Archive for 'Materialism'

Just like as in a nest of boxes round,
Degrees of sizes in each box are found:
So, in this world, may many others be
Thinner and less, and less still by degree:
Although they are not subject to our sense, [...]

~ Margaret Cavendish “Of Many Worlds in This World”

Fragments on Lukács’ essay, focussing on how I would contrast Lukács to Marx, in relation to various claims Lukács puts forward in the first section of his essay, under the subheading “The Phenomenon of Reification”.

I. Quantity to Quality vs. Relationality

In my previous post, I mentioned a key problem confronting this text - a problem that was also a central question for Marx: if capitalism is understood as something historically unique, why do the categories used to theorise capitalism - commodities, money, interest, profit, rent, etc. - appear to be less historically specific than the object those categories purport to grasp? As I discussed previously, Lukács attempts to answer this question by suggesting that a quantitative expansion of the phenomenon grasped by these categories - to the point that this quantitative expansion becomes totalising and all-encompassing - yields a qualitative shift: in Lukács’ framework, capitalism can be generated as a historically-specific object from the extension of forms of practice that are much older historically.

Lukács believes that this is how Marx would also answer this question, and cites various passages from Marx suggestive of this idea. I would suggest that Marx’s answer actually takes a completely different form: for Marx, capitalism as an historically distinct object is constituted when various older forms of practice come to be reconfigured as component parts of an historically novel and qualitatively distinctive social relation. Following Hegel, Marx grasps the meaning of the categories as something that is determined relationally. To say this more plainly: Marx thinks that “commodities”, “money”, and similar categories are only apparently non-specific to capitalism - in his account, these categories take on a very different meaning and significance under capitalism, than various phenomena that, from our present-day point of view, look similar in other societies. The “essential difference” between these categories in a capitalist, compared to a non-capitalist, context, is therefore not due, in Marx’s account, solely to a process of quantitative expansion, but instead due to the emergence and reproduction of the historically distinct sort of social relation whose constitutive moments these categories express. Since Marx also does speak of various quantitative expansions associated with the development of capitalism, this argument is complex to demonstrate on a textual level - I’ll leave that task for another post. My goal here is simply to draw attention to a possible alternative to the sort of analysis Lukács presents, when he tries to explain why the core categories of “capitalism” appear more transhistorical than the object they purport to grasp.

II. Totalities and Tipping Points

Lukács seems to regard the “tipping point” at which quantitative expansion yields a qualitative shift, to be the point at which the “commodity-structure” becomes universalised or totalised. In Lukács’ argument:

The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression and for their attempts to comprehend the process or to rebel against its disastrous effects and liberate them, from servitude to the ‘second nature’ so created.

Logically, even within Lukács’ quantity-yields-quality framework, this isn’t the only analytical option - in principle, quantitative expansions might yield qualitative shifts without some sort of maximal, universal extent of quantitative expansion. Theorising this sort of “tipping point” concept, however, would probably pull the analysis closer to Marx’s relational approach, due to the need to explain why a certain level of quantitative expansion should yield a specific qualitative shift - an explanation that might point toward an exploration of whether some sort of specific configuration, with distinctive qualitative properties, becomes possible at some particular level of quantitative expansion. I don’t specifically see Marx’s analysis following this line - Marx seems to focus more on the effects to an entire set of practices, of the constitution of a new form of social relation, and to understand this qualitative shift to drive a quantitative expansion. Marx does, though, appeal in other dimensions of his argument to the notion that capitalism presupposes a certain (itself expanding) scale that transcends earlier historical organisations of production.

III. Personal vs. Social Relations

At one point early in this section, Lukács makes the point in passing that, at some early point in the development of capitalism, it was easier to “see through” the commodity-structure. Lukács argues:

the personal nature of economic relations was still understood clearly at the start of capitalist development. (emphasis mine)

Lukács intends this as a gloss on Marx’s argument about the fetish, in which Marx argues “a definite social relation between men… assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” In his reformulation of Marx’s argument, Lukács tacitly assumes that the “social” equates to the “personal”. I would suggest that Marx precisely does not make this equation - that Marx is instead attempting to theorise the collective constitution of a social relation that is specifically not personal in nature. As Marx puts the point:

the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. (emphasis mine)

Marx’s formulation also calls into question Lukács’ tacit suggestion that reification involves a sort of ideology or illusion - something that, when it is less totalistic, can be pierced, to reveal the “true” relation - a personal one - that sits on the other side of the veil. Marx is not attempting to theorise an ideology (not even a “necessary” one), but instead a distinctive form of social relation, characterised precisely by its “objective”, “materialist” character. Marx is not suggesting that theory needs to help up pierce the veil of an illusion of objectivity: he is suggesting that theory needs to grasp how we are collectively constituting a genuinely impersonal form of social relation. The categories of the “social” and the “personal” precisely do not align for Marx - this disalignment is central to Marx’s attempt to thematise capitalism as historically distinct, and it also alters the strategy at play in Marx’s critique, which is not to uncover the reality that has come to be crusted over by illusion, but instead to analyse the genesis and potentials of a very distinctive form of social relation.

