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Tag: Althusser
Three provisional theses on Marx's concept of value
August 28, 2016 September 12, 2016 Pothik Ghosh2 Comments
"Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It's no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values."
–Marx, Capital, Volume I
Value is not transcendental. It is born only when it discovers itself in and through the historical accident of exchange. But the birth of value, which follows its discovery of itself, amounts to it being instituted as that which is a presupposition of exchange so that exchange is its realisation as value. Consequently, exchange ceases to be an accident of history to be transformed into an expression of its systemic principle, which is value. This is precisely the dialectic of history of logic and logic of history that Marx demonstrates while mapping the unfolding of value from its elementary or accidental form to its general form and money-form through the intermediate moment of its total or expanded form.
However, it is precisely the failure to closely attend to this rigorous dialectic of history of logic and logic of history that has often led scholars – mostly post-Marxists, but also a good number of Marxists of various kinds – to erroneously claim (and affirm) that for Marx value begins with exchange. Such an error renders value trans-historical and/or has disastrously reformist political consequences.
Essence, of course, becomes accessible only when it appears. But that does not mean appearance precedes essence or that the latter is an effect of the former. All those who insist that value – or the dialectic qua the principle of mediation – begins with exchange are falling precisely into such an error: it's only in exchange that value is accessed so exchange precedes value. As a result, they mistake Marx's demonstration of the historical precedence of exchange over value as the former's logical priority over the latter.
Qualitative equalisation of (qualitative) difference — valorisation — is not the effect of exchange. Rather, it's an integral dimension of the mode of organising of production (in its hidden abode) that must be logically prior to exchange in order for it to be realised in exchange. Had that not been the case, there is no way "mental", "ideal' or "imaginary" money-form as the measure of value would precede, and be distinct from, the tangible money-commodity as standard of price that really changes hands as definite quantities of metal money in the actuality of exchange. Marx in demonstrating this draws our attention to the logical priority of measure of value (and thus value) over standard of price (and price qua exchange-value). In other words, Marx is emphasising, implicitly or otherwise, how value precedes exchange-value with the latter realising the former.
Besides, if in Marx's conception value did begin with exchange why would he then need to dwell at length (in Capital, Volume I) on Aristotle's historical incapacity to come up with a conception of value when the latter is faced with the historical fact of exchange?
Therefore, the assertion that value begins with exchange is a complete and correct statement of things only if one is thinking of value merely in terms of its accidental creation. However, if one is dealing with value in terms of it being the logic of organising production — which is the mode of mobilising labour through quantification of respectively different socially necessary labour times for various qualitatively different concrete labours through a process of reducing them to human labour in the abstract — then this statement is incomplete and perhaps even wrong. In such circumstances, one will do well, instead, to state the following: exchange realises value-relationality (or the dialectic) precisely because the latter presupposes the former. So, instead of saying dialectic begins with exchange one should say the dialectic (value qua value-relationality) appears (or is realised) in exchange (exchange-value qua exchange-relation) precisely because the former is presupposed by the latter as its principle.
To not grasp the dialectic qua the law of mediation, and exchange in those precise terms is likely to lead one into the serious error of conflating and confounding the function of price (and its standard) with that of value (and its measure). Both being distinct functions of the one and the same money-form or money-commodity. That would compel one to erroneously insist, one way or another, that the market is the be all and end all of capital.
Marx's exposition on value in Capital reveals two things at once. One, value is not transcendental. Two, value in being instituted, however, conceives of itself as being transcendental. This thinking of value by itself, which renders it transcendental (value qua value), is precisely the systemic operation of capital. Marx's articulation of critique of value is intimately bound up with demonstrating what commodities say about themselves – or what value thinks of itself. In fact, what is important for the Marx of Capital is, first and foremost, the demonstration of what value says about itself. (See the citation with which this post begins.) Hence, Marx demonstrates how value is, in its own thinking, transcendental. He needs to do this because his critique of value is a deconstruction of precisely the transcendentality of value – or value as transcendental.
Marx's critique of value begins by showing how value is, in its instituting, the abstraction of use-value, which is the irreplaceable, uncountable one (the singular). In other words, value, in thinking itself as being transcendental, is negation of this singularity of use-value. When Marx tells us that exchange-value – which is expression of value – has not an atom of use-value, even as use-value is the "material depository" of value/exchange-value, he is underscoring precisely that. He is drawing our attention to how value conceives of itself, or operationalises itself, as transcendental through a process of abstraction of use-value that is, therefore, the latter's negation or disavowal.
Therefore, in terms of value conceiving of itself as transcendental – something that Marx demonstrates in the process of developing its critique — use-value is an absence or lack in value/exchange-value. But to the extent, that this negation, which renders that which is negated a lack, is made possible precisely by that which goes lacking the lack in question is constitutive of that which renders it a lack. In other words, Marx demonstrates how use-value is, in terms of value conceiving of itself as transcendental, a constitutive lack.
Value conceives itself as being transcendental (value qua value) that is expressed as and in the empirical (of exchange). This means value as such – that is, as the final instant of determination in its loneliness – conceals itself as the character of its (empirical) expressions. This also means that value as this concealed character of its expressions in and as the empirical (of things) is also a concealment of the process of abstraction of the concrete ("historical character" of "meanings" as Marx says in Capital) by which it comes to be the (hidden) essence — the transcendental — of its (empirical) expressions, and the concrete as such (use-value as the singularity it is). In such circumstances, when value as the concealed character of its (empirical) expressions is revealed in its hiddenness, its (empirical) expressions come across as the mystifications or fetishisms/fetishes they are.
Therefore, value as this hidden character of its expressions in and as the empirical — which is value conceived by itself as being transcendental – in being revealed thus is not itself a fetish, a mystification or an ideology. It is, instead, the character of fetishism, mystification and/or ideology. Following Adorno's explication of the dialectic in Negative Dialectics, we could characterise value as the truth of the untrue. Hence, value qua value, which is value conceived by itself as being transcendental, is not in itself an ideology but is the character, or truth, of ideology.
Besides, value in being revealed as this hidden character of its (empirical) expressions — which are themselves, concomitantly, demonstrated to be fetishes or ideologies — is also a revelation of both the process of abstraction of the concrete and its concomitant repression as that process of abstraction.
This clearly implies that revelation of value as the hidden character of its (empirical) expressions – i.e. its revelation as the character or truth of fetishism or ideology – is also a positing of the concrete qua the reversal of the process of abstraction of the concrete. Which means value in its revelation as the character of fetishism or ideology – or the truth of the untrue – must be grasped and envisaged as the division of this truth of the untrue into itself and truth as such.
It is this Alain Badiou points towards in Theory of the Subject, when he writes: "There are two dialectical matrices in Hegel. This is what turns the famous story of the shell and the kernel into such a dubious enigma. It is the kernel itself that is cracked, as is those peaches that are furthermore so irritating to eat whose hard internal object quickly cracks between one's teeth into two pivoting halves."
So, it is not simply about extracting the rational kernel of value (dialectic) from its mystical shell – which is ideology qua exchange-value as the (empirical) expression of the rational. Rather, this extraction of the rational kernel from the mystical shell is also the former's division between itself as the rationality of the irrational and rationality as such. More precisely, it is the transformation of the rational kernel in its extraction. Althusser is quite clear on that score while explaining in an anti-Hegelian register "how", in Marx, "can an extraction be an inversion?". He writes in 'Contradiction and Overdetermination': "…the mystical shell is nothing but the mystified form of the dialectic itself: that is, not a relatively external element of the dialectic (e.g. the 'system') but an internal element, consubstantial with the Hegelian dialectic. It is not enough, therefore, to disengage it from its first wrapping (the system) to free it. It must also be freed from a second, almost inseparable skin, which is itself Hegelian in principle (Grundlage). We must admit that this extraction cannot be painless; in appearance an unpeeling, it is really a demystification, an operation which transforms what it extracts."
But what would this demystification – this extraction as transformation of that which is extracted – amount to? On this count Badiou's Hegelianism against itself in his Theory of the Subject is brilliantly lucid. At any rate, it is more rigorous than what Althusser's anti-Hegelianism is in 'Contradiction and Overdetermination'. Badiou writes:
"In the peach there is still a kernel of the kernel, the bitter almond-shaped nut of its reproduction as a tree. But out of Hegel's division, we will draw no secondary unity, not even one stamped with bitterness." He then goes on to contend: "…at the heart of the Hegelian dialectic we must disentangle two processes, two concepts of movement, and not just one proper view of becoming that would have been corrupted by a subjective system of knowing. Thus:
"a) A dialectical matrix covered by the term of alienation; the idea of a simple term which unfolds itself in its becoming-other, in order to come back to itself as an achieved concept.
"b) A dialectical matrix whose operator is scission, and whose theme is that there is no unity that is not split. There is not the least bit of return into itself, nor any connection between the final and the inaugural…."
Therefore, unless value in its revelation as the hidden character of its (empirical) appearances – that is, in its revelation as the character of ideology or the truth of the untrue – is also the manoeuvre that divides it between itself and truth as such, which is the concrete as the process of abstraction of the concrete in reverse, it would amount to what "unfree mysticism" – Marx's characterisation of the Stoics in his doctoral thesis on Epicurus and Democritus.
But what of the Marx of Capital – the one who is supposedly an incorrigible and an incurable Hegelian? In the section on fetishism of commodities, he provides us with his own version of Hegelianism against Hegel — one that indicates in its own way how the revelation of the truth of the untrue must also be a division between itself and truth as such. He writes: "The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality, from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place."
Posted in Marxism, political economy, philosophy, value theory, UncategorizedTagged Adorno, Alain Badiou, Althusser, appearance, capital, dialectic, empirical, essence, exchange, fetish, fetish character, Hegel, ideology, lack, Marx, negation, singularity, transcendental, truth, use-value, value
A QUICK NOTE ON THE POST-PHENOMENOLOGY OF MARX AND HOW TOTALITY IS A PHANTOM THAT IS REAL
April 26, 2016 April 26, 2016 Pothik GhoshLeave a comment
Hegel's phenomenological story — i.e. phenomena as constitutive moments of the unfolding of the dialectic of essence and appearance — is theoretically central in Marx. Yet, Marxism is post-phenomenological. But what is post-phenomenology? It is nothing but praxis — practice that in its actuality is, at once, itself and its own dialectically-inflected critique. This is "practical materialism", which Marx radically distinguishes from Feurbach's "contemplative materialism". The latter in being a partial materialist critique of Hegel's dialectical spiritualism is rendered, in the final analysis, subjective-idealism and thus a necessary complement of Hegelian spiritualism. Hence, in its theoretical or cognitive moment (Marxist) post-phenomenology is phenomenology as both the symptom of praxis in its interruption, and a placeholder of the praxis to come.
In that context, one can clearly see how Walter Benjamin's "dialectical image" (dialectic as an image of its own standstillness), or, for that matter, Brecht's "gestus", are nothing but discursively articulated conceptions of the post-phenomenology of praxis in its theoretical or cognitive moment. Something that radically re-defines the cogitative order itself to render thought the image and/or concrete index of its own determinate excess and suspension. This reveals how such conceptions are radically and modally distinct from such essentially phenomenological conceptions of Heideggerian discourse as historicality and the ontico-ontological nature of Being — their seeming resemblance notwithstanding.
Many new-fangled theorists and fashionable 'radical' philosophers in their post-Marxist zeal to either reject, or, more dangerously, appropriate Marx, tirelessly insist that totality is a phantom. But if one adheres rigorously to what one has sought to demonstrate above — i.e. the post-phenomenological character of Marxism, which amounts to extenuation of phenomenology precisely through its radicalisation — one will have to admit that even as totality is a phantom it is a real phantom (a "real abstraction" a la Marx). Alfred Sohn-Rethel in his critique of Althusser insists that Marx's conception of commodity abstraction is, contrary to the French philosopher's explication of the same, not merely metaphorical but literal. That is to say, the commodity-form is not merely a symptom of its own impossibility — a mark of its own inexistence as it were. Rather, the value-expressing commodity-form — one ought to say following Sohn-Rethel's critique of Althusser — is a symptom of its own impossibility precisely because it exists as a commodity-fetish in a literal sense. Marx's explication of commodity-abstraction, particularly in Capital, Volume I, points unambiguously in that direction.
Marx demonstrates how commodity abstraction — and therefore the value-bearing commodity-form — is a living contradiction. He reveals with great clarity how commodity abstraction — or valorisation — is about difference being qualitatively equalised precisely in its being difference. He, therefore, also shows that there is no qualitative equalisation — valorisation — without qualitative difference because the question of exchange, and thus qualitative equalisation, arises only when there is qualitative difference. That is to say, a commodity-form is qualitative difference bearing its own negation, which is qualitative equalisation. That is how commodity-form/value-form, in being itself as a unit of qualitative equalisation, is a symptom of its own negativity; and is, therefore, a living contradiction.
There is no doubt that Althusser's rearticulation of Marx's concept of commodity abstraction in Lacano-Freudian terms of "symptomatic reading" is, from a strategic-interventionist standpoint, a crucial theoretical breakthrough. But it is likely to pave the way — as it unfortunately often has — for a post-Marxist, poststructuralist appropriation of Marx. That, not surprisingly, has rendered Althusser's conception of relative autonomy of contradictions into an absolute autonomy of difference — a good example of this is Deleuze's affirmative conception of "difference-without-opposition".
