (finite, because representational, demands and Utopian possibilities), but is about this alongside other--indeed partial--sorts of activities and commitments that are by no means incapable of this sort of production (Jameson's phrasing here is precisely calculated to emphasize the fact that these needs can be and are produced at these other levels--even especially at economic ones). Significantly, it is precisely the cultural level (or the level of everyday life) that is most engaged by the recent statements of Zizek, Jameson, Harvey, Badiou and others to think hard about what communism might be, to imagine Utopias, to speak up out of subalternity and present alternative experiences of the world, and, indeed, to think about revolution: "carving out autonomous spaces," as Paul Ennis recently calls it, in various ways (he talks about what Badiou thinks is necessary, against Zizek, but I think Zizek too thinks this Utopian--and I use this word in an approving, Harveyian, Jamesonian sense that too few share--enclave-production occurs or is at least pragmatically necessary). And it is this cultural level that is most misunderstood by people unfamiliar with that level and what it involves (including the sacrifices that I don't think we can just say are nonexistent--unless we keep thinking all cultural Marxists are just "humanists" in a disturbing new sense). That, however, means education is necessary (both of yourself and the misinformed, as Harvey insists upon above: part of the problem is that this stuff isn't taught, or only gotten through someone like Zizek), and repeated reconnection of this level to others (an act that cultural criticism and recent ideology critique has learned to do in perhaps the most adept and tactical way).

And indeed, cultural Marxism is great at this too: what is culture but a way to reconnect while recognizing that separation of levels, rather than try and construct a one-off sort of immanent metaphysical level at which every microelement just is or is not political? I don't even think you can say cultural Marxism has gone too far--which is what the reactionary consensus in the US (indeed increasingly in literary studies) seems to be. We need more cultural studies, not less. As these studies make their way into departments dealing with urbanism, architecture, media theory and design--where some of the most radical Marxist work is now being done--I think they become more concrete and produce more connections and reconnections, perhaps, than they did when this study was done primarily in literature and film (or philosophy). But that's a development and transformation, which is also probably a shift made in accordance with changes in the system studied and the new forms reconnection to other levels is imagined to take.

Reading Capital

Just found out that David Harvey's famous (and thorough, and excellent) yearly reading of Capital I is online in all sorts of formats.

Bad theory

Almost forty years now of theory widely practiced in the US--and we only have a general sense of what theory is. It's a notorious problem that is actually its own solution: theory is one of the only fields where knowledge doesn't know what it has to be. So perhaps we shouldn't ever have to lock down what it is. Neverthless, it has assumed certain shapes. These too should not be avoided or combated in the name of preserving continual micro-self-differentiation etc., etc. Rather, bad elements (that is, bad procedures, bad ways of writing into which we slip--bad theorizing rather than bad theoretical positions or theories) should be identified, isolated, and clipped off or left alone to wither. Here then is what might constitute the "bad theory" (and it should be clear that by "bad" I mean something like "defunct" or "spoiled") that we might just hesitate before putting into service yet again, in another empty denunciation of... what have you:

Theory gone bad is theory that tries to assure the unqualified prolongation of theory. Theory should be finite--more than that, it should continually, with each use, project the point at which it might not be of use. Thus even if you want to say theory is immanent to thought itself, and therefore finite in that respect (when thought dies out theory will die out too), it would still be avoiding the issue: the issue is that the production of something different than theory cannot just be problematized from the outside.

Ethical theory is theory gone bad. There is too much talk of ethics and responsibility now, and this produces a lot of bad theory. This is because the use of ethical terms is the quickest way to build a bridge between politics and theory, or rather the politicization that takes place as theory (as I've outlined before) and the realm of society in all its diffuseness. Perhaps it is an attempt to thicken the overquick linkages to the political realm which early theory indeed made. But there's no reason this has to take the form of ethics--except possibly because this allows theory to sound more relevant, to issue more injunctions. At it's limit, this involves the dissolution of everything political about theory into philosophy, which has always been too comfortable with staying out of politics as it is: why ethics and responsibiliy are semi-proper philosophical subjects is because politics often comes to interrupt and situate philosophical speculation, embarrassing it. Theory that strives to be philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) shouldn't go down the same road. In this respect I agree even with the extreme assertion of Zizek that, within the period under consideration (1933 and a little after), Heidegger's politicization of his philosophy is more valuable than his outlines of the structures of proper philosophizing (in his courses especially) that borders on an ethics--which is what in general I take away from his recent consideration of Heidegger's joining the Nazis (in In Defense of Lost Causes). That doesn't at all make what Heidegger did right--as Zizek would crudely hold, himself couching things in an overblown ethical language which supposes that the value of this could have been disclosed to him personally and guided his action at the same time as that action could represent a value attributed after the fact, which we perceive as the imposition of politics on the situation (this language--increasingly Badiouian--confuses things almost completely, as I've said before regarding Zizek on this fraught issue). But to attribute such value means (however crudely or confusedly) to recognize that politics imposes itself continually and is actively contained and bracketed by philosophies as well as other forms of knowledge. Theory normally attempts to trace what is thereby left out--but with an ethical turn (which was foreshadowed in the "deconstructivism" practiced at Yale by de Man, where people preached to no end about responsibility in reading), it loses its vocation and becomes increasingly irrelevant. At the same time, and insofar as this irrelevance suffuses theory, "the political" comes up more and more, leading us to the next form of bad theory:

Reifying concepts in order to protect them from reification. Such, at least, is the strategy I see behind such ugly invocations of "the political" or "the social." This form of parody only lends itself to a high seriousness that undoes the reason for adopting the parodic gesture in the first place.

Similarly, bad theory trades in commonplaces. These include the use of phrases like "identity politics," which are most of the time just codes for a reactive movement against queer or feminist impacts upon the humanities. But "western metaphysics" is also a commonplace. Eventually, this trade in commonplaces (a dissolution of the commons?) results in a prohibition on experience itself, as each of these are traded in for something supposedly known (and never described in detail)--or turned back into their reified pseudo-philosophical counterpart by the move we just mentioned.

This is related to the bad-theoretical overuse of alterity as a concept. The dynamics in which alterity engages us are ultimately reductive and need to be reopened back up into the contexts (experiential) from which they emerge. Even if the concept is used to precisely fight reduction, to insist on irreducibility, it has become an uncreative way to reorganize a wide array of phenomena along too-familiar lines.

This is also the way that bad theory ends up relying too much on "language," and makes it into a homogenous field through which everything has to pass. Language isn't that important to good theory. Or, rather, when it becomes a crutch, it isn't language.