This contrast carries over into a number of other dimensions of Lukács’ argument, some of which I’ll pick up on below.

IV. Subjects, Objects, and Things in Between

Both Lukács and Marx offer an argument about a distinctive form of subject-object dualism related to the commodity-structure. The very different conceptions of commodity-structure in play, however, point each in very different directions.

Lukács understands the commodity-structure to relate to the exchange relation. In his account, the quantitative expansion and, ultimately, totalisation and universaliation of the exchange-relation, leads, on the one hand, to a “world of objects and relations between things” - which Lukács equates with “the world of commodities and their movements on the market”. This “objective” world of market exchange confronts the individual subject as a “second nature” beyond their control - an environment whose laws the subject can attempt to anticipate and calculate, but not overcome. Proletarian subjects are further compelled to sell their labour-power onto this market - to externalise part of themselves as an object - and also confront the full effects of the fragmentation of the labour process which, in Lukács’ account, comes to be organised in such a way as to break apart the “organic unity” of use values, scattering the production of a finished product in time and space, and turning labour from a purposeful mastery of nature, into something itself mastered and inserted as a motive force into a production process to which labour must adapt. In each of these ways, Lukács argues, the subject - or, specifically, something he calls “the personality” - the aspect of subjectivity that exceeds what is required for the labour-power that is bought and sold on the market - comes to experience itself as set apart from the totality of the object world. The subject thus becomes contemplative - passively analysing and adapting itself to the laws of an object world the subject experiences as fundamentally alienated from its own practice.

Most visibly with the strange, ungrounded category of the “personality”, but also with the undertheorised category of the “object world”, Lukács’ argument here falls short of the type of theory Marx is attempting to construct. Lukács tacitly takes for granted the qualitative characteristics of both his subject and object worlds. The type of explanation Lukács uses, for example, to account for the “objectivity” of the market, could implicitly be used for any sort of social environment into which any human subject finds themselves “thrown”: single social actors do not, as single social actors, have the capacity to alter any social context - why does the “contemplative” relation of subjects to an object world not characterise all of human history? Lukács’ implicit answer hinges on his argument that capitalism uniquely breaks apart the “organic unity” of the production of use values: lurking in the background here is a notion that subjects realise themselves through their self-externalisation of themselves in material nature, coupled with a tacit romantic glance at skilled handicraft production. “Personality” - which might perhaps realise itself as an active agent in a less fragmented productive environment - lingers into an era in which it figures as nothing more than an idiosyncracy - a “source of error”. With no means available to externalise and thus realise itself as an active, creative agent, it finds itself cordoned off from the object world, which it confronts in a state of contemplation.

It is significant, I would suggest, that, in order to make this argument, Lukács directly juxtaposes - as though they were intended to make the same sort of contribution to Marx’s argument - passages from Capital that are describing commodity fetishism, and much later passages describing the transformation of the labour process that takes place under capitalism, particularly after the introduction of large-scale machinery. These juxtapositions assist Lukács in his attempt to equate Marx’s category of the “fetish”, with Lukács’ own category of “reification”. I would suggest, however, that these two categories point in quite different analytical directions. Marx’s argument about the fetish is intended to account for something that remains unproblematised in Lukács’ argument: the constitution - in the sense of the enactment or performance in collective practice - of the distinctive qualitative characteristics of the forms of “objectivity” and “subjectivity” that are enacted via the process of the reproduction of capital.

Marx’s argument here is more complex and difficult to express than Lukács’ - I won’t be able to do justice to it in this post (I have, however, erected the scaffolding within which to reconstruct this argument, in the series on the first chapter of Capital, volume one, under the Marx tab above). Here - and still very gesturally and inadequately - I can begin to sketch some of what might be at stake, by looking briefly at the contrasting ways in which Lukács and Marx approach the question of the social constitution of particular forms of equality.