This problem cannot be obviated unless Althusser's revolutionary anti-humanist theoretical breakthrough — which he accomplished through the Lacano-Freudian symptomatic reading of Marx's conception of commodity abstraction — is supplemented with Sohn-Rethel's Hegelian-Marxist critique of the same. This would serve to underscore the fact that Althusser's entirely valid anti-humanist critique of Hegelian historicism (and Left-Hegelian humanism) is essentially radicalisation of Hegel by thinking Hegel in the extreme — an operation that amounts to brushing Hegel against his own grain.
Clearly, Althusser's anti-Hegelianism, in radical contrast to the anti-Hegelianism of his post-Marxist epigones and poststructuralist compatriots, is not a premature jettisoning of Hegel but his rigorous extenuation. This is an aspect of Althusser's thinking that is quite evidently there in such essays of his as 'Marxism is Not A Historicism' (in Reading Capital) and 'Lenin as Philosopher' (in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays). And supplementing his symptomatic reading of the commodity-form with Sohn-Rethel's critique of the same is likely to foreground that aspect of Althusser's discourse and thinking. In fact, the Spinozist moment in Althusser, and more significantly in Pierre Macherey, emerges arguably as an integral dimension of this manoeuvre to radicalise Hegel in order to have Hegelian historical reason exceed and surpass itself. This, for example, comes out most clearly in Macherey's Hegel or Spinoza, wherein Spinoza is made to function deconstructively within the symmetrical Hegelian dialectic of recognition (historicism + humanism) to radicalise and transfigure it into an asymmetrical, materialist dialectic of anti-humanist action.
Posted in Marxism, Marxism, post-Marxism, phenomenology, UncategorizedTagged Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Althusser, Brecht, capital, commodity abstraction, commodity-form, Deleuze, dialectical image, gestus, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, phenomenology, Pierre Macherey, post-phenomenology, praxis, real abstraction, Spinoza, walter benjamin
Some rough-and-ready critical observations on the 'redoing' of the subalternist approach by Derridean-Marxists
September 18, 2015 September 21, 2015 Pothik GhoshLeave a comment
In a recent polemic directed at one of the doyens (Partha Chatterjee) of the Subaltern Studies project, I had contended that subalternist politics does no more than end up reproducing capital as a structure of constitutive duality of subalternity and elitism through its continuous expansion and intensification. This, I had further insisted, was because the proponents of subalternism presuppose that radicalism lies in envisaging politics in terms of affirmation of sheer subalternity. A move that, I had argued, continuously reproduces the structure of measure and valorisation, together with its constitutive limit or crisis. I had also sought to demonstrate in passing that this contention of mine stemmed from the fact that subalternity is the determinate limit or crisis of the structure of measure and/or valorisation in its suturing on to that very structure.
Among the many criticisms levelled at this polemic, I am choosing to respond, at some length, to one in particular here. I am doing this because I think by responding to this particular criticism I will be able to make certain clarifications, albeit only provisionally, with regard to how the structure (or, more precisely, the architectonics) of capital is to be grasped from the Marxian vantage-point of critique of political economy. More importantly, this response of mine will, I hope, go some way in revealing the rather insidious defence of subalternism and its pernicious politics the criticism in question mounts.
The aforementioned criticism of my position begins by arguing that "Subalternity cannot be preassumed to be a node around a capital centric suture…". It then goes on to contend, against my argument, that "The evacuation of politics and ignoring of political economy can only be presumed if one *begins* with the assumption that economy is coterminous with capitalism, and capitalism is defined around markets and uber-structure of a globe as per the Young Hegelians rather than through production relations as per Marx". Now, I entirely concur with my critic's implied insistence that capitalism is not coterminous with economy. However, my reasons for doing so are diametrically and fundamentally opposed to hers. When my critic suggests that capitalism is not coterminous with economy, she clearly implies the economy is much bigger than capitalism. The latter being restricted, as far as she is concerned, to the markets of the globe. My concurrence with her assertion, on the other hand, is based on making sense of economy as merely markets, and thus grasping capital as political economy, which is much more than what global markets per se signify.
Clearly, my critic, in suggesting the economy is greater than capital, is, in all likelihood, equating capital with the global markets. For all practical purposes, she is the one who, in effect, shares with the Left-Hegelians the presupposition that capitalism is exhausted by markets. The only thing that putatively distinguishes her from the Left-Hegelians is her conception of the economy, which is the dynamic of intercourse of capital-as-markets with a vast sphere that, in her estimation, lies outside capital. This is clearly on account of her avowed affinity with a so-called Marxian theoretical approach that claims to have rethought capitalist development in those terms. Insofar as forging a political strategy is concerned, this approach has, in the name of anti-capitalism, yielded all sorts of compromising, complicitous and cooptative manoeuvres. In fact, it can be demonstrated without too much difficulty that this so-called anti-capitalist strategy suggested by my critic and others of her ilk is no more than a Left-Hegelian politics of social-democratic reformism by 'antihumanist' theoretical means. But more on that later. For now, let us not get ahead of ourselves.
To conflate capital with its sphere of exchange, where it is only expressed, would surely amount to a Left-Hegelian move, which, thanks to its basis in an anthropologised dialectic, renders the structure of capital fully congruent with the markets of the globe, even as it renders those global markets an uber-structure. The strategy of 'transformative' politics that emanates from such Left-Hegelian dialectical anthropology is, needless to say, one of continuous democratisation of exchange relations, or juridical relations. It is by no means not geared towards suspension of the iron-cage of social relations of production, which are merely represented by those juridical or exchange relations. In more specific political terms, such a strategy is tantamount to the thwarting of the radical potential of concrete struggles and, as a result, reduces them to being competitive and reformist manoeuvrings.
Insofar as capital is the actuality of value-relations, the sphere of exchange-relations (read markets) is merely the moment of expression of value and does not, therefore, exhaust capital. The condition of possibility of exchange-relations that are the phenomenal sphere of its expression is — as Marx rigorously demonstrates in the famous first chapter of Capital, Volume I — value-relation. And this is founded entirely politically in the abode of production and is hidden precisely by its phenomenality, or appearance, of free exchange. It's in this precise sense that capital is, from a Marxian standpoint, political economy.
The question then is, when one grasps and conceptually designates capital as a structure, is it always the case that one is necessarily thinking of capital as being coterminous with market? In other words, is conflation of capital (read value-relations) with its expressivist sphere of exchange relations — which would thereby render global markets into a transcendental structure — the only way in which one can possibly think and conceptually designate capital as a structure? Or, is it possible to explicate and conceptualise capital as a structure – more precisely, a dialecticalised structure and thus an architectonic – from the Marxian standpoint of value-relations (social relations of production)? In fact, it's precisely from such a Marxian standpoint, which understands and defines capital in terms of value-relations (or social relations of production), rather than merely in terms of the 'uber-structure' of global markets, that one can arguably come up with a more rigorous and politically productive conception of capital as a structure. My critical explication of subalternity as a capital-centric suture presupposes capital as a structure in precisely those terms of value-relation or social relations of production.
My critic has, however, shown she is incapable of comprehending that. Her theoretical standpoint, which allows her to hastily misread the conceptual presuppositions of my polemic against subalternism in order to then arrogantly dismiss my critical explication of subalternity as misplaced Left-Hegelianism, is precisely the cause of her paradigmatic blindness on that score. Her theoretical standpoint, as she has herself clearly indicated, derives from the "far better redoing of the subalternist approach" in the work of Stephen Cullenberg, Anjan Chakrabarti and Anup Dhar. She probably forgets to mention the work of two other front-ranking figures of this 'redoing' fraternity: Ajit Chaudhury and the late Kalyan Sanyal.
DERRIDEAN-MARXISTS AND THE 'OUTSIDE' OF CAPITAL
Since my critic has not spelt out how this fraternity of, what I choose to call, Derridean-Marxists 'redoes' the subalternist approach from a supposedly Marxian political-economic standpoint, let me do the honours. Of course, it's not possible to go into the details of the work done by each of its various celebrated scholar-heroes here. I will, therefore, have to restrict myself to briefly stating its central thesis. This synoptic restatement of its central thesis here will, I guess, have to suffice for now. It will, hopefully, be adequate for the purposes of articulating a pertinent critique of its conceptual presupposition, and the strategic political orientation that consequently flows from it. This central thesis is arguably shared by all the proponents of this 'school' of Derridean-Marxism, notwithstanding the difference in nuances and stresses in their respective theoretical articulations.
The theoretical approach of these Derridean-Marxists is derived from Derrida's "hauntological" reading of Marx, and the so-called anti-essentialist reading of Marx by Stephen Resnick and Rick Wolff. Their central thesis, which is underpinned and thoroughly informed by this theoretical approach of theirs, is the following: there is a vast outside of capital that the latter commands in order to reproduce itself without, however, subsuming this outside into its value-relational horizon of exploitation (or, extraction of surplus value). Another famous Derridean, with close ties to the Subaltern Studies project, would likely affirm this as a conception of 'outside in the capital machine'. And this is what my critic also probably has in mind when she speaks of the "far better redoing of the subalternist approach" by some of those Derridean-Marxists. Without doubt this is, indeed, a redoing of the subalternist approach; one that rescues its restorative politics, which is based entirely on affirmation of sheer subalternity, by garbing it up better in the radical idiom of Marxism.
In fact, it is not at all surprising that my critic should assume that the only way in which one can think of capital as a structure, and subalternity as a capital-centric suture, is by presupposing that capital is coterminous with its phenomenalised and expressivist sphere of exchange-relations. Considering that her likely theoretical point of departure is this thesis of capital reproducing itself by commanding a vast outside without, however, subsuming it into its value-relational horizon, she could hardly think otherwise.
At this point, it must, however, be admitted that the work produced by these Derridean-Marxists is exceedingly rich in inquiry-based studies that have laid bare a whole host of socio-economic transactions, and the digits of power relations that underpin those transaction as their constitutive dynamic, especially in the geographical specificity of the Indian subcontinent. That is doubtless an important contribution on their part to the Marxian political-economic project. However, the theoretical framework within which those studies are situated robs them of much their revolutionary-transformative productivity. The only way those studies can be reclaimed for revolutionary-strategic purposes are by freeing them from the Derridean-Marxist conceptual framework in which they are embedded. That can only be accomplished through a process of sustained critique of that conceptual framework.
CAPITAL AS A VALUE-RELATIONAL STRUCTURE IN MARX
This Derridean-Marxist thesis, I wish to contend right away, is erroneous. Its error is arguably the result of not fully coming to terms with the lessons in critique of political economy that the Marx of Capital, particularly its first volume, has to offer. If one were to grasp value and its equation — following the Marx of Capital — in terms of congelation of human labour in the abstract, and the objective abstract labour time concomitant with it, then the abstraction of concrete labour and its own singular concrete time into a qualitatively equalisable objective measure comes across wholly as a question of politics. This is politics as class struggle, which is revealed by the objective dynamic of social relations of production. The politics of class struggle is constitutive of primitive accumulation — which is fundamentally the abstraction of concrete labour and its respectively singular concrete time in accordance with the objectively equalising measure of labour time through its extra-economic regimentation – and the resistance against it of that concrete labour and its respective use-value, which are a qualitative difference. This struggle is, therefore, over the degree of regimentation of concrete labour. For, the socially necessary labour time determined for a concrete labour that creates its respective use-value – something that through such determination is rendered equalisable as human labour in the abstract whose congealed yield would now be commodity as value – is a direct function of the degree of extra-economic regimentation of that concrete labour and its repository or potential. The latter being the vendible commodity of labour-power.
So, here we have in the 'mind' of capital – if one is allowed to talk in those terms for the sake of analysis – the resumption of qualitative difference (concrete labour/use-value), which is the limit of the horizon of qualitatively equalisable and thus quantifiable value-relation, precisely in and as its subsumption into that horizon of qualitative equalisation and measure. In other words, in the blind 'mind' of capital, it is the resumption of its limit in and as its subsumption into it. Here then we have a situation, wherein the limit of capital in its determinateness is, in the blind 'mind' of capital, not its limit but a barrier to be overcome. In this articulation of the limit of capital as a barrier by capital itself, the former gets sutured on to the latter to become its constitutive crisis or constitutive limit. In this context, subalternity, following Gramsci's Marxian explication of the same, is precisely a historically concrete position of determinate limit of the horizon of value-relations thinking itself, not in its own terms, but in terms of its articulation and animation by that horizon. My contention that subalternity is a capital-centric suture is meant, contrary to what my critic presumes, in this precise sense of it being the constitutive limit/crisis of the horizon or structure of value relations or social relations of production.