Next, bad theory quickly displaces social dynamics too quickly into theoretical terms. An example would be the oft cited "subordination of feminism by Marxism." What and who are we actually talking about here? It is here where Foucault's "discourse" comes in to save the day: when in doubt, say discourse does it. Theories of ideology, in comparison, have infinitely more subtlety--and that's saying something. In Foucault himself, the notion is structured (in the Archaeology of Knowledge) to get him out of precisely the dilemma this question (what? who?) produces, as it is posed to him by people who rightly were wondering just how he was able to coordinate so much information concerning the rise of the human sciences. While it's right to insist that the stratifications of discourse, as well as its effectivity (and by means of such insistence, discourse thereby becomes a richer concept in Judith Butler and Edward Said), this might not be enough to rescue the concept from its reduction to an empty field producing too many of those effects. Discourse has to be used more carefully, with more structuralist concepts brought in to thicken the mix.

Bad theory thinks of itself as avant-garde. It has an easy relationship to its own history that sadly ends up mirroring the simplistic histories of ideas which it was supposed to displace. In general, it proceeds as an arrogant new humanism by thinking of itself as a progressive adventure.

Bad theory thinks it only includes by opening itself to multiplicities. While the focus on alterity is reductive, it'd be wrong to see multiplicity as an alternative, or something that does the job better--even if one conceives of it "rightly" (that is, itself fraught with difference or composed only of differences and dimensions, as in Deleuze rather than in Laclau and Mouffe). Multiplicity might not always be the right thing to which a situation must be opened up or in terms of which it should be conceived. Something like totalization can be mobilized against universality and even unity and oneness, as in Sartre or Adorno.

This touches on another aspect of bad theory: it's unwillingness to use more than one or two theories. Bad theory is usually only one or two theories, which gets stuck to or followed to the letter. It's not yet dogma, because it has so much functionality and can in general also be illuminating. But it seeks to eliminate other theories or foreclose their imposition--which occurs often, and as an annoying conceptual muddle--precisely by extending the one position (and flattening or restricting itself so they can be assimilated without reducing them--which would require changing the current stance). Good theory is polyglot and patchwork: it knows when to shut up in one system and shift to another (in other words, it shouldn't proceed by increasing the number of prohibitions upon itself--something nearly all bad theory does--and then get angry at those who misunderstand the minimalist language). Just because the concept itself--here multiplicity--is actually structured (rigorously) in order not to foreclose something, doesn't mean everyone should see how it doesn't exclude something. Everyone shouldn't have to get on your page (or be immanent to whatever) to be on the same page. Moreover, theory should actually open itself up to other things at the edge of theory, which theory isn't--thus I insisted at the beginning on the finitude of theory, which now is rethought spatially--indeed like literary theory and literary analysis. This leads into my last characterization:

Bad theory thinks it itself is politics: while theory represents the politicization (if only by oblique suggestion) of various other fields and their materials and procedures, it has to be interrupted by something from outside itself--or, as theory, has to go someplace other than the lecture hall--in order to actually become something like activism. Along these lines, one shouldn't think that because one's theory says it does not separate a particular conception and politics (like in theoretical Spinozism), introducing the concept into an arena is not political, nor does it link the politicization that might (and only might) thereby occur to actual politics. It's not that there is a gap which we can never bridge--it is simply that politicization and politics itself requires this lack of certainty as to whether it is, in any instance, traversed, as I think Judith Butler (for one) outlines quite well.

One night in Miami...

We are normally given some twenty or twenty-five minutes of the film, to get us interested in it; then four minutes of commercials, then about fifteen more minutes of the film; some commercials again; and so on to steadily decreasing lengths of the film, with commercials between them, or them between the commercials, since by this time it is assumed that we are interested and will watch the film to the end. Yet even this had not prepared me for the characteristic American sequence. One night in Miami, still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty in adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial "breaks." Yet this was a minor problem compared to what eventually happened. Two other films, which were due to be shown on the same channel on other nights, began to be inserted as trailers. A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary counterpoint not only with the deoderant and cereal commercials but with a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste New York. [...] I can still not be sure what I took from that whole flow. I believe I registered some incidents as happening in the wrong film, and some characters in the commercials as involved in the film episodes, in what came to seem -- for all the occasional and bizarre disparities -- a single irresponsible flow of images and feelings.
-Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 91-2

What is interesting here is the tendency of the Marxist move, which we see I think most concretely in Williams (that is, it is registered most thoroughly in experience, not theory, or rather in the collapse of the thought-work distinction--a factwhich Adorno talks about), though it's present in Marx to a huge degree already (mostly as blistering theoretical irony--something I feel many readers don't fully understand). This is to rely not on clearer insight into the phenomenon in question, but to a fleeting glimpse captured while in an irrational state, which does not disclose that the totality is irrational, but transforms what, in any other state, you would call rational into an irrational moment (which presupposes an irrational totality indeed, but also determination, in the Hegelian sense). I think this has to be distinguished somewhat from (though no doubt it is related to) a hermeneutics of suspicion. I should give, in conclusion, Williams' general theory of "flow" or rather (since it is determined, through institutions) "planned flow," which tries to make sense of this experience:

What is being offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, to that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real "broadcasting." Increasingly, in both commercial and public-service television, a further sequence was added: trailers of programmes to be shown at some later time or on some later day.
-Television, 91

Like a language

I want to go over something pretty basic here. One of the objections constantly levied against structuralism is that it treats things as languages when it should treat the things as things. It is generally a legitimate frustration with the oddness of the founding structuralist gesture, which is to say that the thing being investigated is a language, or is structured like a language, or can be understood as a language, or comprehended by using the insights from linguistics, etc. etc. etc.

The criticisms (whether they come from phenomenologists, post-structuralists, or post-post-structuralists) claim that this simplifies the thing in question, and ultimately just projects upon the thing the very terms in which it is being analyzed.

The concern is legitimate, as I said, because it wonders at an analogy being taken so seriously and worked out to the fantastic length and intricacy involved in structural interpretations like those of Lévi-Strauss. But what it fails to understand is that the main term in the analogy, language, has to be understood differently if the analogy is to make any sense.

In other words, the critics of structuralism think they know what language is when they hear the phrase, x can be understood like a language. But the structuralist emphasizes that language, when considered as a structure, looks nothing like what they are imagining.

Language for the structuralist is more like a logic ("structure" is the name for this type of logic, or rather logic working in this way), and as such already doesn't have to be made up of words used in speech, or even something like a grammar (insofar as we think we know what "words," "speech," and "grammar" are when considered independently of the logic in which, according to the structuralist, they are merely minimal units or relations between of these units). So you can't object to a structuralist by saying that x or y doesn't exhibit any features of a language--by saying that it isn't something, for example, that is determined by a culture, or exhibiting conscious organization. For if it involves something like a logic, it will have already worked something like a language.

That is, if the thing has a logic in the way that it also participates, say, in dialectic, it will have worked like a language. "Logic," in other words, is helpfully understood in a pseudo-Hegelian way here. Lévi-Strauss himself articulates the commensurability between structure and dialectic in the famous last chapter of The Savage Mind, in a hugely influential attack on Sartre's fascinating (and too neglected) Critique of Dialectical Reason. In doing so, he is making the case that structural logic is immanent to the being of things in the way Sartre (rightly) says it it is in Hegel and Marx.