V. All Else Being Equal

Just as Lukács reduces the commodity-structure down to the exchange relation, so he also attempts to explain distinctive ideals of equality with reference to the exchange relation. Once again, this pushes Lukács onto the terrain of personal relations: he speaks of the recognition of formal equality, as one of the “objective” conditions for the exchange of qualitatively incommensurable goods. This is a very common way of accounting for the modern resonance of ideals of equality - to point these ideals back to the conceptualisation of exchange as a form of contract, presupposing the formal equality of contracting parties as in principle self-determining agents who are operating free from coercion, and also presupposing the intrinsic fungibility of the goods being exchanged. Marx will make use of these sorts of arguments, as these sensibilities and their associated forms of practice are dimensions of capitalism. Significantly, however, Marx suggests a different line of argument in the immediate context of his discussion of commodity fetishism. He cites a passage in which Aristotle considers the question of whether the goods exchanged on the market - since these goods are being, in effect, “equated” with one another in social practice - might possess some underlying sort of commonality or identity - whether they might, as the chapter has just discussed, possess the homogeneous supersensible substance of “value”. Aristotle considers the possibility, and rejects it, arguing that exchange is simply a “makeshift for practical purposes”. Marx then suggests why Aristotle failed to arrive at the concept of value, and points this back to the absence of wage labour in classical antiquity. Marx argues:

The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality.

The “in truth” is sardonic - Marx is miming the forms of analysis of political economy in speaking this way. Political economists might speak as though value has always existed, but Aristotle and other thinkers failed to “discover” it until the present enlightenment enabled us to uncover what has always tacitly been there (remembering here Marx’s characterisation of the political economists, that they speak as though “there used to be history, but there is no longer any”). The argument of the first chapter of Capital, however, is that value was not there to “discover” until the development of the distinctively modern social practices that performatively (if unintentionally) bring “value” into being. Aristotle didn’t overlook the presence of value: value did not yet exist.

This argument connects in complex ways with how Marx understands the social constitution of modern ideals of equality. Value figures in Marx’s analysis as an intangible social substance - as something that cannot be directly perceived, but whose existence can be deduced through observations over time of the non-random transformations of aspects of social experience that are immediately evident to the senses. Value is an implicit social category - its existence must be deduced. This deduction is possible, because non-random (lawlike) patterns of transformation of material nature and social institutions take place over time. The constitution of value is unintentional (social actors are not attempting collectively to generate the patterns Marx labels with the category “value”), and it is impersonal (taking the form of a constantly reset social norm that marginalises social actors who cannot conform).

I have mentioned before that one image or metaphor for thinking about “commodity producing labour”, involves a nested collection of sets, where the largest includes any sort of social practice involved in any way in the reproduction of our social existence, within this, is that subset of activities oriented in some way to producing goods intended to be sold on the market, and within that is the subset of activities that succeed in what Marx calls a salto mortale - activities that survive a process that Marx describes as a reduction of the labour that social actors empirically expend in production, to labour that gets to “count” as part of social labour. This reduction takes place, in Marx’s account, behind the backs of the social actors involved in the process, who have no way of predicting what percentage of their empirical activities will get to “count”: some empirical activities will “count” fully, some partially - some excessively. And this impersonal process, over time, exerts a coercive pressure back on empirical activities themselves, creating incentives and disincentives that tend (probabilistically) to drive empirical activities in non-random directions, conferring a “developmental” directionality on aspects of capitalist history.

Marx argues - and here is where “value” enters the argument - that this impersonal, unintentional process of culling empirical activities down to a smaller subset of activities that “count” as social labour in this very specific sense, can plausibly be interpreted by social actors engaged in the process, not as a collective social process of culling excess investments of empirical labour, down to what “counts”, but rather as a process of discovering how much “value” a material object inherently or intrinsically possesses. In this dimension of collective practice, social actors behave as though something like “value” exists - as though there is a single, intangible, homogeneous substance that is the total social labour, which then comes to be subdivided in greater or lesser proportions among all the products that are empirically produced. Goods are “valued” to the degree that they participate in this intangible substance - and the degree to which they participate in this substance is not discernible when either the use value or the empirical labour invested in the good is examined: it is revealed only in the social interaction among goods - only in the process of exchange.

There is much more to this argument, but I want to break off here, to reflect briefly on the implications of what I’ve written so far, for the question of how to understand the emergence of modern ideals of formal or abstract equality. To the extent that human labour-power is also a commodity under capitalism, it also participates in this culling process - in this coercive “reduction” down from the various labour powers that have been “produced”, to those that get to “count” - partially, fully, or excessively. Social actors engaging with the labour market - whether as buyers or sellers of labour power - have practical, everyday experience with this process of reduction. “Value” - this invisible, intangible, homogeneous substance - flows in greater or lesser degrees through humankind as well, in spite of the array of visible, tangible, empirical differences that materially distinguish humans from one another. Beneath these apparent differences, something common flows through us - we all partake of a similar intangible essence. Marx suggests, in other words, that the strangely counterfactual ideal of equality that develops in tandem (he believes) with capitalism, that exerts a critical force on actual social institutions and over time is used to call into question the importance of immediately sensible differences between humans - that this counterfactual ideal is a plausible articulation of the experience of partaking in the common intangible substance of value. Quite independently of the formal, contractual dimensions of the wage relation or of other sorts of exchange (which also, of course, play their part in reinforcing ideals of equality and experiences of personhood), this unintentional, impersonal reduction of human commodities down to a common, intangible, social “essence”, helps to enact the distinctive qualitative form of modern ideals of human equality.