Let us now approach the problem of value-relation as a structure from a slightly different angle. Let us begin by asking, how can there be an equation if there is no difference? More simply, the question of exchange arises only when there are qualitative differences (use-values). To paraphrase Marx, 20 yards of linen exchanged for 20 yards of linen will be no exchange at all. It will be a tautological absurdity. But an equation, thanks to its tendency to qualitatively equalise qualitative differences (singularities) tends to endanger precisely its own existence as that equation by tending to erase difference tends to preclude its own condition of possibility. The equation can, therefore, exist only when it's a qualitative equalisation that nevertheless has to allow qualitative difference in order to be that qualitative equalisation. This paradox is the very heart of the algebraic logic of equation. And capital, or the law of value-relation, as the historical operation of this paradoxical logic of equation — or, qualitative equalisation of qualitative difference (singularity) — is, as Marx correctly states (particularly, in Grundrisse), a "moving contradiction". This is precisely the reason why value as qualitative equalisation, in being represented by the quantitatively differentiated determination of exchange-value, instrumentalises the qualitatively different use-value component, or sheer bodily form, of a commodity to be embodied and thus realised as value. That capital for Marx is, indeed, a "moving contradiction" becomes amply evident when he unambiguously demonstrates right at the beginning of Capital that even as value in its representation by exchange-value has not an atom of use-value, use-value is the necessary material depository of value/exchange-value. Clearly, what Marx reveals to be the "two-fold nature" of commodity as the basic unit of capital is actually the germ of capital as a "moving contradiction".
STRUCTURE IN ITS TWO-SIDEDNESS AND THE PROBLEM OF STRATEGY
For this reason, capital offers itself to be read as both itself (a totalising value-relational structure), and as a symptom of its own immanent crisis and thus impossibility. That is because every moment of subsumption of qualitative difference or use-value and the concrete labour unique to it is also the moment of resumption of that qualitative difference or singularity, and thus the determinate moment of displacement and excess of subsumption. In such circumstances, it can hardly be the case that there is an outside of capital that capital commands without subsuming it in its value-relational structure. In fact, what this reveals is that capital is a structure of subsumption/totalisation that resumes itself as that structure precisely by (re-)commencing its own limit and thus excess. In other words, there is no outside in the capital machine. It is, instead, all about being inside capital precisely by virtue of being against it. The so-called absolute outside of capital in being commanded by the latter is already always subsumed within it.
Therefore, an effective strategy against capitalist class power (the value-relational structure of subsumptive exploitation) is not, as my critic and her Derridean-Marxist friends would have us believe, the resistance of the outside or the other of capital to its coercive, oppressive command. For, this type of resistance can only be thought and envisaged, as it indeed is by the Derridean-Marxists, in terms of the sequentially continuous affirmation of ontologised difference. An effective strategy against the horizon of capitalist class power would, instead, be the affirmative deployment of the qualitative difference (or singularity) — which is the determinate limit of capital that capital always needs to resume only in order to subsume it – in a manner that it in its actuality tends towards suspending or totally negating the subsumptive value-relational structure that is capital.
This particular anti-capitalist strategy is a constructionist manoeuvre to affirm itself in its subtraction from the subsumptive-exploitative structure of value-relations by tending towards destroying or totally negating that structure in the process of constructing and affirming itself as that subtraction. The strategy posited by our Derridean-Marxists is affirmation of singular-universality as the (successively sequential) infinity of ontologised difference vis-à-vis capital as the horizon of the law of value. On the other hand, the anti-capitalist strategy that emerges from a rigorous fidelity to the lessons of critique of political economy offered by Marx in Capital, is arguably universal-singularity as the construction of a subtractive ontology by way of simultaneity of infinite difference and infinite deployment of infinite difference. This conception of universal-singularity as the construction of subtractive ontology by way of simultaneity of infinite difference and infinite deployment of infinite difference has been rigorously conceptualised and explicated by Alain Badiou.
Hence, an effective practical critique (affirmative critique) of capital cannot be envisaged by articulating it as the resistance of an absolute outside of capital to capital's non-subsumptive command of it. Such resistance of the outside of capital — which is premised on the thesis that capital reproduces itself by commanding this absolute outside without subsuming it — is all about envisaging struggles against capital as withdrawal, or lines of escape, from it. Therefore, struggles animated by this strategy of resistance of the outside, or the other, of capital to its non-subsumptive command would evidently do nothing to suspend capital as a subsumptive horizon of value-relations. All that such struggles of resistance would do is puncture the horizon of capital causing it now to reproduce itself as its own open and permanent crisis. Clearly, the so-called anti-capitalist strategy of infinition of ontologised difference (or finitudes) is, in objective terms, really a politico-ideological articulation of neoliberalism. An effective practical critique can, instead, materialise only when capital is grasped in terms of its own internal critique or crisis – the determinate moment of resumption of the limit of capital – so that such moments of crisis internal to capital are sustained against their susbsumption through an anticipatory construction of those moments into a constellation. This constellational construction would be the uninterrupted process of what Badiou would call the mutual partaking of generic singularities, which, as a consequence, would articulate destructive antagonism towards the subsumptive-valorising structure of capital. This would, therefore, be the construction of the ontology of subtraction from within the subsumptive structure of value-relations, and in destructive antagonism to it. Hence, this subtractive ontology, in and as the adventure of its own construction, would be the Badiouian "singular-multiple" or "universal -singularity". Marx and Engels' conception of communism as "the real movement" – or, Marx's conception of revolution as "revolution in permanence" – is precisely this.
In this context, the anti-capitalist strategy that derives from the conception of "in and against capital" of Mario Tronti, early Antonio Negri and certain other Italian workerist and post-workerist militants and intellectuals is clearly more rigorous, by far, than the Derridean and Derridean-Marxist strategy of 'outside in the capital machine'.
At this point, we also ought to demonstrate how this wokerist/post-workerist strategic conception of in and against capital is fundamentally distinct from politics as the affirmation of sheer subalternity. Subalternist politics, unlike the workerist/post-workerist politics of in and against capital, is not able to countenance the fact that the limit of the horizon of measure, valorisation and/or representation is in its determinate resumption already always subsumed within that horizon or structure. In fact, proponents of subalternist politics do not realise that what they designate as subalternity, in order to envisage emancipatory politics in terms of its sheer affirmation, is this moment of resumption of the determinate limit/excess of the horizon of measure and valorisation as already always the moment of its subsumption. For this reason, the strategy of subalternist politics as the affirmation of sheer subalternity — not at all unlike the political strategy envisaged by our Derridean-Marxists in their 'redoing' of the suablternist approach — is envisaged in terms of infinition of ontologised difference.
LEFT-HEGELIANISM BY ANTIHUMANIST MEANS
It would perhaps not be out of place here to suggest that this Derridean-Marxist strategy of an absolute outside of capital haunting capital through its resistance against the latter's non-subsumptive command amounts to mere dissemination. Now, dissemination, in spite of its radical antihumanist theoretical presuppositions, produces political effects that are, objectively speaking, hardly any different from the liberal-reformist and social-democratic effects produced by the Left-Hegelians, thanks to the latter's humanist theoretical presuppositions. Repetition with a difference – or differance – does not, as we have observed earlier, suspend the objective horizon of value-relations. As a result, it amounts to no more than the puncturing of that horizon. Hence, it would not be entirely incorrect to insist that the political subjectivity articulated by this hauntological strategy of resistance is the Moses Hess-Proudhon-type of ethical-socialist subjectivity, which now stands refounded in tandem with the specificity of our late capitalist conjuncture: a conjuncture of barbarism that is characterised by capital existing as its own permanent and open crisis even as revolutionary-proletarian politics is in retreat. In other words, this is a neoliberal political subjectivity of radical communitarianism, which, in the objectivity of the neoliberal conjuncture, merely amounts to some kind of competitive reformism and identity politics. In this sense, it is a close kin of the pernicious political project of subalternism.
What must also be emphatically asserted here is that both subalternists and their Derridean-Marxist retrofitters are completely in the wrong when they insist that the so-called pre-political is actually political in its own right because it is absolutely autonomous, and thus a radical alterity, vis-à-vis the dominant political. Of course, the so-called pre-political is not actually pre-political. It is, without any dispute, political through and through. On that not a quarter ought to be yielded to the dominant historicist and stagiest tendency within both theoretical and political Marxisms. That said, one ought to also recognise that the so-called pre-political is actually political not because it is absolutely autonomous, and thus a radical alterity, vis-à-vis the dominant political. Rather, it's as much political as the dominant political precisely because its relationship with the latter is constitutive of a structure that generates the political both in its dominant and subordinate instantiations. If capital is the structure of value-relations as the qualitative equalisation of qualitative difference, and is thus represented by quantitatively differentiated determinations of exchange-values, it is, in its world-becoming as that structure, manifest as combined and uneven development. In such circumstances, the political is neither the dominant nor the subordinate in any moment of this combination of unevenness. Rather, the political is the dynamic of the relation between the two, which is constitutive of their combinatory or structure. In this sense, the dominant political and that which, as a result, is produced and designated as 'pre-political in that qualitatively equalised and thus quantitatively differentiated relationship are both equally political.
Now, let us focus on the workerist/post-workerist conception of being in and against capital in order to figure out how it is radically distinct from the modality of subalternist politics. The proponents of this strategic conception while envisaging the determinate resumption of qualitative difference (use-value/concrete labour) – which would be the determinate instantiation of excess of the structure of measure and valorisation — anticipate its subsumption. As a result, their strategy — premised on this conception of determinate resumption of excess as already always its subsumption — seeks to concretely prefigure the exceeding of the limit that the resumption of the excess in being determinately envisaged is anticipated to come up against. Clearly, this is a strategy of constructing subtraction – Badiou's "subtractive ontology" to be precise – vis-à-vis the subsumptive horizon or structure of value-relations, which starts getting destroyed as a consequence of such subtractive construction, and in tandem with it.
This subtractionist strategy – which is as much integral to Badiou's post-Maoist Maoism as arguably that of certain tendencies of workerism and post-workerism – is based on grasping capital through a process of dialectical reversal: capital, which is the subsumption of its determinate limit, is grasped as, and rendered, the limit of the determinate moment of its excess. Althusserian overdetermination, which is an explication of capital from the side of proletarian politics and in its strategic terms, affords precisely such a dialectically-reversed reading and conception of capital.
SUBTRACTION AND MARX'S 'HEGELIANISM'
The ground for this was, however, cleared by Marx himself who anticipated this subtractionist strategy and its theoretical presupposition of being in and against capital. It was precisely because Marx grasped capital as a moving contradiction that he was able to rearticulate Hegel's dialectic against its totalising mystifying grain, which "seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things", as a "rational" dialectic that was "a scandal and an abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable break-up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence…". This shows, among other things, that when one thinks capital as a structure – as one certainly should – one thinks of it as much as an abstracted totality as the discursive demonstration of its determinate excess. After all, the story of capital as a structure, if it's seen in its longue duree, has so far been a story of its unraveling. However, this two-sided thinking of the dialectic – and the structure of capital – is bound to be lost on Derridean-Marxists because they do not fully grasp Marx's demonstration of capital as a "moving contradiction", wherein the inside of capital is that inside precisely in opposing capital by tending to exceed it as a subsumptive-exploitative structure of value-relations (or social relations of production). As a result, they do not see how the structure can be thought, and envisaged, as both a totalising closure, and precisely for that reason, as a discursively articulated exceeding and unraveling of the same.
It is this that compels them to make sense of oppression and social domination in terms of capital as a historically concrete horizon of social relations of production commanding its absolute outside in order to reproduce itself without, however, subsuming this outside into those relations of production. And it is precisely for this reason that someone like my critic cannot imagine that one can think of capital as a structure without either necessarily rendering the structure a transhistorical closure, or grasping it merely in terms of global markets.
When structure is grasped, or conceived, from the side of capital, we have structure as a totalised closure. This is structure as an abstraction. But when the same structure is thought, and/or envisaged, from the side of its immanent critique, then what we have is structure as the discursively demonstrated or articulated limit of the excess of structure as an abstraction. The fact that capital as a structure reproduces itself through expansion and recomposition shows it is not a stabilised totality. Precisely for this reason the structure of capital ought to be thought, not in terms of transcendental infinite totality, but as infinite totalisation. And this is the schizz of capital as a total structure. Therefore, to grasp, and envisage, capital as a structure is not necessarily to grasp it in terms of a transcendental or uber totality but to grasp it as totalisation (as opposed to totality), which must always begin as that totalisation precisely because in thus beginning it is constantly unravelled as the totality it tends to be. Clearly, the emphasis, when one grasps capital as a structure from the side of its immanent critique, is on the counter-tendency of resumption of its unraveling, or opening up, rather than its tendency of subsumption and closure.
In this context, Althusser and Macherey's conception of structure (or the dialectic) as the limit-form of its own displacement, because it's an effect and thus a symptom of its own "decalage" (void), demonstrates that their articulation of capital as a "structured totality" – contra capital as an "expressivist totality" – is from the side of its immanent critique. A similar but more advanced rearticulation of the structural dialectic (of infinite totalisation) from the side of its immanent critique that renders it a "historical dialectic" (of "infinite thought" in action) is to be found in Badiou's "metaontological" (re)articulation of the structural dialectic as the Real in its limit: the Real being the happening of the impossibility of conceptualisation and/or structuring, and thus its excess. Even a Hegelian-Marxist such as Moishe Postone in coming up with his conception of capital as structure clearly does so from the side of its immanent critique. He explicates his conception of capital as a "blind subjectivity" of totalisation in terms of this totalisation being an effect of precisely the determinate overcoming of social mediation (or totality). Postone arrives at this conception of totality/totalisation, thanks to his radical deployment of the Hegelian dialectic by pushing it to its extreme, and thus against its own idealist grain.