It is only after this that he overturns Sartre's notion of dialectical reason, grounding it in what Sartre calls analytic reason, ultimately leading him to conclusions which are more familiar, and which involves further qualifying the way this logic or structure works. Sartre says:

[Scientific, Analytic] Reason is the mind as an empty unifier... Dialectical Reason transcends the level of methodology; it states what a sector of the universe, or, perhaps, the whole universe is. It does not merely direct research, or even pre-judge the mode of appearance of objects. Dialectical Reason legislates, it defines what the world (human or total) must be like for dialectical knowledge to be possible; it simultaneously elucidates the movement of the real and that of our thoughts, and it elucidates the one by the other... It is therefore, both a type of rationality and the transcendence of all types of rationality. The certainty of always being able to transcend replaces the empty detachment of formal rationality: the ever present possibility of unifying becomes the permanent necessity for man of totalising and being totalised, and for the world of being an ever broader, developing totalisation.
-Critique of Dialectical Reason, 20

In short, dialectical reason does not remain one-sided: it is speculative, and therefore not a function of the understanding. Lévi-Strauss replies simply that:

all reason is dialectical... since dialectical reason seems to me like analytical reason in action; but then the distinction between the two forms of reason which is the basis of Sartre's enterprise would become pointless.
-The Savage Mind, 251

If we understand the logic established by dialectical reason's "legislation," or, in Sartre's terms, the totalizations, as the crucial thing, it does seem legitimate to say that analytical reason can establish them just as much as dialectical reason, if we add something to the former.

This is the other crucial aspect of structure, which is that it is not a logic that can be taken over by consciousness:

Linguistics thus presents us with a dialectical and totalizing entity but one outside (or beneath) consciousness and will. Language, and unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its reasons and of which man knows nothing.
-The Savage Mind, 252

This, then, is the usual claim which we recognize in structuralism, and to which the objections usually are directed, since it makes the subject a mere function of "language." Thus, Levi-Strauss' immediate response:

And if it is is objected that it is so only for a subject who internalizes it on the basis of linguistic theory, my reply is that this way out must be refused, for this subject is one who speaks: for the same light which reveals the nature of language to him also reveals to him that it was so when he did not know it, for he already made himself understood, and that it will remain so tomorrow without since his discourse never was and never will be the result of a conscious totalization of linguistic laws.
-Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 252

But notice that such claims about language only make sense when we understand the more basic claim that "language" here is fundamentally like a logic. Thus the structure gets its non-internalized character because it is a logic immanent to things, not just because it is so determining (which is nearly always read as constraining) of the subject's role. The fact that the subject is a function of language here does not have to do with how determining the structure is, but how language is a logic. It is only in this sense that we can really understand why such a language resists internalization: for even if it were internalized, made conscious, it would still only be operative or produce effects because it was a logic. In short, making it conscious doesn't matter. The logic matters. And it is in this sense that the analytic reason can, when active, produce dialectic effects of totalization, because in that instance this only means what is always the case is indeed the case: the logic, the structure, is producing effects.

Let me just say that this fact complicates dismissals of poststructuralism as well as structuralism which rely upon the fact that, in absence of a deconstruction of something, one falls back upon structures and thereby remains within a certain cultural, linguistic sphere, or just involves deconstructing "cultural" structures--as if all taint of structuralism had to be removed. Such things are said of Foucault, Derrida, and even Lacan (leading to a move away from the tensions between the symbolic and the imaginary and a sole focus on the symbolic and the real). All of this is complicated if the critic understands that in each case language as a structure means something different than language--especially if we take language in its Heideggerian sense. By this I don't just mean that it is made up of binaries, either (though of course this is involved). I mean that it is a logic in the sense I explained earlier, and one which Lévi-Strauss is not so quick to immediately call "cultural" (that is, unless we reconsider our notion of that latter term).

Best of... Marxism

Nothing truly interesting is possible without negativity; error or ideology, false appearance, are also objective facts that have to be reckoned back into truth.
-Fredric Jameson, "On 'Cultural Studies'" in The Ideologies of Theory, 633

I know I said a phenomenology collection would be next, but returning to Marx and Hegel recently in my reading has given me a fondness for my (somewhat more sketchy) writings on Marxism:

Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach: A very, very lengthy attempt (it extended into six posts, and still remained incomplete) to piece together some basic characteristics "Theses on Feuerbach" and comprehend the level at which Marx's "overturning" of Hegel proceeds. I'm not as technical here as I should be, especially in explaining Hegel, but I hope my simplifications (especially the use of Foucault, who I toyed around with as an explanatory mechanism, and, quickly after this, threw away) are generally helpful in making the problem Marx encountered clear. I should add that in short, I am generally trying to outline something like what Fredric Jameson says (as usual, excellently) here, or find out why and how exactly it is the case:

...it is a mistake to think that Marxism is simply a type of interpretation that takes the economic "sequence" as that ultimately privileged code into which the other sequences are to be translated. Rather, for Marxism the emergence of the economic, the coming into view of the infrastructure itself, is simply the sign of the approach of the concrete.
-"Towards Dialectical Criticism" in Marxism and Form, 322

...and Here are the other posts in the series: post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6, and some rough notes on where I am going after the sixth post.

On Hoarding and Specters of Marx: a detailed analysis of the "hoarding" chapters in Capital and the Grundrisse, and a general perspective on the usefulness of Marx, via a somewhat unorthodox (or at least less Marxist) take on Derrida's Specters of Marx.

Marx, Economics and Law: explaining the "Critique of the Gotha Programme."

Spivak v. Derrida on Value: A look at "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" and a localization of differences between Spivak and Derrida when it comes to Marx. I should say that Spivak seems closer to what Marx says, which refuses analogies between capital and subject, and insists on analogies (in order to demystify them) between capital and society (the demystification proceeds by then seeing society in terms of the means of production), if I can speak loosely.

Gramsci on Hegemony: my presentation for a class with Spivak on Gramsci (and, in a shockingly productive pairing or contrast, W.E.B. Du Bois--whose Black Reconstruction I can't recommend enough), which tries to explain in detail how the concept of hegemony emerges in Gramsci's analysis of history.

Structuralism and finitude: I touch on structuralism mainly, but I have a nice part on the famous "effective causality" passages in Althusser and Balibar's Reading Capital.

You can also expect in the future more detailed treatments of Raymond Williams than the ones I have written so far, as well as considerations of Althusser and Fredric Jameson.

Methodology of literary study and literary theory

Can we extract, from a multifarious set of discourses, a literary critical methodology, or a methodology of literary study, and oppose this to literary theory?

I think we can, though I'm still just working out this idea--in other words, though what we extract can only, as of yet, be a theory (a literary theory) of this study of method. However, we should have no qualms about this: it is precisely the job of literary theory to theorize about such things (things that may oppose it), since theory itself is nothing that should be overcome, over with, etc., however tired we become of it. Perhaps, indeed, it is nothing that can be overcome (and that's a theory right there, Paul de Man's). Literary theory (we may elaborate on de Man's thesis) speculates on its demise, constantly being hindered by the possibility that this demise is impossible.