Through this account, Marx also hopes to render plausible what he regards as pervasive forms of misrecognition, in which these intangible - but, in Marx’s account, socially enacted - qualities are perceived, not as something we have only recently created, but rather as intrinsic essences that we have recently discovered. The argument around misrecognition is, again, quite complex - I won’t be able to recount it here. The argument hinges on a complex and largely tacit set of distinctions concerning the ways in which we perform certain dimensions of our social experience as overtly social - the personal, intersubjective dimensions - while, by contrast, an impersonal social dimension goes unrecognised as social: it plausibly appears “objective” - and, by so appearing, provides us with experience of a set of qualitative characteristics that inform our concept of “objectivity” - a concept that we might plausibly look for or be receptive to in other sorts of impersonal environments - such as material nature…

Much more is required to develop and fully substantiate this argument, let alone to draw attention to the countercurrents and side eddies that curl around the phenomena I have so inadequately described (there is never, for Marx, just one plausible articulation of our collective enactments - and the reproduction of capital, in his account, entails a bewildering multitude of additional enactments, each interacting with one another in complex and dynamic ways). For the moment, just a brief word on the issue of standpoint of critique in relation to this kind of point. As I’ve sketched the argument above, it could sound as though an ideal of equality might hinge on the sort of collective sleight of hand involved in the enactment of value. This is not Marx’s position. Capitalism may have provided the means - quite accidentally - whereby we demonstrated collectively to ourselves that we could simply perform equality - that we could treat one another as equal, at least for certain purposes and in a certain dimension of collective practice - that we could disregard empirically sensible differences in order to perform this social equality, if needed. This accidental discovery opens a space of possibility - a space that becomes potentially wider, once we recognise the collective genesis of this ideal, rather than essentialising it as a “discovery” of something we perceive as having existed all along. This space of possibility might include an exploration of other forms of relation - less formal, less abstract - but attuned to the possibility to create in and around sensible difference, by performing our selves and our relations in a different way. This topic is much too complex to address adequately here - I mention it as only the most passing of references to how Marx conceptualises the potential for the conscious appropriation of potentials that have been constituted - but in alienated form - how, in other words, he understands his standpoint of critique.

This post is a bit of a monstrosity - my deepest apologies. I am trying to capture a set of notes that I hope to develop adequately in other places at other times. I am also trying to come to grips with the difficulty I have in trying to express what I object to in other theoretical approaches, in a circumstance in which the alternative that shapes my objection is just… a great deal more vast, generally, than what I’m objecting to… Working out how to write about this, short of a full thesis-length presentation, is something with which I’m currently wrestling. At the moment, as with this post, I leave out massive amounts, to the point that, while writing is still helpful for me, because I know at least a decent portion of what I would add to flesh the argument out, the posts strike me as though they must be utterly unintelligible and bizarre to anyone reading on. Thanks all for their patience as I write through this morass… Too tired tonight to edit (which, with this post, is possibly a dire mistake…) Take care all…

Previous posts in this series on Lukács:

Seeing What Was Already There

Reification, pt. 1

Reification, pt. 2

So a few more brief reflections on Specters of Marx, to follow up on yesterday’s brief post. I won’t write systematically on the text, but I did want to take a slightly closer look at the final parts of the concluding piece on “The Apparition of the Inapparent” - subtitled “The Phenomenological Conjuring Trick”. The first part of this chapter pursues Marx, pursuing Stirner; in order to deal adequately with the argument Derrida is making there (and with his later - quite interesting - question about continuities and discontinuities between the Marx of the German Ideology and the Marx of Capital), I would need to do a type of textual work - on Derrida and a couple of Marxes - that I don’t have time to undertake here. What I want do instead is focus on the text from around p. 185 onward - from the point where Derrida begins to transition to his most extended discussion of commodity fetishism.