Clearly, emancipation is, and must be, an antidialectic. But the antidialectic of emancipation, if the same is to be thought rigorously and not in the fancy-free non-dialectical manner of so-called difference-thinking, can be actualised only through dialectical thinking as its own action. As both Postone and Badiou have shown from their respectively distinct radical-Hegelian and Althusserian points of departure, this antidialectic of emancipation cannot be ontologised, and can only be an immanently constructed constellation. This fundamentally distinguishes Badiou's metaontological affirmation of the antidialectic of emancipation, for instance, from the ontologising and thus non-dialectical affirmation of the antidialectic in phenomenology of difference and Heideggerian-Levinasian deconstruction.
WHAT THE HELL IS UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR?
We have so far articulated our critique of the Derridean-Marxist position in terms of the bare abstractions of the dialectic and the structure. We would do well now to critically examine their central thesis — capital commanding an absolute outside without subsuming it — in more concrete political-economic terms.
Let us begin with Marx's conceptions of productive and unproductive labour in his Theories of Surplus Value, Part I. While critically engaging with Adam Smith's conceptions of the same, Marx writes: "Only labour which produces capital is productive labour. Commodities or money become capital, however, through being exchanged directly for labour-power, and exchanged only in order to be replaced by more labour than they themselves contain. For the use-value of labour-power to the capitalist as a capitalist does not consist in its actual use-value, in the usefulness of this particular concrete labour – that it is spinning labour, weaving labour, and so on. He is as little concerned with this as with the use-value of the product of this labour as such, since for the capitalist the product is a commodity (even before its first metamorphosis), not an article of consumption. What interests him in the commodity is that it has more exchange-value than he paid for it; and therefore the use-value of the labour is, for him, that he gets back a greater quantity of labour-time than he has paid out in the form of wages."
Marx then goes on to further explicate his conceptions of productive and unproductive labour through his continued critical assimilation of Smith: "…this distinction between productive and unproductive labour has nothing to do either with the particular specialty of the labour or with the particular use-value in which this special labour is incorporated. In the one case, the labour is exchanged with capital, in the other with revenue. In the one case the labour is transformed into capital, and creates a profit for the capitalist; in the other case it is an expenditure, one of the articles in which revenue is consumed."
The domain of the absolute outside of capital, which capital commands in order to reproduce itself without at the same time subsuming that outside into its value-relational structure, is, for our Derridean-Marxists, possibly constituted by a range of practices of unproductive labour as defined by Marx in the passage above. There are, undeniably, a whole range of labouring activities (including heavily gendered care work in the domain of social reproduction), which yield products that are acquired not to be competitively exchanged for profit through transfer of value, but for immediate consumption. As a result, the domain of 'production' constitutive of such labouring activities involves no extraction of (surplus) value – or (surplus) labour time. Rather, what is involved, as far as such unproductive labour is concerned, is extraction of surplus use-values for immediate consumption. The forms through which such extraction of surplus labour (surplus use-values) — as opposed to extraction of surplus labour time (surplus value) – is operationalised are, more often than not, extra-economic or semi-extra-economic. That is perhaps why such forms can, at times, come across as 'pre-capitalist' (feudalism, slavery, bonded labour and so on in their various permutations and combinations) at the level of their discursive appearances. If one were to confine oneself strictly and purely at this level, one would be correct to observe that capital as a value-equational structure of social relations of production institutes socio-economic transactions with an outside of unproductive labour by way of extra-economic or semi-extra-economic command. Such unproductive labouring activities can be easily construed as the outside of capital because the products they yield are not value-embodying commodities in the strict sense, and such labouring activities are, for that reason, not integrated into the value-equational horizon of production relations.
However, from the vantage-point of Marx's critique of political economy, such an analysis would be patently unrigorous and incomplete. To claim that such labour-practices constitute the unproductive outside of capital because the products they yield are not value-embodying commodities because they are merely use-values meant for immediate consumption, is to analyse the situation merely in terms of its immediate empirical appearance. To analyse such a situation more rigorously and accurately, one must attempt to grasp and reveal the concretely precise functionality that this immediate appearance of unproductive labour – labour producing use-values for immediate consumption – has with regard to the value-relational horizon of capital and its productive labour. And here the following excerpt from Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, becomes crucial: "The whole world of "commodities" can be divided into two great parts. First, labour-power, second, commodities as distinct from labour-power itself. As to the purchase of such services as those which train labour-power, maintain or modify it, etc., in a word, give it a specialised form or even only maintain it – thus for example the schoolmaster's service, in so far as it is 'industrially necessary' or useful; the doctor's service, in so far as he maintains health and so conserves the source of all values, labour-power itself – these are services which yield in return 'a vendible commodity…', namely labour-power itself, into whose costs of production or reproduction these services enter."
Seen in this context, labour-practices that are unproductive in their immediate appearance, emerge as productive in the final analysis, in terms of their rearticulation and refunctionalisation by the causality of the structure within which they get situated precisely by virtue of producing only use-values for immediate consumption. The use-values such labour produces for immediate consumption effectuate, in being thus consumed, the production of the "vendible commodity" of labour-power, which, according to Marx, is "the source of all values". Such unproductive labour, which produces use-values for immediate consumption, would, according to Marx, be "services" that enter into the "costs of production and reproduction" of the vendible commodity of labour-power. So, in the ultimate analysis, such labour is productive. Autonomist Italian Marxist-Feminists – particularly, Leopoldina Fortunati in her pathbreaking book, The Arcane of Reproduction – have developed this important insight of Marx to an advanced level of theorisation with regard to the familial domain of unwaged care work. Of course, one will not be able to grasp the full import of such work if one seeks to understand value merely in terms of calculation of its magnitude.
Value is, first and foremost, about politically instituting an equalising measure or rationality. Only then is it a calculable magnitude in accordance with this politically founded measure or rationality. Marx demonstrates that with great acuity in Capital. By seeking to explicate unwaged and thus apparently unproductive labour in the familial domain of reproductive or care work in terms of its integration into the capitalist value-chain of productive labour, Italian Marxist-Feminists such as Fortunati have revealed the constitutive crisis that value essentially is, at the level of its very appearance. They have shown how the unwaged, custom-based extra-economic familial domain of care work demonstrates value in and as the irrational (political) founding of itself as a rationality (economy). Therefore, in their theorisation, value is not merely a rationality or measure, but is, rather, a measure or rationality in and as its own constitutive crisis of the irrational and the unmeasured. In terms of bare logical abstraction, what they are suggesting, and with profound accuracy at that, is the following: the unmeasured is not only the constitutive limit of measure that makes the latter possible, but, precisely on that account, measure is the limit-form of the immeasurable. That primitive accumulation is not merely a one-time historical occurrence, but is constitutive of every moment of so-called normal, economic accumulation is rigorously substantiated by the work of these Italian Marxist-Feminists.
Our Derridean-Marxists with their conception of capital commanding its absolute outside without subsuming it cannot, unfortunately, understand that. They are unable to grasp and explicate capital as a structure, which for them can only and necessarily be an exitless totality that precludes all attempts to think a viable and effective strategy of emancipation. It is this that has arguably led them to think of capital in terms of it commanding an absolute outside to itself, and which this outside resists. This, they believe, is the only possible way through which one can develop an effective anti-capitalist strategy. It is precisely for this reason they think, like my critic here, that anybody who grasps capital as a structure is necessarily a Left-Hegelian thinking in terms of an transcendental structure created by global markets. And this, in turn, is, as we have seen earlier, due to their inability to grasp Marx's explication of the value-relational structure of capital as a moving contradiction. This prevents them from understanding capital as the horizon of value-equational relations of production in terms of internal dialectics. As a result, they are incapable of seeing how the dialectic as a structure is not merely the totalising subsumption but is, precisely for that reason, the limit-form of its own antagonistic asymmetry. In other words, they do not realise that the inside of capital, a value-relational structure, is not merely this inside. That the inside of capital is that inside precisely as the limit or interruption of its determinately asymmetrical antagonism is something that completely eludes them. Their failure, or unwillingness, to countenance capital as a structure in its two-sidedness also obstructs a proper understanding of political economy in its concrete operation. They are unable to grasp how unproductive labour, whose apparent function is the creation of use-values for immediate consumption, is already always subsumed within capital's value-relational structure of productive labour precisely by virtue of being such a producer of use-values for immediate consumption.
What the thesis of capital's non-subsumptive command of an absolute outside also fails to account for is how labour-practices, which are apparently unproductive, fulfil yet another productive structural-functionality over and above the one demonstrated above. People, who apparently do unproductive labour in order to only reproduce themselves, constitute the "relative surplus- population" or the "industrial reserve army" (Marx, in Capital, Volume I). This reserve army of labour works to regiment the productively employed labour-power and increases the latter's productivity, thereby leading to a concomitant increase in the extraction of surplus value and capital accumulation. In the ultimate analysis, this renders the apparently unproductive labour of the unemployed and underemployed reproducing itself, systemically productive.
The labour that is unproductive in an immediate sense must be grasped in terms of how its unproductive functionality is productively articulated by the structured totality of social labour within which it is constitutively situated. That is precisely what Marx does while explicating his concept of the "industrial reserve army". He writes: "If the means of production, as they increase in extent and effective power, become to a less extent means of employment of labourers, this state of things is again modified by the fact that in proportion as the productiveness of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for labourers. The over-work of the employed part of the working-class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to over-work and to subjugation under the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working-class to enforced idleness by the over-work of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists, and accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale corresponding with the advance of social accumulation."
This Marxian conception of industrial reserve army has become even more significant in this neoliberal (or, late-capitalist) conjuncture. That is so because this conjunctural moment is characterised by accelerating rates of same-skilling across the various segmental and sectoral divides of the working class, and an equally rapid diminution in the quantity of productively employed living labour due to a significant diminution of socially necessary labour time. All of this, thanks to an unprecedented and overall increase in the organic composition of capital. This, in turn, has brought into being the footloose and precarious "mass-worker". Its ranks ceaselessly burgeoning with an ever-increasing rapidity. The mass-worker is clearly as much a part of the apparently unproductive reserve army of labour as he/she is productively employed in the production of value. The Derridean-Marxist thesis that there is a vast outside of capital that capital as a value-relational horizon non-subsumptively commands in order to reproduce itself is even more difficult to sustain in the face of the rise of the mass-worker, and its characteristically indeterminate and precarious positionality.
In fact, the crisis that capital has progressively been running into due to the increasing and accelerating diminution of living labour in the production of value has compelled it to turn towards the affective realm of 'non-work' socialisation in order to render its various moments sites for direct extraction of value. The rise of social media is a prime exemplar of that. This is "affective capital" – or "biocapitalism" – demonstrated and explicated with quite a bit of clarity by the Italian post-workerists, among others. This is life itself in its living as production of value, and thus productive work. This has led Negri, together with many other post-workerists and autonomist-Marxists, to come up with the conception of social factory. In this light, our Derridean-Marxists need to be asked, once again, where is this absolute outside of capital that capital commands without subsuming it? Where is it, indeed?
OF TRANSITION AND POSITIONALITY
At this point, it would perhaps be appropriate to underscore the importance of rethinking the problem of transition. Such rethinking is indispensable if one wishes to rigorously come to terms with the strategic conception of positionality. My critic, thanks to her affinity for the Derridean-Marxist theoretical approach, deploys this conception in the most slipshod fashion while criticising my polemic against Partha Chatterjee and his subalternist approach to politics. I had argued, while dwelling on Chatterjee's rather troubling position on India's occupations of Kashmir and its so-called north-eastern states, that "…this so-called criticism of colonial occupations by subalternists such as Chatterjee is not the determinate critique of political economy it ought to be in order to realise and fulfil its radical potential. And anti-colonialism and/or anti-occupation, in the discourse and thinking of such intellectuals, stands completely evacuated of all politics of class struggle to become no more than an idiom of competitive ethno-nationalisms and 'militant' reformism. Precisely through such a politico-theoretical move is the anti-colonial and/or anti-occupation politics of, say, Kashmir ostensibly affirmed only to be rendered a little nationalism or sub-nationalism that then serves to legitimise and reinforce India's federalist-unionist big nationalism, which is the ideology that serves its imperial project of politically managing the South Asian moment of the globalising late-capitalist conjuncture. This particular modality of deployment of the language and ideas of anti-colonialism is nothing but their revisionist rearticulation, which is precisely what postcolonialism is." I had also gone on to assert that "…this is not simply hypocrisy on Chatterjee's part. It is something far more pernicious. It is neurosis that inheres in the very structure of his thinking and discourse.".
The response my critic came up with is the following: "The critique of Chatterjee here sort of exculpates (him) by presuming the issue has something to do with the in-built limit of their analysis. I actually think that this is not so — which makes it worse. This is not a lapse because the analysis cannot go there. It is a lapse because we (I include my self here, as I don't think I have worked this out for my own self) retain a nationalist presupposition coming from our positionality. Sort of like how whiteness works (so not inherent TO analyses of race that they cannot handle the transitions between racial formations from slavery to capitalism, but a blockage from the whiteness side of it…)."