What, though, would we now extract? In other words, what do we mean by "methodology?" The particular practices, attitudes, moves, approaches of literary study at particular moments in its history, as well as at particular sites in the wide spread of its deployment. In short, it would be the formalization of the way in which we usually talk about certain ways to study literature, just before we begin trying to ask ourselves what these ways of study presuppose about the literary object or the task of criticism: we might say Geoffrey Hartman in Wordsworth's Poetry is very sensitive to the historical import of a psychology, for example, and that Walter Benjamin in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels was obviously under the pressures of writing something that could be academically accepted. These are ways of talking about how studies of literature work that are as of yet impressionistic, aesthetic, biographical, or organized around a sort of study of influences or crude history of ideas. But what is in question in them are ways a study of literature actually proceeds, its texture, its general approach, its particular form of responsiveness. What makes them particularly special, however, is that what is accounted for is not a general set of formal presuppositions, but (almost like a stylistics, but concerned also with function and aim) a discrete set of critical operations: transitions, modes of citation, the structuring of a study, its local strategies, its momentary deployments of rhetoric (which may indeed be material, everyday practices, actions outside of the text proper). When we talk about the toning down of Benjamin's aphoristic tendencies in the light of how he was trying to submit Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as his Habilitationschrift (that is, as George Steiner nicely talks about him in his introduction to the Verso edition) this is oddly particular: it is a statement indifferent to the limits of Benjamin's way of working, but sketches the positive features of that way in terms of practical (that is, limited) limits. It is focused on method.

I need a better example, but for now I can also give some depth to the notion of a literary critical methodology by putting it in relation to literary theory--which is not necessarily always implied in this way of talking, but, unopposed by any other way of talking about these phenomena, these practices, continually exerts pressure upon this area of discourse and lifts it into the sphere of theory (in short, colonizes it). A methodologist would get at all those things a theorist talks about and then turns into a theory: a set of general, almost a priori theses about the role of literature and the role of literary study, which must be overcome or opposed by another theory, another set of theses. In Paul de Man's terms, methodology would be somewhat like the study of reading (de Man would just say, reading itself--that is what makes him a theorist and not a methodologist), which is something prior to theory but which also, at times, interrupts theory. And indeed, here too is a good example of precisely what I mean: what we are doing here is not only outlining what methodology is, but actually defining the procedures of literary theory as a counterexample. In doing this, what we construct, following but also revising de Man, is a description of the method of literary theory: it is characterized here--I claim--by an operation of generalizing, or perhaps overgeneralizing (that is, by totalizing). I do this, I construct this description, before I call it into question, and insofar as I am doing this, my gaze is on theory as method, as a general practical approach with specific ramifications (I can think of specific texts where this generalization is most clear--indeed, in very crucial sites in de Man's work, but to get into this would take us too far astray) and, most of all, specific moves or functions (as an aside, one of my points here is that the increasing use of this word "move," the surprising extent of its acceptance, can be traced to an attempt to get at this level of method, particularly with respect to theoretical arguments, and I think is proof we're already talking on a methodological level--and that talking on a theoretical level about these things is inadequate). In short, I'm not focused here on theory as theory, but theory as a method.

The task somewhat defined, we encounter objections. First, the object of such a methodology would not be literature, but literary study. So what is the pertinence of such a discourse for the study of literature specifically? What distinguishes it from institutional history?

This objection presupposes that the study of literature is itself not a particularly remarkable discourse, as if its remarkable thickness (its proliferation) were merely the excrescence, the remainder of a more primary sphere of artistic production (as if it were merely "secondary texts" compared to "primary texts"). I would reply as follows. While I think it has the sort of analytical function that is similar to that of science, in that it possesses an object and studies that object--and indeed I believe it should retain that function, that homology to science, rather than proceed as if it did not establish knowledge, as if it itself were art--the study of literature has a specificity that increases the more and more it becomes distinct from the consumption of texts and indeed, the mere interpretation of them. In short, it can less and less be defined in terms of its object. (And as we can see from recent histories of science, we find that this does not mean the study of literature is therefore different from science, as if science had a clear object and literary studies, or the humanities more generally, did not: indeed, precisely like certain sciences, it cannot be defined merely in terms of its object.) Because on the one hand the study of literature at least since the advent of theory establishes this distinction more concretely (in short, because we are working to define ourselves less by our object), and on the other because literary study, or the type of study that we now call the study of literature--perhaps including aspects of rhetoric, exegesis, or the study of language generally--has a long history of refusing to simply perform either of these functions (that is, because literary study was never defined by its object in the first place), this specificity is quite high. It seems clear then that a certain distinctiveness which demands its own type of study would inhere in the practice of criticism; a literary critical methodology would be that type of study.

We run the risk in claiming this, however, that we might just be entrenching more and more the notion that literary study is just the study of a literary object. That is, another objection to our rebuttal lies in wait: we could only give some specificity to the study of literature itself at this point in our analysis of it, when the literary study is indeed extremely confident that it has an object. We would then be taking the existence of the object for granted, and would merely create a new object existing beside it (the object would be the analysis of the first object). In short, we cannot just posit that the existence of a certain specificity of literary study merits treating it as an autonomous sphere. We cannot confuse specificity with autonomy (it might indeed be the case that with greater specificity there is less autonomy when it comes to literary study). We cannot shirk from the task of actually establishing its relationship to literature, thereby making literary critical methodology somehow pertinent to literature itself.

I get into this confusing territory here because many of the attempts to talk about the way the study of literature proceeds--in other words, attempts to talk about its method--refuse to do this. Two discourses are set up: that of literature, and that of literary study, both having very clear (though very, very different) institutional ties. (Very bad) Marxist criticism and Foucauldian criticism sometimes do this: the assumption is that you can have, say, a depiction of the institutions of power within a novel, or, still staying within the realm of the literary, a certain circulation of a literary document in the marketplace, while you also have a certain set of critics who, years later, have ties to the university and circulate their studies of literature in that (separate) institution. The lines are not always so clear, however, and more of these Marxist and Foucauldian studies assume the existence of two discourses without actually stating anything about them: they are implied in certain gestures (again we see the benefit of looking at method) whose purpose is to call into question the position from which a critic is speaking of a particular work. In short, rather than clearly establishing the relationship of two different discourses to each other, it is more advantageous for a particular type of criticism (and again, it is usually naive, or very bad) to say that they are in fact totally related at particular times, and then at other times say that they are different, incommensurate.