Because I’ve been working on the commodity fetish discussion in such detail, I couldn’t help but be struck by a couple of strange omissions in Derrida’s otherwise very close paraphrases and quotations of Marx’s text. The first occurs in Derrida’s discussion of Marx’s wooden table - the one from the beginning of the fourth section of Capital’s first chapter - the one that, as soon as it turns into a commodity, acquires “metaphysical” properties. Derrida here draws attention to Marx’s claim that the use value of the table does not account for the strange properties the table acquires, once the table becomes a commodity. Significantly, however, Derrida glosses Marx’s argument as an attempt to talk about the social construction of a pregiven thing:

It is so disconcerting, this commodity-thing, that one has to approach it with “metaphysical” subtlety and “theological” niceties. Precisely in order to analyze the metaphysical and the theological that constructed the phenomenological good sense of the thing itself, of the immediately visible commodity, in flesh and blood: as what it is “at first sight” (auf den ersten Blick). This phenomenological good sense may perhaps be valid for use-value. It is perhaps even meant to be valid only for use-value, as if the correlation of these concepts answered to this function: phenomenology as the discourse of use-value so as not to think the market or in view of making oneself blind to exchange-value. Perhaps. And it is for this reason that phenomenological good sense or phenomenology of perception (also at work in Marx when he believes he can speak of pure and simple use-value) can claim to foster Enlightenment since use-value has nothing at all “mysterious” about it (nicht Mysteriöses an ihr). If one keeps to use-value, the properties (Eigenschaften) of the thing (and it is going to be a question of property) are always very human, at bottom, reassuring for this very reason. They always relate to what is proper to man, to the properties of man: either they respond to man’s needs, and that is precisely their use-value, or else they are the product of a human activity that seems to intend them for those needs. (p. 188)

Derrida seems so certain here that Marx takes use value as a sort of unproblematic, phenomenologically-transparent, category, that he doesn’t see, or at least doesn’t feel the need to mention, that in this same passage Marx also claims that the specific determinants of value, taken by themselves, do not account for the strange qualities expressed in festishised forms of thought. In other words, Derrida appears to read into this famous passage a kind of distinction between use value and value that, I would argue, is beside the point of the strategic thrust of this section of Marx’s text. Derrida seems to take “use value” to be, for Marx, a kind of unproblematic materiality that sits fundamentally outside ideology or spectrality - a materiality subject to empirical perception by a kind of phenomenologically unproblematic good sense. Derrida does not appear to consider that this “good sense” might, itself, be one of the targets of Marx’s analysis in this chapter - might, indeed, be a fetishised form of thought and one of the targets of Marx’s critique of the fetish. Derrida then - not surprisingly - takes Marx to understand capitalism as a system for the exchange of these unproblematically material, phenomenologically-transparent “things” - and seems to believe Marx is arguing that spectrality arises from exchange alone - that use values intrinsically sit outside the process, and come to possess “spectral” qualities only when tossed into the ambit of commodity circulation.

Derrida then goes on to convict Marx at great length of not recognising the spectrality that already haunts this apparently unproblematic and phenomenologically intuitive materiality. Use value, Derrida argues, always already presupposes spectrality; Marx is incorrect in positing that use value sits somehow outside the spectral process, etc. Regular readers of the blog will know that I think Marx is very well aware of this. While Marx does himself no favours with his style of presentation, nevertheless, he intends the first chapter of Capital (as I have argued elsewhere at some length) to be a critique of the positions with which the chapter opens - so, a critique of the claim that an unproblematic material use value sits outside the arbitrary social conventions of exchange, and a critique of the forms of critique that rely on the “givenness” of the use value/exchange value distinction, rather that trying to grasp (as Marx thinks his analysis does) how this very distinction, along with both of its antinomic poles, comes into being via specific forms of collective practice.

In the opening passage to the section on commodity fetishism, which Derrida abridges into a discussion of use value alone, Marx points out that neither use value nor the empirically-observable determinants of value can account for the strange forms of perception and thought Marx has been analysing in the first chapter. Marx does not do this in order to argue that “use value” or “value” sits “outside” the fetishising social form he analyses. Instead, his argumentative intent is to ask why various sorts of what are taken to be “mere empirical content” have come to assume the distinctive “forms” these contents assume in capitalist society. Marx’s strategic intention here is to draw attention to the existence of a social form - of something not directly empirically observable, but nevertheless impinging on what can be empirically observed (and on the manner in which observation and interpretation tends to take place), such that content and form are not arbitrarily connected to one another. Marx is beginning in this passage to make the case that we must posit the existence of such a “supersensible” entity, in order to grasp a particular trace or symptomatic distortion that moves through the things we can empirically observe, and through the very forms of observation we find intuitive to apply to those “givens”. This trace is (one of) Marx’s spectre(s) - and it resides - as he explicitly says on a number of occasions - both within, and outside, the process of exchange. Use value therefore does not figure as a simple “outside”, uncontaminated by the spectre - and our intuitive phenomenological experience of “use value” as a general category, has everything to do with our indigenous experience as natives inhabiting capitalism’s all-too-thoroughly enchanted world.