A more disingenuous articulation would be difficult to come by. She attempts — with the surreptitious dexterity of a seasoned professional academic — to turn the tables on my polemic by suggesting that I provide Chatterjee with an exit route just because I seek to critically locate his pernicious position on Indian occupations in the limit internal to his structure of thinking and discourse. Well then, let me return the favour by laying bare in even more unqualified terms the political complicity of her theoretical approach in India's occupation of Kashmir; among other things.
Even as she insinuates that my polemic against Chatterjee's position on Kashmir and the so-called Indian Northeast is actually an apologia on his behalf, she goes on to suggest that Chatterjee's problem is entirely an ethical problem of not being able to grapple with the "nationalist presupposition" of his positionality at the level of his self. By making this problem of positionality purely into a question of ethics, or practice of the self, my critic seems to be clearly suggesting that the politics of emancipation can be no more than a politics of reform – one that will compel people occupying dominant and oppressor positionalities to ethically grapple with the presuppositions of those positionalities to change the state of affairs by simply changing themselves. In making this utterly status-quoist political move – dressed up in the idiom of radical theory – not only does she naturalise the conception of positionality, but consequently ends up reinforcing the hegemony of the structure as the constitutive duality of dominance and subordination.
We would do well, at this point, to remind my critic, and her ethically-inclined Derridean-Marxist friends, what Marx says in the 'Preface to the First German Edition' of Capital, Volume I: "I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of our society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."
My critic's complicit and compromised position is arguably on account of how she understands the Marxist problem of transition. If one were to rethink the problem of transition in the light of how capital as a value-relational structure refunctionalises unproductive labour as productive, one would probably realise that the transition from various pre-capitalist modes of production to a capitalist one does not always necessarily involve alteration in the discursive appearances of the socio-economic forms that instantiated those pre-capitalist modes of production in their own respective times.
More often than not, such forms are carried into capitalism in their 'pre-capitalist' discursive appearances through a process of their rearticulation, reanimation, and/or refunctionalisation by the capitalist mode of production, or the value-relational structure that is capital. We already saw that when we were earlier dealing with how extra-economic or semi-extra-economic extraction of surplus use-values gets rearticulated into a productive relation. In such circumstances, apparently pre-capitalist social relations of race, caste, community, gender and so on are preserved at the level of their respective discursive appearances only and precisely through a process of their productive refunctionalisation in and by the value-relational structure of capital. Hence, race, caste, community and gender relations in their 'pre-capitalist' appearance operate as integral constituents of the value-relational structure of capital. They are now, therefore, fully capitalist in their structural-functionality.
In such a situation, the oppressed positionalities of, say, Blackness, Dalitness, Femaleness, Muslimness, or, for that matter, Kashmiriness can emancipate themselves from the oppression embodied in the oppressor positionalities of, say, Whiteness, Brahminism, Maleness, Hinduness, or, for that matter, Indiannness, only by seeking to unravel the value-relational structure of capital within which such oppressive relations are situated through their productive refunctionalisation by that structure.
INDIA'S NEOLIBERAL OCCUPATIONS
In the case of Kashmir, for instance, the Indian occupation retains the discursive appearance of classical colonialism. But the way it serves capital in its late, neoliberal conjuncture is significantly distinct from how classical colonialism served capital in its early conjuncture of so-called embedded liberalism. It might not be entirely misplaced to argue that the main function of Indian occupation of Kashmir now, thanks to the de-development it has wrought on the occupied territory, is that of rendering and maintaining the population of this territory as a reserve or pool of migrant labour with regard to certain economic sectors, and segments (mostly cognitarians) of the productive labour market in the Indian mainland. This is even truer of the Indian occupation of its so-called Northeast. The degree and extent of this phenomenon can, however, be revealed only through militant inquiries by politically committed activists and radical intellectuals within the Kashmiri movement against Indian occupation
This contention of mine should not, however, be taken to mean that certain other territories such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which have historically been an integral part of the Indian national project in its formation, have not been de-developed to function as labour reserves for the industrial economic centres of the country. What it simply means is that Kashmir and the so-called Indian Northeast have been functionalised as labour reserves through the historical process of occupation that is specific to them. Bihar and UP too have been similarly functionalised, but through different historical processes specific to their respective socio-economic and political geography. Besides, the economic sectors and labour segments the Kashmiri reserve serves, for instance, is not fully congruent with the economic sectors and segments served by the Bihari or Uttar Pradeshi reserves. There is also likely be a whole range of differences, both at the subjective-experiential plane and at the level of objective quantification, among the members of those diverse labour reserves in their operations in the social factory on the Indian mainland. What cannot, however, be disputed is the historical form of colonial occupation — which has been specific to the dynamic of relations between India and Kashmir, or India and its so-called Northeast — continues to perpetuate itself; and in doing so functionalises those regions as pools of migrant labour for different economic sectors, and segments of its productive labour market, on the Indian mainland.
Also, the occupation, by being a live demonstration of India's imperialist hegemony vis-à-vis its south Asian neighbourhood, tends to bolster, both politically and ideologically, the nationalist consensus in the mainland thus preventing the accentuation of class contradictions there. Of course, such occupations, not unlike classical colonialism, continue to extract and appropriate resources and raw materials native to the occupied territories. But this arguably is no longer its primary structural-functionality. Rather, it is a discursive appearance that has been retained from its specific historical past and which is now an epiphenomenon that wreaks and sustains de-development in the occupied territories to functionalise them as migrant labour pools with regard to the mainland. All of this together, however, amounts to no more than a considered hypothesis. One that will, once again, have to be substantiated through militant investigations by activists and radical intellectuals in the anti-occupation struggles being waged in those areas.
The short point of all this hypothesising is that every struggle against its respectively specific form of oppression has to envisage its strategy in a manner that each of them in the determinateness of militating against its concrete form of oppression begins articulating the destruction of the value-relational structure of capital. Anything less would be reformist and restorative identity politics, which would rob those struggles of their radical potential, and render them competitive and reformist. This would make those struggles into reproducers and recomposers of precisely the same oppressive structure of the constitutive duality of domination and subordination they have been militating against. The reproduction of that structure, by way of its recomposition through such struggles, will amount to those struggles throwing up new layers of systemically-coopted elite intermediaries and subjugated subalterns of their own.
BETWEEN ETHICS AND PRIVILEGE-CALLING, AND THE ETHICO-POLITICAL OF REVOLUTIONARY MILITANCY
In this context, my critic's theoretical move to delink the question of positionality from the problem of transition leads her to a thoroughly ethicalised conception of politics, whose preponderant strategic register is that of privilege-calling. The problem with this strategic register, if we carefully attend to the political language it generates, is that its emphasis is more on calling people out on their privileged positionalities than on strategising the unraveling of the value-relational structure of capital that is the condition of possibility of this constitutive duality of privileged and underprivileged positionalities.
This is, therefore, a strategy of "ressentiment" (Nietzsche). Underpinned by "slave-morality" (Nietzsche), it's a strategy tailor-made to serve neoliberal capital. If on one hand, it is about struggle as a politics of competitive bargaining and cooption; its obverse, on the other hand, is that people occupying dominant/oppressor positionalities do no more than ethically grapple with those positionalities in their instantiations at the level of merely their selfhood. Collective politics, in this context, becomes a big laugh: it's about the 'collectivity' of various selves ethically grappling with their oppressor positionalities to overcome them. This clearly implies that the structural condition of possibility of such mutually constitutive positionalities of the oppressor and the oppressed is left intact. Worse, the idiom of solidarity becomes, as far as the oppressor/dominant positionality is concerned, a register of philanthropic empathy and sympathy for the 'less-fortunate' occupiers of the oppressed/subordinate positionality. As a result, the idiom of solidarity becomes a systemic ideology, enabling not merely the reproduction of the structural condition of possibility of oppression as such, but perpetuating and deepening the same forms of oppression too.
This is, however, not to suggest that a political strategy orientated towards unraveling the value-relational structure of capital will have nothing to do with questioning privileged positionalities. To thinks that is preposterous, to say the least. Any strategising that seeks to unravel the value-relational structure of capital will have to envision how movements against specific forms of oppression can concretely articulate themselves as the simultaneity of "struggle in unity, unity in struggle". This strategic conception and credo of Mao Zedong clearly shows that privilege-calling is integral to revolutionary-political movementality, and thus does not need to exist as an independent strategic register and/or political idiom. After all, what else can it mean when people are called on to struggle in the process of coming together in unity? Mao's credo of "struggle in unity, unity in struggle" is all about envisaging strategy as the constellational construction of subtractive ontology in Badiou's sense of the term. And it is not as if this is devoid of ethicality. In its revolutionary-proletarian conception, politics is the singularity of the ethico-political. This means it is no longer simply about ethics as the grappling with one's positionality in its instantiation at the level of one's self. Politics as the singularity of the ethico-political implies, instead, that ethics is integral and internal to concrete political struggles against concrete forms of oppression or social domination. This is manifest in the future-anterior orientation of those struggles that they seek to actualise from the determinateness of their respective concrete locations in striving to unravel the value-relational structure of capital while struggling against the specific forms of oppression they are faced with. According to Badiou, there cannot be a Marxist ethics, but there is an "ethics of Marxism". And this ethics of Marxism is the revolutionary-proletarian subjectivity as the simultaneity of "unity in struggle, struggle in unity" in its actualisation amid and through concrete struggles against concrete forms of oppression.
Posted in critical theory, political economy, PoliticsTagged absolute outside, Ajit Chaudhury, Alain Badiou, Althusser, Anjan Chakrabarti, Antonio Negri, capital, constellation, deconstruction, Derrida, Derridean-Marxists, dialectic, difference, Ethics, Gramsci, Hegel, industrial reserve army, Kalyan Sanyal, Kashmir, Left-Hegelians, Leopoldina Fortunati, limit, Macherey, Mao Zedong, Mario Tronti, Marx, mass-worker, Moishe Postone, neoliberalism, occupation, ontologise, Partha Chatterjee, positionality, productive labour, Rick Wolff, singularity, social factory, Stephen Cullenberg, Stephen Resnick, structure, subalternity, subtraction, Theories of Surplus Value, unproductive labour, value
Some provisional notes on the materialism of thought, and modernism as "an aesthetics of necessary failure"
September 5, 2015 September 5, 2015 Pothik GhoshLeave a comment
The fundamental question, insofar as modernism is concerned, is what does modernism make its diverse forms say about themselves. Depending on what modernist forms say about themselves — i.e. whether those forms construe, envisage and articulate themselves as myths of non-meaning, non-cogitation and non-thought; or, allegories (in Benjamin's sense) or symptoms of the same — we need to internally divide modernism into two temporalities, two periodisations and two politico-aesthetic trajectories: fascist (or postmodernist, that is, neoliberal) and critical. And yet, as 'consumers' who are already always producers, even the fascistic and/or postmodernist politico-aesthetic temporality of certain modernist forms — something those forms speak as the intentionality of their producers — we need to brush against their own grain.
Brecht brilliantly anticipated that through both his intervention in the famous realism/modernism debate, and through the dramaturgy of his theatrical productions. So, the problem, from where I stand, is not whether a phenomenology of thinking haunts an aesthetic form. The problem for me, instead, is whether or not such a phenomenology is able to found itself in and as its own materiality by finding its own historical index and historicity. This is precisely where Benjamin's post-phenomenological thinking — contrary to the dominant poststructuralist current that seeks to interpretatively assimilate him to difference-thinking — stands rigorously and radically distinguished from both Husserl and Heidegger's phenomenology of thought. The 'Convolutes N' of his The Arcades Project unambiguously declares that. And it is precisely such post-phenomenological thinking — in its radical separation from the phenomenology of thought — that Badiou, following Althusser, rightly affirms as the materialism of thought.
What, therefore, needs to be stated here unambiguously is the following: post-phenomenological thinking, or the materialism of thought, is not some premature abandonment of phenomenology of thought. Rather, it amounts to the extenuation of what is sheer phenomenology precisely by traversing it to its post-phenomenological antipodes, wherein it stands realised as its own materiality in and as the institution of its own duration and historicity. Conversely, sheer phenomenology of thought in its existence is – from this Benjaminian-Badiouian perspective — the incompleteness of its realisation as the post-phenomenology or materiality of thought, and thus the incompleteness of its own extenuation. [As an aside, it must be said here that this reveals how the line that separates mystified revolution, which is mysticism of difference (Fascism, Bonapartism, social democracy and/or neoliberal postmodernism) from revolution as difference demystified is perilously thin.]