Pierre Bourdieu resolves these problems when it comes to the sphere of literature and literary criticism, and thereby comes the closest to performing the sort of study of critical method that we are advocating. At the heart of his project is an effort to show that the study of literature and the production of literature are two aspects of one process, which can also still be differentiated across a wide continuum in a nuanced way. In short, he makes the distinction we are making between literary production and the study of literature, but he also establishes a relationship between the two. In doing so, he also accomplishes what we seek to accomplish: the destruction of the notion that the study of literature is the same thing as the study of a literary object. He sees in this notion not only all that we have remarked above about the problems of supposing the literary study is a secondary text appended to a primary text (that is, unlike many theorists in the 70's/80's, he does not invert the old paradigm and assert that literary commentary may indeed be literature--cf. Geoffrey Hartman's famous essay, in Criticism in the Wilderness), but also sees a certain notion of art itself bound up with it. We can call it the aesthetic consideration of art, or, perhaps better, the Kantian notion: the literary critical act is, in this view, nothing more than a very sophisticated response to the work. Even when it tries to be rigorous, to be scientific, it comments upon literature as if it were an entity existing over against a subjectivity that experiences it: the task of the critic, then, is to be as true to the experience of the literature insofar as it corresponds to the nature of the text (to what is "in" it). Of course, you can deviate from this model, but still retain the aesthetic function, the Kantian standpoint: most notably, you can grant some autonomy to the act of responsiveness itself, and no longer demand that literary criticism concern itself with the amount of correspondence between what is said about a text and what is actually in it. But this approach may still reasonably suppose that literary criticism has a privileged view upon the object, for example, such that it can nevertheless still say things about what is actually present in a text. This is indeed reasonable, but it is also still Kantian, still aesthetic: as de Man puts it, it presupposes a type of phenomenality exists in the literary object which allows a critic (as opposed to someone else) to say such things, to suppose that, even if he is not concerned with how his statements correspond to the text, or whether they are true of it, might still actually say something about a text.

What Bourdieu does to rid us of this notion, of this function of criticism, is to situate it, as we said, on one and the same plane with literature itself. Literary criticism then can be seen as a particular activity that indeed has a relationship to literary production--the production of texts. But it is an activity that stands alongside other activities, like the process of book distribution, marketing, reviews, all of which now are seen as differentiated, distinct ways of handling (I emphasize this word, since it retains a nice Heideggerian valence) literary production, indeed as modes of production in their own right, as opposed to a homogeneous set of responses to the text. Institutions also are part of this network (as it were), but again exist only beside other practices of handling literature: they do not, as in Foucault, gain a sort of autonomy except insofar as they work against the other practices to achieve the effect of autonomy, the appearance of it (this is why Bourdieu's critiques of institutions are much more rigorous, something which the work of my buddy Evan, in a paper given at the UCLA Southland Graduate Student Conference recently made clear).

We can now return to the project of a methodology of literary study: Bourdieu resolves the problems that arise when one begins to posit some specificity to the literary critical task, when one begins to separate the study of literature apart from the production of literature itself, but it is not clear that positing such a separation would immediately restore the Kantian, aesthetic status of literary criticism. To put it a different way, Bourdieu's way of working is only perhaps one solution, not the solution to the Kantian problem. Indeed, once you begin to see the force of putting things on one plane, as it were, or seeing them (in his terminology) in terms of a field, it becomes hard to then study isolated elements of that field, in the way that we are proposing literary study should itself be studied in terms of its method. For it is (rightly) not obvious why you would then look at one point as opposed to another, or, better, without also considering all the others (you feel, again rightly, as if you are falling back into the old illusions). And while indeed I believe with Bourdieu that it makes little sense to see literary criticism without also looking at literary reviews, say (or at least looking at where it comes from--i.e. the academy), we might still be able to keep a focus on this area which would not immediately land us back into the old aesthetic problems, or for that matter unknowingly perpetuate them.

All this is to say that there are, I think, reasons for talking about literary study (and specifically its methods) apart from literature which, on the one hand, don't have to presume literary criticism is autonomous or, on the other, don't have to assume the totality of a field as the object proper to a study. We can have at the same time a wider and a narrower object. Part of this comes from a view of the way in which literary criticism proceeds that is very similar to Bourdieu's: a study of literary critical methodology would see literary criticism as a set of approaches, as a set of operations (some textual, some institutional, some habitual), which are not too distinct from the practices that he thinks ultimately make up the field (by inserting themselves in it). Thus our resistance to talking about certain aspects of literary study as theory is not entirely negative: it is grounded in a more positive account of activity that is basically that of Bourdieu's, which refuses to see them--as many theorists do--in the abstract realm of ideas, of competing thoughts.

There are other objections, I'm sure--particularly from those who might indeed defend this sphere of thought apart from action, who would like to see literary criticism not as a set of actions but as a form of thinking--but the one concerning the merits of treating literary criticism itself as the material for study is the most important, and I have treated it accordingly at length. What remains to be articulated is more of what such a study--such a methodology--would relate to literature itself if it is not entirely going to do so as Bourdieu says. For now, let us just say that without supposing literature is destined to be interpreted or studied critically (which is another way, as we saw, of conceiving literature and literary criticism aesthetically), the operations of literary criticism are indeed important in that they tend to bear also upon modes of reading, which are themselves essential--though not always--to literary production. I'd have to think more about what this means, and whether it isn't just putting everything in different (though no doubt, better) words. The fact that literary criticism also deals so much with language--both its nature and, more often, with its use--indeed brings its contributions to reading out of the sphere of mere reflections on consumption.

I do think though that formalizing the way we talk about the way literary study proceeds would, however, be highly profitable--it might have enough amazing results on its own. This, I'll maintain, would require us to talk about methods instead of theories, or at least begin to differentiate between the two more. On the other side of the spectrum, we would also have to differentiate more between basic activities in life (like Benjamin composing for the academy), and the specific practices that make up literary criticism: there are not styles of criticism, or greater or lesser sensitivities to texts, or unique approaches, but specific methods of literary criticism.

Notes on Marx

Here's some quick notes about where I am going in all my Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach posts:

Why marx turns specifically to the economy (at least in his early writings):
because it is hegelian nature (what is outside dialectic, i.e. [perhaps, this isn't right exactly if taken strictly] what is outside reappropriation into the movement of becoming of being and nothingness--i.e. it is brute being, a-dialectical being) conceived RIGHTLY: i.e. not in Feuerbach or Stirner's sense. It is nature that is already social, but this "already" is not due to the movement of the dialectic. How?

This all revolves around trying to see the ultimate general direction of Marx's enterprise with respect to Hegel and especially with respect to the Hegel of Feuerbach, Stirner, and Bruno Bauer (but especially Feuerbach). Obviously, this is extremely reductive. But it might help nevertheless: one needs fundamentally to conceive, in a very brutal, basic sense, why exactly Marx got so intrigued with political economy as a site for dialectic. Althusser is especially good regarding this need. But he can come off as too rigid, because he's trying perhaps to do too much for us at once: understand both the contingency and the necessity of this interest of Marx with respect to others and with respect to the movement of his own thought. But in the end, one should read Althusser with this more humble project in mind--namely, being able to account for the particular specificity of Marx's analysis to the economy and to a historically determined, finite period (to be a little redundant) of the economy (I try to show this a little regarding The Communist Manifesto in another post). In other words, one needs to be able to link in the back of one's mind the project of Hegel to something like this late quote on "the trinity formula" from Capital III:

Capital, land, labor! But capital is not a thing, it is a social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical social formation, which simply takes the form of a thing and gives this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and the produced means of production. Capital is the means of production as transformed into capital, these being no more capital in themselves than gold or silver are money. It is the means of production monopolized by a particular section of society...