Marx does still, of course, distinguish use value from exchange value - if not for the reasons Derrida seems to attribute to Marx’s argument. Derrida takes Marx to be making a temporal distinction: things are first use values, and then become spectralised when they enter into exchange (cf. p. 200). While Marx will make logical (and, because these things are intrinsically related for Marx, practical) distinctions between use value and exchange value, mapping Marx’s logical distinctions onto a temporal frame - as if something could be a “use value” and only subsequently come to be “spectralised” through market exchange - fundamentally breaks Marx’s framework. Under capitalism, “use value” (this very general, extremely abstract category that appears to lack specific social determination) becomes a “real abstraction” - a general abstract category that we practice into existence. The emergence of this category is intrinsically bound to the emergence of the commodity form, which binds “use value” together with “exchange value” in a tense and contradictory dynamic union. This socially-constituted unity itself generates a practical/logical distinction between use value and exchange value - not because use value precedes exchange value temporally, but because these two categories are united specifically in their antinomy to one another - they are constituted as mutually-determining oppositions in collective practice. Marx will then argue that it is possible - from a standpoint immanent to this antinomy - to derive the possibility for a form of production oriented to use value as an end in itself, rather than production oriented to use value only as a means for producing surplus value. This possibility, however, is an immanently-emergent one - not a possibility available in this exact form in earlier historical circumstances. I realise I am being very abbreviated here - the full argument is complex, and my goal here is simply to gesture at the difference between what I take Marx to be doing, and what Derrida seems to be taking him to do, in what Derrida calls Marx’s “pre-deconstructive” critical theory… ;-P (p. 214).

At any rate, Derrida’s “deconstructive” theory then seems to make a move that, to me, falls behind what I take Marx to be doing. In Derrida’s terms, I take Marx to be offering an argument about a social context whose spectral dimension immanently constitutes itself as “nightmare” that “weighs on” the living, precisely because it also immanently constitutes the possibility for alternative organisations of social life: it is this “contradictory” dimension of the social context (this tendency, in Marx’s terms, for the social world to “invert” itself) that generates the experience of spectrality as an experience of domination. Derrida convicts Marx of positing something that sits outside spectrality, and tries to argue that there is no outside - no perspective that is not-yet-haunted. Marx would agree. Yet, where Marx sees “use value” - however counter-intuitive this claim might seem - as a category specific to capitalist society, and therefore as haunted due to its constitution within a particular sort of spectral social form - a “haunting” that, because it is contingently social, can potentially be exorcised - Derrida seems to speak on a much more transhistorical register, discussing the ways in which technical transformations of any sort make possible types of iterability that are themselves the loci of a sort of spectrality for Derrida, and making similar gestures that suggest that spectrality is a sort of intrinsic and ineradicable property of any kind of sociality. This may well be right - but the question becomes: are Derrida and Marx invoking the same sort of spook? Does Derrida’s critique actually connect with the sort of exorcism Marx is trying to perform?

In a sense, from Derrida’s apparent starting point, where some sort of potential for critique resides in any sort of iterability, it becomes possible to ground the “dry messianism” of which Derrida speaks so highly in this text. Derrida may believe that going beyond this very abstract, intrinsically “negative”, forms of critique, risks the sorts of terroristic inheritance that befell Marxism in the 20th century. Not going beyond this form of critique, of course, risks a complete disconnect between critical ideals and practical transformation… This specific issue of Derrida’s rejection of the practical index of Marx’s work, arises in Derrida’s text in the form of an omission - a sentence excised from the middle of a quotation Derrida otherwise reproduces intact from the first chapter of Capital. Derrida quotes the following passage (which I’ll reproduce first in the form in which Derrida supplies it):

There [in the religious world] the products of the human brain [of the head, once again, of men: des menschlischen Kopfes, analogous to the wooden head of the table capable of engendering chimera - in its head, outside of its head - once, that is, as soon as, its form can become commodity-form] appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race…. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself [anklebt] to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

As the foregoing analysis has already demonstrated, this fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the labour which produces them. (p. 208-209)

The ellipsis in the middle of this quotation is quite extraordinary - so brazen and audacious that Derrida must intend the reader to be “in” on the joke. To provide a bit of context that won’t be clear from the limited summary I’ve provided of the text above: Derrida has taken pains in previous sections to draw close attention to what Derrida claims is the great importance Marx attaches to “the head” in various writings. In reproducing the quote above about the fetish, Derrida adds content of his own in order to highlight the way in which this passage supports this argument - at least, this is the conclusion one would draw if reading this passage from Marx solely via Derrida’s iteration. As the text is annotated and expurgated above, it appears that Marx invokes the fetish - “I call this the fetishism” - in relation to some argument about the “head” and in the context of an analogy to religion.