If we attend closely to Badiou's conception of "fidelity to the event", we will see that what underlies this conception is precisely the move of extenuating phenomenology of thought by traversing it to its post-phenomenological antipodes, wherein it is its realisation as its own materiality. The event, for Badiou, is not truth, but an interiorised subjective illumination. And yet the event is, for him, indispensably crucial because it enables what he terms fidelity to the event, which in and as its own actuality is the truth of the event in its forcing. That is why, for Badiou, even as the event is not truth; truth is the truth of the event in its forcing. So, for Badiou truth is not the thought of the event. Instead, truth is the event as its own thought in action. And this event as its own thought in action is already the thought or the truth of the event in its forcing. That is precisely why Badiou thinks the event — contra phenomenology of difference and poststructuralism — as neither event of being nor being of event; but as the supernumerary supplement to being that in being identified thus is already always integrated into being. Therefore, for Badiou, the post-phenomenology or materiality of thought is not an out-of-hand rejection of phenomenology of thought. Rather, phenomenology of thought is for him not sheer phenomenology, but is the post-phenomenology or materiality of thought as already always its own limit and thus the already always crossing-of-that-limit.
As a consequence, Badiou's post-phenomenology or materiality of thought — unlike the post-phenomenology of poststructuralism such as Foucault's genealogy or Deleuze and Guattari's machinic ontology – is not a future-anteriority that is retrospectively constructed in, as and through the production of phenomenological effects, which as those effects are no different from the effects produced by Hegelian and Left-Hegelian phenomenologies of identity-as-identity and identity-as-change-of-identity respectively. Badiou's post-phenomenology is, therefore, clearly, not hermeneutics. Rather, it's a future-anteriority that is an adventure of construction in being an anticipatory, prefigurative 'hermeneutic' thought in action.
Materiality, therefore, cannot be the rejection or abandonment of the idea. That would merely be the inversion of the constitutive diremption — or idealist dialectic — of idea and matter, taking us towards a positivist and vulgar materialism that would continue to confine us within the structure and/or force-field of idealist rationalism. Rather, materiality is the singularising rupture — or rupture as singularity — with that constitutive diremption. This means materiality is the moment of the idea in its emerging as the instantiation of its own absence as the cause of such emerging. In other words, materiality is about the inseparability — and thus singularity — of matter and its idea. Hence, it's also the movement that is constitutive of prefiguring the overcoming of its interruption by anticipating the limit this movement generates by virtue of precisely being that movement. Materiality then is, as its own (immanent) thought, the already always grasping of its own limit.
This, in my view, is what one learns from the poems of Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms, particularly Alberto Caeiro's; Badiou's rigorously engaged reading of the same, and Adorno's explication of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure.
In fact, it is in this context of materiality being its own (immanent) thought as the already always grasping of its own limit that Adorno's conception and explication of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure needs to be situated and made sense of. Modernist forms as forms of non-meaning, non-thought and non-cogitation, vis-à-vis the forms of historical-realist meaning and sense, do not call on us to approach them in a melancholic contemplation imbued by "aecidia" — something that Benjamin warned against. Such forms call on us, instead, to approach them, as Benjamin would have us believe, by intensifying our contemplation of them to such an extent that such contemplative thought turns into its radical opposite: the thought of historcisation that is, therefore, thought in action. This is thought immanent to being now-time; or, ontological subtraction as its own thought in action. Therefore, to grasp modernist forms in terms of Adorno's conception of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure is to see how such forms call on us – regardless of what the intentionality of their respective producers is or was – to grasp themselves as something that must already always be exceeded.
Clearly, Adorno's conception of modernism is in line with Benjamin's deployment of Schlegel's romantic conception of aesthetic criticism, wherein a work of art is, at once, itself and an articulation of its own criticism. This is also what Brecht, through the conception and practice of his V-effect, points towards, as does Badiou through his "inaesthetic" conception of art as the real of reflection.
Benjamin's aforementioned approach to the question of art is, admittedly, from the side of the producer. And that is largely true of Brecht too. But do such approaches of Benjamin and Brecht not, therefore, imply that the consumer is already always the producer, and that he/she thus reads forms not as forms, which would reduce the question of form to that of sheer style, but as modes. To read form as mode is to read form as the transparency of its own formation. We would do well to pay attention to Andre Breton' glass-house in Nadja, the one he wished to inhabit as a writer, and which Benjamin also affirmatively alludes to in his essay on Surrealism. Thus, to read a form as a mode is to grasp it as the determinate excess of form, and subtraction from the abstract logic of formalism that the concrete form, which is being thus exceeded, mediates.
To read form as mode is to grasp a form as articulating its own criticism, and thereby already always being its own excess and voiding. Adorno's conception of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure, not unlike Badiou's inaesthetics, amounts precisely to that. What Benjamin and Brecht merely imply for the consumer's side through their insistence that the producer of a form have that form articulate itself as mode, stands cogently formulated as the consumer's task in Adorno's conception of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure.
Clearly, Benjamin and Brecht on one hand, and Badiou and Adorno on the other, together complete the asymmetrical or singular dialectic of productive consumption and consumptive production that Marx clearly indicated while laying bare that same dialectic as the symmetrical and thus idealist dialectic of capital.
In such circumstances, I don't feel like quibbling much when I am confronted with a certain heuristically recursive reading of this conception of aesthetics of necessary failure as itself a necessary failure. Nevertheless, I cannot stop myself from saying that this conception as the concept that it already is, operates at the modal, not formal, level of abstraction. As a result, this theory is an affirmation of itself in and as its singular temporality and mode by already always being an articulation of the criticism of its own discursive-formal specificity that interrupts its singularity precisely in instantiating it. So, unless one's insistence about the Adornoesque conception of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure itself being a necessary failure proceeds through such specification, it runs the risk of becoming a theoretical argument for founding a 'new' historicist aesthetics – or, an aesthetics for a 'new' historical realism.
Of course, I have my share of problems with Adorno. The way he explicates his concepts of negative dialectics and constellation demonstrates the dialectic as the mode of presentation of its own negativity. This clearly points us towards thinking the dialectic as the affirmative mode of determinate presentation of its own void, and thus excess, in its limit.
In other words, Adorno's concepts of negative dialectics and constellation clearly point towards thinking (and envisaging) a new order of affirmation that is non-productive. And yet Adorno himself is not able to fully see what his concepts point towards, and walk that path of thinking (and envisaging) affirmation as a non-productive order of 'being'. His concepts of negative dialectics and constellation show he understands that negativity can escape from its Hegelian dialectical inscription only if it's thought in terms of the uninterruptedness of destruction. And yet he cannot understand how such an (im)possibility can actually happen. That is because he is unable to think of negativity in terms other than that of destruction. In other words, we find him unable to think negativity in terms of adventurous constructionism of subtraction as an actuality, which would be the actuality of destruction in its uninterrupted ceaselessness. It is not for nothing that Badiou conceptualises and envisages subtraction as that which is the articulation of destructive antagonism towards the sublationary force-field of the (idealist) dialectic. This is why Badiou terms his subtractive affirmationism political negativity.
In such circumstances, Adorno's failure to think the happening of the (im)possible, which his "negative dialectics" conceptually articulates, can possibly only be ascribed to the limit imposed on his thought by its objective conjunctural location. This failure of his to draw the non-productive affirmative consequences from his own concepts of negative dialectics and constellation is clearly evident in his melancholic conception of the "totally administered society". Something that then risks generating its own obverse: the Heidegger-like affirmation qua the irrationality of poetic-thinking, and the deconstructive infinite finitudes. And yet, unless we are able to arrive at this criticism of Adorno by showing how his concept of negative dialectics frees negativity of determination from being merely the negation of determination to become its own moment of presentation as negativity, we won't be able to think and envisage the non-productive order of affirmation in and against the productivity of capital. And that, ironically enough, would make us bring the Heideggerian deconstruction, we strive to throw out of the front door, back in through the rear window.
The heuristic-recursive insistence that we see Adorno's modernist conception of aesthetics of necessary failure as itself a necessary failure unwittingly risks upholding the ways of deconstruction, and the infinite regress that is concomitant with it. This, as far as aesthetic production within a Marxist field is concerned, could easily compel artists to submit their productive activity, paradoxically enough, to a kind of Lukacsian aesthetic imperative of historical realism.
Posted in Adorno, materialism, modernism, philosophy, politics of literatureTagged "aesthetics of necessary failure", Adorno, Althusser, Andre Breton, Badiou, Benjamin, Brecht, constellation, Deleuze, dialectic, Fascism, Fernando Pessoa, form, Heidegger, inaesthetics, Marx, materialism, mode, modernism, Nadja, negativity, neoliberalism, phenomenology, poetic-thinking, Postmodernism, V-effect
Some critical observations on the Kantianism of Levi-Strauss's dialectic and how a 'formalised in-humanism' could be extracted from it
"The savage mind totalizes. It claims indeed to go very much further in this direction than Sartre allows dialectical reason, for, on the one hand, the latter lets pure seriality escape (and we have just seen how classificatory systems succeed in incorporating it) and, on the other, it excludes schematization, in which these same systems reach their consummation. In my view, it is in this intransigent refusal on the part of the savage mind to allow anything human (or even living) to remain alien to it, that the real principle of dialectical reason is to be found. But my idea of the latter is very different from Sartre.
"In reading Critique it is difficult to avoid feeling that Sartre vacillates between two conceptions of dialectical reason. Sometimes he opposes dialectical and analytical reason as truth and error, if not as God and the devil, while at other times these two kinds of reason are apparently complementary, different routes to the same truths. The first conception not only discredits scientific knowledge and finally even leads to suggesting the impossibility of a science of biology, it also involves a curious paradox; for the work entitled Critique de la raison dialectique is the result of the author's exercise of his own analytical reason: he defines, distinguishes, classifies and opposes. This philosophical treatise is no different from the works it examines and with which it engages in discussions, if only to condemn them. It is difficult to see how analytical reason could be applied to dialectical reason and claim to establish it, if the two are defined by mutually exclusive characteristics. The second conception is open to a different objection: if dialectical and analytical reason ultimately arrive at the same results, and if their respective truths merge into a single truth, then, one may ask in what way they are opposed and, in particular, on what grounds the former should be pronounced superior to the latter. Sartre's endeavour seems contradictory in the one sense and superfluous in the other.
"How is the paradox to be explained, and avoided? Sartre attributes a reality sui generis to dialectical reason in both the hypotheses between which he hesitates. It exists independently of analytical reason, as its antagonist or alternatively its complement. Although in both cases Marx is the point of departure of our thought, it seems to me that the Marxist orientation leads to a different view, namely, that the opposition between the two sorts of reason (analytical and dialectical) is relative, not absolute. It corresponds to a tension within human thought which may persist indefinitely de facto, but which has no basis de jure. In my view dialectical reason is always constitutive: it is the bridge, forever extended and improved, which analytical reason throws out over an abyss; it is unable to see the further shore but it knows that it is there, even should it be constantly receding. The term dialectical reason thus covers the perpetual efforts analytical reason must make to reform itself if it aspires to account for language, society, and thought; and the distinction between the two forms of reason in my view rests only on the temporary gap separating analytical reason from the understanding of life. Sartre calls analytical reason reason in repose; I call the same reason dialectical when it is roused to action, tensed by its efforts to transcend itself."
–Claude Levi-Strauss, 'History and Dialectic' (The Savage Mind)
That dialectical thinking is fundamentally and precisely all about vacillation — envisaging dialectical reason and analytical reason as complementary, and then oppose them to one another as truth and error – is something that is completely lost on Levi-Strauss when he criticises Sartre for his (left-Hegelian) articulation of dialectical thinking by way of such vacillation.
The problem with Sartre's articulation of dialectical thinking is not this vacillation between analytical reason as the concrete instantiation of dialectical reason as the determinate overcoming of analytical reason, and dialectical reason as the abstraction of such overcoming. In fact, the explication of dialectical reason as such an interplay of the concrete and the abstract, makes such vacillation its lifeblood. The problem, instead, is that this vacillation is orientated in Sartre's thinking in terms of pure seriality. But even on this count the stress of Levi-Strauss's criticism of Sartre falls not so much on his conception of pure seriality as on the escape that this pure seriality is meant to be, in my view an unrigorous, articulation of. That, needless to say, leads Levi-Strauss to a conception of dialectical reason, wherein it is not the pure seriality of escape from analytics. Rather, for Levi-Strauss, dialectical reason is destined, in its infinite perpetuation, to yield analytics. He construes the infinition of dialectical reason as the infinite proliferation of infinite analytics or analytical reasons. Thence his conception of the savage mind as one that totalises.
Therefore, the paragraphs excerpted above — which are, in a sense, the crux of Levi-Strauss's theoretical and philosophical approach – unambiguously demonstrate that his conception of savage mind is not only an anthropologised and ethnicised conception, but is, in the same movement, a kind of Kantian elevation of the same to the status of a metaphysical tribune of pure reason, which is a governmentalising constitutivity of multiple practical reasons by way of adjudicating among them and thus interpellating them into being integral parts (placeholders) of that constitutive governmentality.
It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the dialectical reason Levi-Strauss affirms through his conception of savage mind is — notwithstanding his insistence that its provenance is in Marx – basically Kantian. And this, not surprisingly, compels the French anthropologist to conceptualise or formalise the dialectic as a structure, a deep structure to be precise. Or, how else can one explain Levi-Strauss's conception of dialectical reason here as an expressivist totality of infinite analytical reasons (or, infinite analytics of finitude)? And this Levi-Straussian conception of structural dialectic is arguably nothing but a reformulation of Kant's "transcendental dialectic" (in his Critique of Pure Reason), albeit in the discursive locality of ethnology and modern anthropology.