-Capital III, 953

Something is said here about the particular historicity of what is being analyzed, and it can be elucidated by comparing it to Hegel via Feuerbach in its general tenor. One then, of course, has to try and realize more specifically how this historicity is refined and specific to Marx's particular task at this moment in time, and whether he has already perhaps abandoned this model and its general tenor altogether. In other words, it doesn't hurt to hear Hegel resounding in what Marx is saying here, in order to begin to attune oneself to the background noise of Marx that may be totally indifferent to Hegel (to botch a metaphor).

Gramsci Presentation

I gave this presentation to a class this week:

I will not be talking directly about hegemony but instead about something else that comes up quite often in the reading we did for this week and (as we will definitely see when we read Black Reconstruction) in the work of Du Bois: the writing of history. What are the demands of historiography for someone thinking about politics and working out Marxist concerns? This is my question. However, in pursuing it I may be constantly traversing a point at which the effort of writing history (as Gramsci in his notes seems to be approaching it) passes over into a concern that might influence his use of the word “l’egemonia.” If any such point exists, and if I ever do move through it, we might question it with respect to what it gives our understanding of Gramsci (and Du Bois) and what areas the mere possibility of its existence is already excluding from the field of my considerations—in other words, whether and how this point might only also be a blind spot.

This indirect approach might best start with a quotation from Gramsci’s notes towards an account of the Italian unification in the mid-19^th century. Here, according to Gramsci, the Northern urban productive force (i.e. totality of labor + totality of means of production, including instruments and waste) had for various reasons to assemble the Southern urban forces around its lead so as to attain what Gramsci calls homogeneity of internal coherence among all urban forces. But, unlike the urban North, these urban Southern forces were not the leading forces in their own part of the nation: they were often led by the rural force in the countryside. Gramsci shows that these conditions were able to produce a “strident contradiction” that, if made explicit, would produce something incurable, something the Northern urban force could not use its particular homogeneity or cohesion to remedy. If we can, let us try and observe for now precisely how Gramsci is staging or setting this contradiction up as the posing of a question—letting the other complex concerns work themselves out afterwards. “The urban forces,” Gramsci says, in this state of affairs,

are socially homogeneous, hence must occupy positions [across Italy] of perfect equality. That was theoretically true, but historically the question posed itself differently: the urban forces of the North were clearly at the head of their national sector, while for the urban forces of the South that was not true, at least not to the same extent. The urban forces of the North had therefore to persuade [dovevano quindi ottenere] those of the South that their [i.e. the South’s] directive function [funzione dirrettiva] should be limited to ensuring the “leadership” [direzione] of North over South in a general relation of city to countryside. In other words, the directive function of the Southern urban forces could not be other than a subordinate moment [un momento subordinato] of the vaster directive function of the North. The most strident contradiction was created by this series of facts [La contraddizione piú stridente nasceva da questo ordine di fatti]. The urban force of the South could not be considered as something on its own [comme qualcosa a sé], independent [indipendente] of that of the north. To pose [porre] the question in such a way would have meant asserting in advance an incurable “national” rift [un insanabile dissidio «nationale»]—a rift so serious that not even a federalist solution would have been able to heal it [avrebbe potuto comporre]… In reality, however, there existed only certain “aspects” [«aspetti»] of such a national question, not “all” the aspects or even the most essential ones. … In practical terms, therefore, the question posed itself in the existence of a strong center of political leadership, with which strong and popular personalities from the South and the islands would necessarily have had to collaborate (SPN 99-100; Q19§26, 2043-44).

Now, as Gramsci composes this history, he does not oppose the “national question,”—that is, the question about the independence of the Southern urban forces from those of the North—he does not oppose this question to history as some historiographer’s construct or external mechanism that would pretend to make sense of history’s “actual” richness: provisionally, we may say that history for him is something that works itself out in structures similar to questions. However, we can also see that it is essential for him to keep marking the fact that history, though it works out itself in structures similar to questions, does not work itself out in the form of theoretical questions or meta-historical reflections. Thus, when he says, “to pose the question in such a way would have meant asserting in advance an incurable ‘national’ rift,” apparently we must see that the history of the productive forces, and not any particular person or historiographer, is the one posing or putting forth the question, and putting it to themselves. Similarly, we must see that it is opposing and avoiding its own questions by dispersing their disruptive potential into aspects, only some of which actually exist, as Gramsci says. The writing of history, then, appears to consist of looking at the conditions in which the productive forces can pose themselves discernible questions, and tracking the ways certain aspects of these questions, in their existence or non-existence, allow this force to avoid or seize the question through them.

 But what do we mean by this? What exactly is being seized and avoided? This can be put another way: why does Gramsci say that, in reality, only some aspects of the question exist? This is because, as we said peremptorily, the question itself (which, we remember, was the question as to the independence of the urban force of the South from the North) comes from beyond the capacity of productive force of the urban North to remedy it: the question’s aspects reside in that space in which the North’s own homogeneity or cohesion is precisely not enough by itself to endure the question’s possibility. This leads us to a deeper understanding of the role of the question at which Gramsci’s historiography looks. The question of the independence of the Southern urban force is there in the history Gramsci is writing because it is not yet possible for the Northern urban force to actually make this Southern force wholly independent “in reality.” If this were possible, if the Northern force were homogenous enough for this independence to occur, the Northern urban force would not be where it is, within a relation to the South and faced with this question as to whether it is or is not in this relation—indeed this is why actually posing the question would “assert in advance” of posing it that there would be a rift, as Gramsci claims. The only option for the urban North, then, is attempting the unification that would risk asserting the question of its independence from the South so as to avoid asking that very question. This means, on the level of the productive forces, working with what it already has—only aspects of the question, as Gramsci says, since the questions are somehow, by the fact of its cohesion or lack of cohesion, the fact that it cannot be asked merely by or with those productive forces.

What is it beyond these productive forces that could constitute the questions that Gramsci’s historiography traces? In answering this, we can see how historiography may become explicitly related to politics and Marxism for Gramsci. Because we know that it cannot come merely from a productive force, let us suggest that for Gramsci this cohesion or non-cohesion of a productive force resides within its relations—more precisely, in the area of these relations which exceed being merely the productive force itself considered qua productive, i.e. economically. If this is so, the historiography of this productive force can transform itself into analyses of relations of force, which, as Gramsci says,

cannot and must not be ends in themselves (unless the intention is merely to write a chapter of past history), but acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particularly practical activity, an initiative of will. They reveal the points of least resistance, at which the force of will can be most fruitfully applied; they suggest immediate tactical operations; they indicate how a campaign of political agitation may best be launched, what language will best be understood by the masses, etc. (GR, 209; Q13§17).