What Derrida then omits - a single, very short sentence - is the sentence that contradicts this interpretation utterly. Marx does not jump directly from the analogy to religion, to the performative act that names the fetish and binds it to some particular constellation of attributes (and, in fact, the analogy to religion actually follows, in Marx’s text, after a prior analogy to the natural sciences - an analogy that Derrida actually discusses, but displaced, such that Derrida’s discussion does not make clear the promixity of these two “analogies” - to religion and science juxtaposed - in Marx’s text). In Marx’s version of the argument, the following sentence follows directly upon the discussion of the religious “analogy”, and therefore immediately precedes the declarative performance in which Marx names the fetish:

So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. (emphases mine)

It is only here - where Marx has explicitly introduced his movement beyond the “analogies” (not analogy) of the scientific (as well as the religious) realm, and opened up the practice-theoretic index of his argument - that Marx performatively declares that it is this - this element of production (not exchange), this product of the hand (not the head) - that is to be called the fetishism of commodities.

I think the reader is meant to understand the nature of the move Derrida has made here - to appreciate the deliberateness and the severity of the performative transformation his iteration of Marx’s text effects. Derrida has argued throughout the text that we inherit - but selectively. This move is a deliberate critical play off of a central emphasis in Marx’s work: Marx argues that we make history - but not in conditions of our own choosing - and then focusses on grasping those conditions we have not chosen, hoping thereby to open up a space for practice. Derrida is here illustrating the potential for selective interpretive practice to open up and close off dimensions of those conditions we have inherited. Derrida has earlier pointed out that Marx’s argument presupposes that interpretation - precisely as an intervention into inheritance - has its own practical power. Derrida argues:

This dimension of performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets, will play an indispensible role in what I would like to say this evening. “An interpretation that transforms what it interprets” is a definition of the performative as unorthodox with regard to speech act theory as it is with regard to the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach (”The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it [Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt aber drauf an, sie zu verändern])”. (p. 63)

Derrida’s performance - his invocation of a particular spirit of Marx (a “dry, messianic” one) is simultaneously - as he has also told us it must be - an exorcism of another spectre: Derrida excises the “hand” - the practice-theoretic dimension of Marx’s work - out of fear, perhaps, that this dimension of Marx’s text must point to parties, and states, and totalitarian regimes that have cloaked themselves in Marxist garb. Es spukt. Who isn’t frightened when confronted with the cataclysmic results of Marxism’s self-declared heirs? Still, Derrida is spooked to the point that he exorcises Marx’s practice-theoretical orientation from his reiteration of Marx’s text. He selects out a “good spirit” - the spirit of “dry messianism” - in order to exorcise the frightening figure of a terroristic party and totalitarian state that so disastrously realised itself in Marxist garb. This attempt to select the good spirit without raising the bad, in many ways sidesteps the difficult problem that Marx indexes his own critical standpoint to the possibility of a practical, interventionist “messianism” that is nowhere near so dry, abstract, and negative as the one Derrida seeks.

Derrida’s exoricism - deliberately? - is not complete. There are still traces in Derrida’s text of Marx’s practical orientation. Much earlier in the text, Derrida worries that Marx might become some sort of politically-neutralised, “academic” reference:

This recent stereotype would be destined, whether one wishes it or not, to depoliticize profoundly the Marxist reference, to do its best, by putting on a tolerant face, to neutralize a potential force, first of all by enervating a corpus, by silencing in it the revolt [the return is acceptable provided that the revolt, which initially inspired uprising, indignation, insurrection, revolutionary momentum, does not come back]. People would be ready to accept the return of Marx or the return to Marx, on the condition that silence is maintained about Marx’s injuntion not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that “changes the world”. In the name of an old concept of reading, such an ongoing neutralization would attempt to conjure away a danger: now that Marx is dead, and especially now that Marxism seems to be in rapid decomposition, some people seem to say, we are going to be able to concern ourselves with Marx without being bothered - by the Marxists and, why not, by Marx himself, that is, by a ghost that goes on speaking. We’ll treat him calmly, objectively, without bias: according to the academic rules, in the University, in the library, in the colloquium. We’ll do it systematically, by respecting the norms of hermeneutical, philological, philosophical exegesis. If one listens closely, one already hears it whispered: “Marx, you see, was despite everything a philosopher like any other; what is more [and one can say this now that so many Marxists have fallen silent], he was a great-philosopher who deserves to figure in the list of those works we assign for study and from which he has been banned for too long. He doesn’t belong to the communists, to the Marxists, to the parties, he ought to figure within our great canon of Western political philosophy. Return to Marx, let’s finally read him as a great philosopher.” We have heard this and we will hear it again.