Kant's "transcendental dialectic" is a formalised dialectic, wherein the dialectic is grasped in its abstraction and thus conceptually rendered a transcendental or a priori structure and form that is expressed in and by an infinite multiplicity of concrete practices and their respectively specific practical reasons. Here we can clearly see how Kant's transcendental conception of the dialectic – not unlike Levi-Strauss's structural dialectic — renders it a govermentalising, adjudicatory metaphysical tribune of pure reason vis-à-vis an infinite multiplicity of practical reasons that are, therefore, mutually relativised analytics precisely on account of being mutually articulated.
That is so because Kant does not grasp practical reason (or analytic) as the effect of the noumenon (thing-in-itself) as the determinate excess of the horizon of relationality. Rather, for Kant, the noumenon becomes the basis for envisaging a new order of relationality among multiple practical reasons because in his eyes there is an ontological similitude among all of them precisely because those multiple practical reasons in their difference determinately express the noumenon (thing-in-itself) as the excess of the horizon of relationality. Therefore, it's not for nothing that speculative materialist Quentin Meillasoux sees Kant as a figure of Ptolemiac counter-revolution, not Copernican revolution, in western philosophy. The noumenon is precisely that which cannot be inscribed within the horizon of relationality – or the symbolic order — that it nevertheless founds in the process of effectuating itself as the determinate presentation of void of the horizon of relationality, or the symbolic order. Kant's philosophical move is counter-revolutionary in that he thinks the noumenon only, however, to conceptually articulate it by privileging its effect over itself as its own instantiation.
The fundamental philosophical kinship between Kant's "transcendental dialectic" and Levi-Strauss's structural dialectic shows, among other things, why the latter's attempt to articulate a critique of ethnology, as a discourse complicit in the colonial enterprise, by way of developing the discipline of structural anthropology ends up as a heroic failure. Thanks to his Kantian conception of the dialectic as an ahistorical, and thus metaphysical, structure, the ethics of Levi-Strauss's anthropological critique of colonialism is unable to develop a political register for articulating itself. In fact, his Kantian conception of the dialectic as an ahistorical deep structure does not allow his ethicality of critique to move beyond its moral registration. And that, not surprisingly, once again restores the colonial civiliser, albeit this time around as the benevolent anthropologist-tribune, who is now there to enforce the moral law of mutual respect between the savage and the civilized (or the raw and the cooked) by way of instituting the structuralist epistemological project of relativism in order to conscientise the latter.
In this context, it must be said that Levi-Strauss's conception of the dialectic as an a priori deep structure, not unlike Kant's "transcendental dialectic" with which it has a fundamental philosophical affinity, amounts to what Hegel called "bad infinity". The "bad infinity" of Levi-Strauss's structural dialectic derives, not unlike Kant's "transcendental dialectic", from it being transcendental in its infinite totality. That does not, however, imply that we take recourse to Hegelian, or for that matter Sartre's left-Hegelian, "good infinity" as the way to critique and break with this Kantian/Levi-Straussian bad infinity. For, this Hegelian – or left-Hegelian – "good infinity" is nothing but transcendental bad infinity by other means. By introducing history as the unfolding of the geist – or an expressivist, quasi-materialist human ontology in case of the left-Hegelians – all such good infinity amounts to is transformation of infinite totality of transcendental bad infinity into infinite totalisatiion.
What we need to do, instead, in order to rigorously critique and break with the transcendental bad infinity of Kant, and the Kantian Levi-Strauss, is to think the Hegelian good infinity in its extreme. This Hegelian conception of good infinity, a la the quasi-historical dialectic of Hegel, admittedly enables the envisioning of the historical dialectic by providing what is, in essence, still an ahistorical dialectic with the appearance of epochal motion. And while that can, and often is, dangerously deceptive because the repetition of the ahistorical structural dialectic now has the appearance of historical motion and epochal change, it also opens the way, as it did for Marx, to think it in its longee-duree, and thus in its extreme, so that its appearance of the structure-exceeding historical motion becomes its own immanent thinking, rendering that historical motion and the attendant epochal change real, and not merely apparent. This thinking-in-the-extreme, it must be stated here, is not something that has to be forcibly interpolated into this quasi-historical dialectic. Rather, the very fact that the transcendental or formal dialectic now has a historical appearance, renders Hegel's quasi-historical dialectic — his so-called good infinity — something that virtually calls out to be thought in the extreme, and thus against its own grain. After all, the shift that is effected, from infinite totality of transcendental bad infinity of the Kantian dialectic to infinite totalisation (repeat totalisation) of the so-called good infinity of the Hegelian dialectic, shows that totality is no longer an accomplished a priori fact but is a project that one has to perpetually seek to accomplish through a perpetual process of totalisation. Clearly, the a priori, and thus teleology, of infinite totality continues to persist but now as a schizz, a crisis: it opens itself up precisely in closing itself.
To get a sense of what thinking Hegel's good infinity — or his quasi-historical dialectic — in the extreme amounts to, we might do well to attend to the following excerpt from Fredric Jameson's The Hegel Variations:
"…the form of of the syllogism can also be useful if we focus attention, not on its results or conclusions, but rather on that 'middle term' shared by both subject and predicate–a kind of Hoelderlinian primordial unity, from which…both terms emerge and to which they strain to return at the end of the logical process. Even these examples, however, suggest yet a further lesson, namely the need to stress an open-ended Hegel rather than the conventionally closed system which is projected by so many idle worries about Absolute Spirit, about totality, or about Hegel's allegedly teleological philosophy of history.
"Indeed, the doctrine of the middle term suggests a very different Hegel who may serve as a corrective to the traditional ones: this is the Maoist Hegel proposed by Alain Badiou, in which the metaphysical spirit is expansive rather than centripetal or cyclical. Here the central dialectical movement is identified as One dividing into Two, and it is clearly quite distinct from those figures that emphasize (for example) the return of consciousness into itself…."
Clearly, this move of brushing Hegelian (and left-Hegelian) "good infinity" against its grain, also, at once, does the same to the transcendental bad infinity of Kant and Levi-Strauss. Such against-the-grain reading of transcendental bad infinity – which is concomitant with the thinking-in-extreme of the so-called good infinity of Hegel – will amount to an affirmation, not of some new good infinity against bad, but an immanentist bad infinity in radical antagonism to both the transcendental bad infinity of Kant and such Kantians as Levi-Strauss, and the good infinity of Hegel.
This immanentist bad infinity, which is immanentist in an active practical-materialist sense, is the infinity of remainder and/or excess. More rigorously and precisely, it's the infinity of determinate production of void vis-à-vis the horizon of relationality or symbolic order in its concrete mediations. This is, therefore, not escape as Sartrean pure seriality but is, instead, a leap that seeks to suspend precisely such seriality that is merely the obverse of the bounded seriality of Kant's transcendental dialectic (or Levi-Strauss's structural dialectic), or, for that matter, the seeming open-endedness of the Hegelian geist in its historical unfolding. This immanentist bad infinity is a conception of nowness or finitude in its uninterrupted infinition. This immanentist bad infinity, or finite-infinity — the transfinite in Badiou's Cantorian set-theoretic terms – is "infinite thought" in radical and thus unpunctuated antagonism, not only to the infinite totality of transcendental bad infinity of Kant (and Levi-Strauss) and so-called good infinity of Hegel; it's also in radical antagonism to the phenomenological and/or deconstructive conceptions of practice of infinite finitudes. In the latter, the suspension of infinite totality/infinite totalisation is thought as the difference of the "a-whileness" (Heidegger) of finitude as an interiorised and thus phenomenologically-reduced experience.
In radical contrast to that, the immanentist bad infinity — which late Althusser variously conceptualised, by way of a protracted detour through Greek atomism, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza and even Heidegger, as "transcendental contingency", "necessity of contingency" and so on – is the remainder or excess (as the determinate production or presentation of void) as the institution of its own duration and historicity.
This immanentist bad infinity — which stands affirmed in breaking with transcendental bad infinity of Kant by brushing it against its grain in the process of thinking the Hegelian good infinity in the extreme – is also a reading-against-the grain of Kant's formalised "transcendental dialectic". So, this immanentist bad infinity, as an against-the-grain reading of Kant's formalised dialectic (and thus of Levi-Strauss's Kantian structural dialectic too), is an envisioning and articulation of the dialectic as the limit-form of the ontological excess of both the dialectic itself as an abstracted structure, and the individualised hypostasis of concrete practical reasons that in being hypostatised thus mediate into being the dialectic as that abstracted structure.
This conception of the dialectic as limit-form of ontological excess, as opposed to the formalisation and abstraction of the dialectic into a transcendental structure as in Kant (and Levi-Strauss), is what Badiou terms "formalised in-humanism" in his The Century. Badiou's "formalised in-humanism" is, unlike in traditional epistemology, not an identity between the form or concept, and its object of "in-humanism". Rather, as the term demonstrates through its fraught lexical and semantic appearance, it's meant to articulate the form or concept of precisely the impossibility of formalisation or conceptualisation. And, for Badiou, this impossibility in being an active occurring – a "taking-place" – is the Real in its human-exceeding in-humanity. In other words, Badiou's "formalised in-humanism" – which is our immanentist bad infinity in and against the transcendental good infinity of Kant's formalised dialectic – is an allegorical conceptual figure of constellated construction of transindividualised ontological excess. This would be nothing save the truth of the absent-cause – the a priori of no a priori as it were – in its forcing.
Posted in anthropology, Calude Levi-Strauss, Kant, philosophyTagged Alain Badiou, Althusser, bad infinity, Claude Levi-Strauss, dialectic, formalised in-humanism, Fredric Jameson, good infinity, Hegel, immanentist, Kant, limit-form, Sartre, structural dialectic, structure, The Savage Mind, transcendental dialectic
Marx: An Epicurean in Hegelian disguise?
August 27, 2015 August 27, 2015 Pothik GhoshLeave a comment
"…the principle of Epicurean philosophy is not the gastrology of Archestratus as Chrysippus believes, but the absoluteness and freedom of self-consciousness — even if self-consciousness is only conceived in the form of individuality.
"If abstract-individual self-consciousness is posited as an absolute principle then, indeed, all true and real science is done away with [aufgehoben] inasmuch as individuality does not rule within the nature of things themselves. But then, too, everything collapses that is transcendentally related to human consciousness and therefore belongs to the imagining mind. On the other hand, if that self-consciousness which knows itself only in the form of abstract universality is raised to an absolute principle, then the door is opened wide to superstitious and unfree mysticism. Stoic philosophy provides the historic proof of this. Abstract-universal self-consciousness has, indeed, the intrinsic urge to affirm itself in the things themselves in which it can only affirm itself by negating them.
"Epicurus is therefore the greatest representative of Greek Enlightenment, and he deserves the praise of Lucretius:
"Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret
In terris oppressa gravi sub religione
Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat
Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans,
Primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra.
Est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra,
Quem neque fama deum nec fulmina nec minitani
Murmure compressit caelum………………………
Quare religio pedibus subjecta vicissim
Obteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo."
("When human life lay grovelling in all men's sight, crushed to the earth under the dead weight of religion whose grim features loured menacingly upon mortals from the four quarters of the sky, a man of Greece was first to raise mortal eyes in defiance, first to stand erect and brave the challenge. Fables of the gods did not crush him, nor the lightning flash and growling menace of the sky…. Therefore religion in its turn lies crushed beneath his feet, and we by his triumph are lifted level with the skies.")
"The difference between Democritean and Epicurean philosophy of nature…has been elaborated and confirmed in all domains of nature. In Epicurus, therefore, atomistics with all its contradictions has been carried through and completed as the natural science of self-consciousness. This self-consciousness under the form of abstract individuality is an absolute principle. Epicurus has thus carried atomistics to its final conclusion, which is its dissolution and conscious opposition to the universal. For Democritus, on the other hand, the atom is only the general objective expression of the empirical investigation of nature as a whole. Hence the atom remains for him a pure and abstract category, a hypothesis, the result of experience, not its active [energisches] principle. This hypothesis remains therefore without realisation, just as it plays no further part in determining the real investigation of nature."
–Karl Marx, 'Difference Between The Democritean And Epicurean Philosophy of Nature In General'
SOME SYLLOGISTIC 'QUESTIONS', AND OBSERVATIONS
What do we have here? Marx, the Epicurean affirmationist and anti-dialectician in a Hegelian garb? And was this not who Marx really always was? Is this not the Marx that Althusser and his band of Althusserians, particularly Macherey and Badiou, produce through their detour via the Greek atomists (and Spinoza in Macherey's case), thanks to the 'discovery' of the "epistemological break" between Early Marx with his expressivist human ontology and subject and Late Marx with his antagonism between concrete labour and productive forces on one hand, and abstract labour and social relations of production on the other? Was this not the Marx that was always there, right at the very beginning — this being his doctoral dissertation — and who had only momentarily been obscured by the dross of Hegel's dialectic and Young Hegelian dialectical anthropology? Did not the Marx of Capital, but especially of the Grundrisse, continue doing what he does in this doctoral thesis of his: mobilise and deploy the dialectical discourse against itself in order to have it break with itself? Is it not this break with the dialectic and its structure — which is tantamount to the universalisibality of the singular — that is evident here when he writes:" Abstract-universal self-consciousness has, indeed, the intrinsic urge to affirm itself in the things themselves in which it can only affirm itself by negating them."? Sure, he uses the Hegelian-dialectical terminology and conception of negation to articulate this anti-dialectical universal. But is that anything more than his historically given threshold of sayability? So then, is the dialectic of productive forces and social relations of production that Marx elaborates really meant by him to be a dialectic? Or, is the relentlessness of the dialectical machine — that is his magnum opus Capital — not actually meant to indicate the relentlessness of the antagonism of the singular universalising to the dialectical universality? In fact, is that not the direction he unambiguously indicates in his Grundrisse, what with the text tending clearly towards according conceptual primacy to labour vis-a-vis capital and its labour theory of value?