In order to see this transformation, we must look at where Gramsci effects the expansion of the area beyond productive forces as such: that is, in a few pages within the note titled “Analysis of Situations,” when he differentiates various “moments or levels” in the relations of the productive forces. For reasons of time, I cannot look at all of this differentiation now, but I can look at one of them: the “most purely political phase” (GR, 205) of what he calls the moment of the relation of political forces.

This moment is not as tied to the economic constitution of the productive forces as “the relation of social forces.” It indeed contains economic concerns (or concerns that only relate to the productive forces qua productive,) but in one of the three levels Gramsci specifies it is explicitly questions that, beyond these economic or “corporate interests,” arise. If we can, let us notice again merely how the word “question” must appear and function—again letting other concerns (like that of ideology, the party, etc.) be illuminated perhaps by virtue of this notice. “This is the most purely political phase,” Gramsci says,

and marks the decisive passage from the structure to the sphere of the complex superstructures; it is the phase in which previously germinated ideologies become “party,” come into confrontation and conflict, until only one of them, or at least a single combination of them, tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself over the whole social area [a diffondersi su tutta l’area sociale]—bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle rages [ponendo tutte le quistioni intorno a cui ferve la lotta] not on a corporate but on a “universal” plane (GR, 205; Q13§17).

The “question” as it functions here is not just what makes productive forces risk themselves. It is the means by which they risk and secure for themselves that homogeneity and coherence that they have. By expressing or articulating a particular set of historical questions within its political dimension, a productive force can make all other forces struggle politically (and, as Gramsci says, also economically, intellectually, and morally) around it. These questions, then, would be the political development of contradictions in the historical situation of productive forces that were so particularly problematic that they could not be overcome. If historiography articulates how these political questions are constituted, they will indeed be working out not just the past, but also where force can be applied.

Let me just suggest that it would be in the beginning of the notes on “The Modern Prince” that we might find this articulation regarding how these political forces are constituted. There, it is the particular functioning of the myth that will illuminate the constitution of the currently broad definition we are using of “political.” The absolutely crucial question that these notes prompt us to ask, which is indeed that question towards which all of this has tended, would be whether Gramsci in the end was writing history (in the sense of "the past") in the passage above or constructing a myth. Or both--and have we gone any way in specifying what this conjunction or disjunction would be? We might also ask this of Du Bois next week. The fundamental point for me, however, is that Gramsci is trying to delineate a history that would be absolutely incommensurate in its truth with vanguardism as a practice: vanguards could only be untrue, could only be the populous in the grip of a mistake. But this precisely does not mean that vanguardism does not happen. Indeed, it put Gramsci in jail. But the question we need to ask ourselves--if we are to refine our inquiry--is whether myth or history as "the past" would do this. Or, again, both (or none). We could also conclude by showing that the last quote continues, “and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups” (GR, 205). Hegemony would thus have already crossed our path somewhere—I’ll venture that point occurred when we moved from how the productive force questioned itself to how it used this questioning to express itself.

Marx as defender of the dialectic

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx defends the Hegelian dialectic. Or rather, he defends it against the attempt to break with it that is concentrated in capitalism. He exposes this attempt as really only a dialectical redoubling that does not escape from the dialectic.

We can see this in the passage where he recasts the Hegelian master/slave relationship into the bourgeoisie/proletariat relationship. The second is actually the truth of the former--that is, in less Hegelian terms, the bourgeoisie/proletariat relationship is the dialectical overcoming of the antagonism or contradiction between the master/slave relationship. Instead of exploiting the slave, the master here tries to take care of the worker so that the worker can continue to work. This allows both master and slave to work for the master's master, work itself. But what is crucial about this is that the "taking care of" here or "feeding" of the slave is only feeding the slave such that the worker's work--and not the worker himself--can continue. The emphasis is upon work abstracted from the existence of the slave that provides the work. Thus the slave sinks below the conditions that he would be under if he were wrapped up in the feudal master/slave dialectic, because the master here is not concerned with his existence--the master is "incompetent to assure the continued existence" of the slave, as Marx puts it. The slave cannot properly be a slave under capitalism. That is, it cannot be assured as to whether he will exist as a slave: his bare existence is threatened in the face of the abstract labor-power he temporarily embodies.

Thus what is going on is the attempt to dissolve the dialectic into a relationship where there will be no conflict, no dialectical conflict, between the master and the slave. A critique of capitalism, then would be the reassertion of the conflict or antagonism between the worker/slave and the master, and furthermore the assertion that the bourgeoisie is not a proper master. In other words, it would be a defense of the dialectic--not in order to resolve it again in the abstractions of Hegel, but to then direct it from this false escape from the dialectic into a socialist, and then communist, actual escape. I'll elaborate this more later. Here is the passage from the Manifesto--I've italicized the portion of the text that is explicitly under consideration:

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

Spivak, Derrida, Marx and the question of value

I'll outline here a basic point that Gayatri Spivak makes about Derrida and Marx in "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" that does not cease to be relevant even today when thinking about all the concepts we inherit from Derrida--most notably (and was there any other concept he gave us? and was it ever a concept?) differance. We'll see that it is picked up, a decade later, by Bernard Stiegler, for essential reasons. Spivak lays out the point simply, in the strict terms of Marx:

For Derrida... capital is generally interest-bearing commercial capital. Hence surplus-value for him is the super-adequation of capital rather than a "materialist" predication of the subject as super-adequate to itself. This restricted notion can only lead to "idealist" analogies between capital and subject, or commodity and subject.

-in The Spivak Reader, 119

The distinction she makes between "materialism" and "idealism" is outlined in the first paragraph of that essay and should be recalled:

One of the determinations of the question of value is the predication of the subject. The modern "idealist" predication of the subject is consciousness. Labor-power is a "materialist" predication. Consciousness is not thought, but rather the subject's irredicible intendedness towards the object. Correspondingly, labor power is not work (labor) but rather the irredicible possibility that the subject be more than adequate--super-adequate--to itself, labor-power: "it distinguishes itself [unterscheidet sich] from the ordinary crown of commodities in that its use creates value, and a greater value than it costs itself" (Capital 1, 342).

-in The Spivak Reader, 109.

This is a lot to take in, but let's walk through it: Spivak is extremely careful with the words she uses and each signals a turn in thought that lends itself to our tracing it out.

It is obvious from the first sentence of the second quote (the first sentence of the first paragraph of the essay) that how the subject is predicated is, for Spivak, a way that the question of value can take on a particular valence or tone. In other words, a way the question of value can be asked can be in how the subject is predicated, how it is allowed or not allowed to be: the predication itself asks the question of value, so that what value is will resonate with how a subject is predicated.