It is something altogether other that I want to attempt here as I turn or return to Marx. (p. 38-39)

Even in the truncated quotation on commodity fetishism, discussed above, Derrida reproduces the line - quite unnecessary to his own argument - about the fetishism of commodities relating to the nature of the labour that produces them. This line steps explicitly outside the boundaries of exchange - in which Derrida has been trying to encompass Marx’s argument - pointing to production and, ultimately, to the practice-theoretic nature of Marx’s approach. Derrida’s “dry messianism” allows no space, however, for the specificity of the ideals that would emerge from Marx’s practice-theoretic approach.

A strange, conflictual text in the end: spooked by the spectre of practical transformation, but unable completely to exorcise this frightening ghost, even by invoking the intervention of the “good” desert spirit of dry messianism. Derrida does, of course, offer a great deal of metacommentary on precisely this paradox - cloaking himself, as the French Revolutionaries in Roman garb, in the metaphors and imagery he draws from Marx, in order to rebuke Marx’s own critique of movements that clothe new content in old phrases. Derrida simultaneously illustrates the potential for performative creation, and the repetition that drags the dead along its wake, in and through this form of critique. The resulting argument is masterful - and yet… this performative interpretation - which would transform what it interprets: Derrida himself tells us - in the guise of telling Marx - that this kind of exorcism will fail - that spirit and spectre interpenetrate, that emancipatory spectrality is not subject to calculation and command. But perhaps this conclusion - the vision of noble, but ultimately self-defeating, interpretive performance, ever-renewed, ever-abstract, an eternal negation - is a more particular spectre than Derrida credits it as being. Or, to say the same thing another way, perhaps Marx’s goal was more immanent than Derrida seems to assume: not the Enlightenment goal of banishing all spectres, of stepping into the clear light of objective contemplation of “givens” naively perceived, but rather the goal of overcoming a particular form of spectrality, one that inheres specifically in the reproduction of capital, and involves the realisation of possibilities with which we haunt ourselves.

Enough for now - time to get some coffee, and some food (and apologies that I’m in need of both to the degree that I will toss this up without editing - I’ve been doing this rather a lot lately, to the detriment of the flow of the writing and at the risk of foolish and easily corrected analytical errors - apologies - with the formal writing commitments I have on the table right now, this is unfortunately the only way I can steal time to blog)… I should note that other aspects of this text, with assorted tangents on other topics, are also being discussed over at Praxis, and that Praxis helpfully pointed to the far more systematic and thorough review of this text posted by Steven Shaviro.

Okay, so I went a bit crazy with this… I hadn’t intended to write a whole article-length response to Elson’s work – which, between yesterday’s post and today’s, is effectively what I’ve done. This post is so long that, while I would normally post it to the front page, it just exceeds all reasonable length – I’ll have to tuck it below the fold. Also, apologies in advance that I’m simply too exhausted, having written this, to edit - there are sections where I think I’m being repetitive, and other sections where I’m moving too quickly - hopefully anyone who clicks through will understand that this was written in one long and possibly ill-advised sitting, and it suffers as a result…

For those trying to decide whether to click through, I summarise the second half of Elson’s argument, of which I’m much more critical than I was of the first. I focus particularly on the notion of a real abstraction – and on how Elson is both aware of this concept, and yet uses it in tandem with an analytical framework that is expressly posited as transhistorical – the effect is to criticise capitalism for having a certain set of real abstractions (captured in categories like abstract labour, value, and money) against critical categories that do not have this same “real” status. I follow this thread through Elson’s argument, discussing Elson’s comments on the “structure/agency” issue in theories of capitalism; I outline her reading of the first chapter of Capital; and I discuss her concluding discussion of the political implications of her reading of Marx. In spite of the length of this piece, I don’t cover Elson’s argument in the same micrological detail I used in the previous post: the length is made up of critical asides where I explore the differences and points of agreement between my own approach and Elson’s work. I conclude with a fairly condensed set of criticisms, and also provide a whirlwind sketch of how I understand the concept of abstract labour – just to provide some sense of the perspective from which I am offering this critique.

To the folks who asked me to comment on this piece, all I can say is: be careful what you wish for… ;-P Below the fold we go…