The Althusserian conception of materialism of thought — which in Badiou's conception of "subjective-materiality" finds a more rigorous and developed reformulation through Mallarme, but also Pessoa — is an Epicurean-subtractionist conception. Epicurus is so extreme in his anti-universalising rigorous particularism that it amounts to subtraction from the diremptive horizon of the universal and the particular, and is thus universal-singularity. Marx's reading of Epicurus's philosophy of nature points clearly in that direction. In the portion excerpted above he writes: "If abstract-individual self-consciousness is posited as an absolute principle then, indeed, all true and real science is done away with [aufgehoben] inasmuch as individuality does not rule within the nature of things themselves. But then, too, everything collapses that is transcendentally related to human consciousness and therefore belongs to the imagining mind." The last sentence of this quote is particularly irrefutable as evidence on that count.
And this is the direction Althusser pursues in his later conception of aleatory materialism or materialism of the encounter. Badiou follows that path even further as is evident from his conceptions such as truth as "fidelity to the event", the "universal-singular" and "subtractive ontology". Both of them correctly grasp the materialist dialectic as the culmination of Epicurean rigorous particularism and thus subtractive universal-singularity. This evidently makes this materialist dialectic the operation of forcing the truth of the aleatory, the encounter, or the event a la Badiou. In fact, when Althusser articulates his conception of materiality as pure happening (the encounter) sans all matter, it is this Epicurean subtractionist conception of materiality that he strives to affirm.
That Marx himself adopted this Epicurean-subtractive modality of thinking – albeit in the discursive idiom of Hegelian dialectics — is evident in how he envisages and articulates his conception of natural history of capital in Capital, Volume I. Marx's conception of natural history with regard to his discursive representation of capital as its own immanent critique – Adorno was to later further develop this conception of natural history in his Negative Dialectics — reveals how the emergence and generalisation of productive labour is constitutive of diremption between man, and nature-as-matter. Something that, therefore, renders labour, in its situation within and animation by that horizon of diremption, fundamentally immaterial.
Marx's conception of capital in terms of natural history, therefore, also demonstrates that labour can emancipate itself from its constitutive condition of immateriality (or ideality) only in, as and through its self-abolition. That is encapsulated in clear programmatic terms in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. And labour in self-abolition would basically be materiality as a rupture with the horizon of constitutive diremption of labour in its immateriality and nature-as-matter, to be an affirmation of the singularity of nature as nonidentitarian excess of identity, or as the negativity of the historical in and as its own determinate presentation.
Clearly, therefore, materiality, a la Marx's conception of natural history, is not simply nature-as-matter because matter is nothing but the constitutive obverse of the immateriality or ideality of labour. Rather, materiality, in this conception, is the duration and/or historicity of nature as nonidentitarian excess. This is precisely materiality without matter, as materiality should and can only be. In that context, the Althusserian conception of materialism of thought, and Badiou's conception of "subjective-materiality" is an Epicurean-subtractionist rearticulation of this natural-historical conception of materiality without matter.
We can, therefore, also easily claim that Althusser and, especially, Badiou's subtractionist rearticulation of the materialist dialectic – something they accomplish by reading the materialist dialectic in Marx through the prism of Epicurus and Greek atomism – is a reformulation of the Marxian conception of natural history in the discursive register of Epicurean and Greek atomism. Can we not?
Posted in Marxism, philosophyTagged Adorno, affirmationist, Althusser, anti-dialectician, Badiou, Democritus, dialectical, dialectical anthropology, Epicurus, Grundrisse, Hegelian, Macherey, Marx, natural history, singular, universalisability
With Lenin against Foucault, with Foucault against Lenin
Unless the state, and its attendant state power, are grasped and demonstrated as the operation of the grammar of social relations –in other words, the structure of circulation of value, and exchange — all attacks on the state, whether envisaged in terms of seizure of state power or in terms of resisting the state, and withdrawal from it, will only result in its recomposition and reinforcement.
So, deregulation that capital proposes should be grasped not as the disappearance of the state, but the recomposition of the modern state-formation that is the structure (or grammar) of circulation of value, and exchange — or recomposition of the regime of capitalist class relations — that is more favourable for capital as a social totality. Deregulation is, indeed, re-regulation. It has changed (recomposed) the modern state that represented social capital (capital in its social totality) in the early capitalist conjuncture of embedded liberalism to being an agency of capital in its late, neoliberal conjuncture. [In fact, this character of the modern state was already evident, albeit merely as localised instantiations then, in the early capitalist conjuncture itself. First, with Bonapartism and then with Fascism. Marx, vis-a-vis the political form of the reign of Louis Bonaparte, and, following in his footsteps, August Thalheimer with regard to German Nazism, had sought to explicate this phenomenon in terms of the "autonomization of the executive" (Thalheimer's term). Mario Tronti's conception of the "autonomy of the political" can be read as an updation and reformulation of Marx and Thalheimer's conception of "autonomization of the executive" for the late capitalist conjuncture.]
Hence, a politics that seeks to disavow the power of the modern state, whose structure is formational, cannot afford to buy into the neoliberal plea for 'deregulation' as providing it the means to accomplish the historical attenuation of state, its governmental functionality, and the microcapilaries of power constitutive of it. Foucault's politics — which derives from a more rigorously articulated theory of what is arguably anarchist politics, and which is based on the ethics of care of the self and "resistances" to power in terms of withdrawal from it — falls precisely into that error.
What such an error on Foucault's part demonstrates, among other things, is that anarchist politics as a manifestation of its radical essence would amount to nothing less than libertarianism veering to the right. That would be a political subjectivity completely in sync with the structure of capital in its neoliberal conjunctural specificity.
The libertarian political subjectivity integral to Foucault's affirmation of the ethics of care of the self — whether it be envisaged in a hedonist manner or a radical-communitarian one — gets objectively, and unwittingly, inscribed within the neoliberal political project. For, what else is neoliberalism but the conjunctural objectivity of capital as an accelerated horizon and dynamic of expanded reproduction and actual subsumption of living labour (or creativity, Marx's "use-value") by dead labour (capital as a structure of valorisation) respectively? Neoliberalism is nothing but the existence and perpetuation of capital as its own terminal crisis, and yet one that is not the unravelling of capital, which is the law of value and thus fetish character of social relations.
In that sense, neoliberalism is a unique conjuncture, wherein capital as an epochality of social relations is in crisis — symptomatised by the current instability or precarity of social locations in terms of the social power they embody — even as radical working class politics is in retreat. In such circumstances, the affirmative Foucauldian conceptions of infinite proliferation of language, the jouissance of boundless productivity through perpetual ascesis or constant differing away becomes a subjective obverse of this neoliberal objectivity.
Of course, such a genealogical subject constitutive of hermeneutic recovery of various historical moments of care of the self does effect recomposition, and thus subversion, of history/capital as a horizon of valorisation and power in order for it to expandedly reproduce itself. But what the affirmationist conceptual framework of Foucault, particularly late Foucault, tends to emphasise as subjectively radical are these recompositions-subversions, not the incipience of interruption of the horizon of history/capital itself that these subjective moments of subversion/recomposition simultaneously instantiate and thwart.
Hence, radical politics in this Foucauldian key of ethicality and ascesis would amount to the acceleration of different "resistances" to different operations of power, or regimes of truth, and their accelerated subversion that would further accelerate the production of new discursive regimes of truth. Foucault, all said and done, does not have a conception of subjectivity of political radicalism as interruption and abolition of capital as the horizon of valorisation and productive power. A subjectivity that by virtue of being an embodiment of the concept of limit of the singular truth of the event (determinate presentation of the void in social relations) envisages the praxis of political radicalism not just as infinite difference but as "infinite difference and infinite deployment of infinite difference" (Badiou's conception of revolutionary subjectivity in Metapolitics).
And if neoliberalism is, as I have tried to argue above, the conjunctural objectivity of capital as an accelerated horizon and dynamic of expanded reproduction of capital and actual subsumption of living labour (creativity, difference) by dead labour, what would such a (libertarian) conception of accelerated subversions of the horizon of power finally amount to? In that context we can see the limit of what is often called Foucault's Kantianism. On account of his conception of ethics as the relationship that the self establishes with itself in withdrawing from the moral law, I prefer to term Foucault's Kantianism as his anti-Kantian (because it is clearly anti-deontic) Kantianism, or radical Kantianism.
So then, does Foucault affirm the neoliberal project? My sense is he does not. But can his conceptual method, and its attendant ethics as politics, be seen as neoliberal anti-neoliberalism? I think it can be.
Be that as it may, the proposal and/or manoeuvre of deregulation cannot be effectively combated, as Leninists after Lenin imagine, in terms of seizing control of state-power. For, in a neoliberal, late capitalist situation when that is no longer objectively possible due to heightened precarity of segmentation of the working class, the Leninist political credo of seizure of state-power easily becomes no more than the basis for a politics of struggling for the preservation/restoration of the given/previous state-formation (composition of capitalist class power) that the 'deregulatory' (read re-regulatory) manoeuvres attempt to dismantle/have dismantled through its recomposition.
Commitment to Leninism as a politics of seizure of state-power is, in this neoliberal conjuncture, no more than a commitment to social democracy. And what can social democracy of neoliberalism be save the oppressive and chauvinist lobby politics of some segments of the working class against other segments of the same class that are relatively and relationally disempowered vis-à-vis the former? This renders social democratic politics — including the state-capitalist form of post-revolutionary Leninism (read Stalinism) — an integral politico-ideological appendage of new institutional forms of capitalist control and domination such as prisons, psychiatric institutions, the modern hospital (may we also add trade unions), and so on. On this score Foucault is indisputably right, albeit the politics of libertarian "resistances" he derives from such inferences of his is merely an obverse of the social-democratic political subject of capital. In fact, Althusser , in his seminal explication of "ideological state apparatuses", had arguably paved the way, albeit from a strictly Marxist perspective, for Foucault's historico-conceptual work on governmentality. That ideology is not false consciousness but is material in being the instantiation of the default tendency of lapse at the heart of the practical actuality of the science of proletarian class antagonism is what informs Althusser's explication of ideological state apparatuses.
Fidelity to Lenin in this neoliberal conjuncture must, therefore, be a betrayal of Lenin as the proper name for Leninism. We should strive, instead, to repeat Lenin, strive, as Zizek says, in a Kierkegaardian sense. That is, repeat Lenin with a difference. And this repetition of Lenin with a difference would be constitutive of a politics that breaks with the horizon of disjunctive synthesis between anarchism on one hand and Leninist socialism on the other. And such a politics in breaking with this disjunctive synthesis would be the affirmation of a conjunctive synthesis. Communism as the real movement constitutive of the abolition of given state of affairs is the actuality of this conjunctive synthesis. The question, therefore, is not one of choice: liberty or communism? Instead, it's one of conjunction: freedom and communism. The simultaneity of political and cultural revolutions, wherein one struggles against immediate oppression while simultaneously seeking to transform the capitalist structure of social relations that is the mediate condition of possibility of such oppression, would constitute the affirmation of this politics of conjunctive synthesis.
Rosa Luxemburg, the German and Dutch left-communists who followed her, and the GPCR's left-Maoists, together with the Italian (Operaists) and French (Euro-Maoists such as Badiou) inheritors of those legacies (European and Chinese respectively) provide us with various loosely interrelated politico-theoretical approaches to envisage this conjunctively-synthetic politics of communism that is repetition of Lenin with a difference. And in this it bids goodbye to Mr Socialism, that Leninist hobby-horse, as the intermediate stage between capitalism and communism that stems from workers seizing state-power. Rather, it envisages communism as communisation — struggle against immediately oppressive operation of (state) power while simultaneously reorganising concrete social relations of production to determinately abolish the necessitarian character of social relations (or capital as the operation of the law of value) as an uninterruptedly continuous process. This, in the words of the Nietzsche of 'Ecce Homo', would be "…negating and destroying are conditions of saying Yes" in its concrete realisation.
This, not surprisingly, spells a return to the classical Marxism of Marx, who minced no words in envisaging communism as "revolution in permanence".
Posted in Foucault, Leninism, modern state, NeoliberalismTagged Althusser, anarchism, August Thalheimer, deregulation, Foucault, Leninism, Mario Tronti, Marx, neoliberalism, recomposition, state