Spivak then reproduces a distinction Marx makes in The German Ideology between the predication of consciousness and the predication of labor-power. As Marx says, the former predication "descends from heaven to earth," making "consciousness" into what "determines life" while the latter is involved in a movement of "ascending from earth to heaven," making "life" into what "determines ...consciousness" (The German Ideology, Amherst: Prometheus, 1998, 43). This is the sense in which the first is "idealist" and the second "materialist:" not because one or the other is a particular form of rigorous idealism or materialism but because the first has idealist and the second "materialist premises" (Marx, 43)--thus the quotes she puts around the words. What is "idealist" corresponds to a predication of the subject that presupposes the form of consciousness as primary and the labor power in life secondary, and what is "materialist" corresponds to a predication of the subject that presupposes the form of labor-power in the opposite way. What are these presuppositions, exactly? Nothing other than identity, self-presence in the case of idealism and difference or absence of presence in the case of materialism. This is why Spivak says that labor-power is not labor--not a thing or a present that would be identical to itself, like the conscious "I am"--but a "irreducible possibility:" labor-power is not, because it is only a difference between the subject and its object, what it needs. Thus, "super-adequation:" the converse of Spivak's proposition that the subject is super-adequate to herself according to labor-power is that the subject is that the subject is lacking something or is different than what it needs to be in order to be adequate. For Spivak, labor-power is a predication of the subject as a needing and making subject, a subject that can make more than it needs and, in "being" this ability, always "is" lacking something or needing something that would make it adequate to itself or identical. It is always already more than its identity to itself. If Derrida's consideration of capital "can only lead to 'idealist' analogies," as she says, then we see that Derrida's idealism must stem from presupposing here that consciousness as this self-identity is more primary than labor-power and difference as a predication of the subject.

We'll continue these reflections later... here is the transit they will make: capital presupposing identity in Derrida and escaping the real meaning of surplus-value, or the surplus itself. This "restricted" and not "generalizing" notion--Spivak especially chooses her words carefully here, referring to the distinction between a restricted and general economy--stems from an ambiguity in how differance appears only after or before there is super-adequation, and not precisely at the point of super-adequation itself. In other words, differance "is" not super-adequation, and thus Derrida presupposes that it exists in a completed form--in capital, rather than as labor power. This ambiguity is localized by Stiegler in Technics and Time, when he cannot place differance either before or after phusis with any clarity: does phusis arise from differance or afterwards? And is this a correct understanding of differance on the part of Stiegler--is not this indeterminacy precisely the determinacy of both the either and the or, of the perhaps?

The big Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach post, part 6

To continue from last time, this entry being the culmination of the encounter between Feuerbach and Hegel, and having the promised appearance of some music:

...This all may seem tedious, but it is necessary to grasp in order to see where Marx is coming from when he refers to “materialism.” For what Feuerbach does next is show that Hegel did indeed ground the necessitation of the relationship between Spirit and the Absolute, but merely did not emphasize it: he grounded this necessitation precisely in what is seen by Feuerbach as material “nature,” that supposedly non-Spiritual category that is both prior to and outside of significance. This “nature” proves to be nothing other than what Hegel must refer to in Feuerbach’s eyes in order to fully develop the consistency of his God: not the Absolute in Spirit, but the principles that compose Spirit itself. It is thus clear to us why this is such a revolutionary overthrow of Hegel, and why this changes the whole essence of God “as a religious object:” if Hegel specified what “nature” was, then God, the culmination of Spirit, would issue forth necessarily not from His own essence (the essence of the Absolute), but only from the completion of Spirit insofar as Spirit itself completes itself only in accordance with its presuppositions. Instead of the existence of God and the meaningful found within the self-developed principles of Spirit (the layerings of meaningful action that produce later layerings), God would be the result of the “nature” that exists before and outside of these principles—in what makes these principles possible. To put it yet another way, if the principles that direct and propel Spirit’s development are shown to lead Spirit to a state of culmination, then calling this state of culmination “God” will not be arbitrary. Nothing will exist other than this culmination, and since it culminates necessarily, it will be full, final, perfect. Thus the preconditions of Spirit, the structure that effectuates and provides for its development, its “nature,” are what are to be elucidated for Feuerbach, because they are what, instead of Spirit alone or by itself, will be considered real, since they make up God. All that needs to be done is lay the emphasis on “nature” instead of the Absolute when asserting the identity of the Absolute and Spirit, and Spirit will be organized from the ground up, and its culmination (God, significance itself) as well.
To digress shortly, we may remark that a good example of the difference between the two—an example one can experience for oneself—can be culled from the sphere of music. Hegel’s God is a symphony by Beethoven. Notes appear in one of these symphonies and move in both harmony and discord based on the genius of the compositional ideas that form them and break them apart: Beethoven composes a symphony to articulate and bring into a vocabulary of notes various ideas and feelings, letting them take shape in accordance with their meaning and intention. Take Beethoven’s third “Eroica” symphony. Composed in 1803, it is a grand statement about the nature of heroism and the hero, dedicated to Napoleon. Throughout the symphony, heroism as an idea is brought to music such that when the idea ceases its movement, when it is completely stated, the notes stop, and the symphony is over. Each section, each movement in one of these symphonies is one such statement of the author regarding heroism, organized around a discrete and distinct notion that occurs in his head, and together they make up nothing less than an epic series of articulations that convey this general idea. Led on by his own intentions, the symphony is Beethoven’s statement regarding Napoleon—this is such the case that after Beethoven (like much of Europe) witnessed Napoleon’s coronation of himself in late 1804, he supposedly scratched out the dedication to him on the title page of the symphony, giving the symphony itself a different meaning, a different intention. Now, turning to Feuerbach, we might say that he is advocating a type of articulation of meaning that would look like a composition by the British composer Steve Reich. In his “Music for 18 Musicians” (1974) Reich assigned various instruments a particular series of notes to play, a particular tempo to play them at, and a particular way to play them, and then simply had them begin and maintain that particular assignment. The result is a massive series of noises that are merely the collection of various instruments each keeping to and repeating their individual utterance. At any moment of the work, the 18 musicians are busy combining together their individual sounds in different permutations, and doing so only really because they are playing in the same room together. In fact, the entire work is the result of an exhaustion of all the possible permutations of the various instruments: when each individual instrument’s series of notes are over and played, they simply stop, and the end of the work is achieved when they all are simply done with. Thus, each movement of the music is a product of the maintenance of the original presuppositions assigned to each instrument. Each moment is organized from the bottom up, and does not express any idea other than that produced by the mathematical combination of the instruments. Far from being something led on by the genius of a divinely inspired mind articulating a vast meditation on the nature of heroism in his historic era, the composition of Reich is about the beauty of the ability of individuals to combine and create harmony out of nothing more than their own movements, out of their own natures. These works give some weight and definiteness to Hegel and Feuerbach’s ideas of God, embodying them, as it were.