Archive for 'Reading'

So Nate’s book meme pointed me back to a work Mike Beggs had recommended to me ages ago - the volume Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, edited by Diane Elson (1979). As often happens in the midst of PhD research, I had gone through the book really quickly, decided I wanted to go through it more carefully as there’s a lot in it that is potentially valuable for me - and then of course left it sitting by my computer for several months, staring at me, a high enough priority to be the “closest book” to me when Nate’s meme hit - but without quite getting around to doing that more careful read…

It’s really a fantastic collection. I’m meant to be writing on Diane Elson’s piece, which is very good, and which a number of people have mentioned in relation to my work, as she also uses a formulation I tend to use - that Marx is not presenting a “labour theory of value”, but something more like a “value theory of labour”. There are overlaps and also differences of emphasis in our respective arguments - and I will try to write a post on those points of contact and disjunction soon. Now that I’m looking at the book again, though, I’m finding myself drawn to some of the other articles in the collection.

This morning I was looking at Jairus Banaji’s “From the Commodity to Capital: Hegel’s Dialectic in Marx’s Capital“, which sketches a very good account of Marx’s appropriation of Hegel, while sparring along the way with other readings of Marx that fail to recognise the Hegelian subtext. Althusser receives particularly pointed criticism for his suggestion that readers just skip over the first part of Capital on an initial read - a recommendation that, I must admit, does somewhat send the shudders through anyone who reads Capital as an appropriation of the Hegelian concept of “science”. Banaji probably sees Marx as a more consistent Hegelian than I do - and he may well be correct in this view - I’ve tended to read more critical intention into Marx’s use of Hegel’s method, and I also read a stronger practice-theoretic argument about the formation of subjectivity into Marx. So my Marx (to formulate this point quite anachronistically) has a fair bit of Durkheim mixed in with his Hegel. Regardless, Banaji’s article is an excellent presentation of the textual evidence for the “Hegelian” structure of Capital - making very similar arguments about the first chapter, and also casting a quick net over the whole three volumes, which I’ve barely had time to wink at in my writings here. This article does a lot of work in a very short space.

It also - and this, I have to confess, is what actually motivated me to write this post - flings some very funny barbs at opposing readings. This volume as a whole is a bit on the snarky side, and I find myself often laughing at the way the snark bursts out the seams of what are often otherwise fairly careful, well-developed, academic presentations - I find the disjoint very entertaining, even where the barbs occasionally land in my general direction… ;-P But the closing sentence of Banaji’s piece saw me burst out laughing on the tram, coming into work. How’s this for a concluding image:

…one of the most striking manifestations of the underlying crisis in the movement as a whole is the contemporary state of Western Marxism - the ecstatic leap from the uppermost floors of an imposing skyscraper of immobilised dogma to the granite pavements of confused eclecticism. (40)

Ouch!

Evidently, I take great pleasure in seeing other people confused by the same things that confuse me. In the library today, where I was not doing research on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I nevertheless kept finding myself in the stacks, near places where works on Hegel were shelved. As I wandered past, titles would distract me, and I found myself opening books to the sections where they tried to explain the section on Force and Understanding. In most cases, the result was a sort of summary - the sort of move where you can tell that an author has simply thrown up their hands at the text and gone, “Right then! There’s no making sense of this. Time to paraphrase!” (Lest this comment appear critical, I’m sympathetic to this strategy and, in context, think it’s an entirely appropriate response…)

My favourite randomly-retrieved comment on the section, though, comes from Robert Pippin’s (1989) Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, where Pippin provides a very nice account of the strategic intent of the section, but still can’t resist expressing a measure of exasperation at the form in which Hegel presents his argument:

It is at this point that Hegel summarizes both the realist and empiricist theories of account giving by saying that both of them generate the problem of an inverted world. The worlds in question are the “supersensible” and “sensible” worlds, or what we might more generally call the “empirically independent realities of force” and the “empirically undetermined legislation of law,” versus the manifold of sensible appearances. To the extent that such realities and such legislation are empirically independent, they simply invert the sensible world into something else and do not explain it (the classic case being Plato’s forms and Aristotle’s objections); to the extent that they are not independent, to the extent that the empirical manifold is the sole criterion of knowledge, the sensible world “inverts itself,” is unintelligible without the supersensible world (itself already caught on the first horn of the dilemma).

Now, to claim that the “true” world, whether supersensuous or sensuous, turns out to be an inverted world, “really” sensuous or supersensuous, respectively, is quite an unusual way of framing the dilemma described at the start of this section. But despite Hegel’s extreme formulations of the point (the sweet is sour, punishment is revenge, etc.), I think that that dilemma is what Hegel is talking about, and the inverted world section simply generalizes and restates that dilemma in as paradoxical a way as Hegel can devise. But what the reader is totally unprepared for is Hegel’s quite baffling, extremely compressed account of the origin of such a problem and his sudden, equally baffling, shift of topics.

First, he tells us that, given such an inversion, we must

eliminate the idea of fixing the differences in a different sustaining element; and this absolute Notion of the difference must be represented and understood purely as inner difference, a repulsion of the selfsame, from itseld, and likeness of the unlike as unlike. (PhG, 98; PS, 99)

Such language alone should tell us that we are suddenly deep in Hegel’s speculative waters, a fact confirmed by the next sentence: “We have to think pure change, or think antithesis within the antithesis itself, or contradiction.” From here, somehow in the next three pages, Hegel introduces the notions of infinity, life, and the dependence of consciousness on self-consciousness that will dominate much of the rest of the book. In short, this is as important a transition as any in Hegel, and it is unfortunately as opaque as, if not more so, than any other. (pp. 137-138)

Pippin then goes on to try to make some sense of all this - but I figure it’s best to leave all of you in suspense… ;-P (Actually, Pippin suggests looking forward - both the to discussion of self-consciousness around the corner in this work, and also to Book 2 of the Logic - although, to be honest, I was reading through this last night, with the explicit intention of comparing back to the account in Phenomenology, and I’m not certain I think the version in the Logic is much less opaque…)

By the way, for those who have been wondering what happened to the series on Capital, which I was promising to sum up back in December: it has evolved (or at least taken a brief developmental detour) into the recent posts on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. This happened because some aspects of Marx’s argument seemed to require a quick refresher on Hegel. While I’ll obviously keep blogging on Science of Logic (and perhaps also a few more bits and pieces of the Phenomenology), I’m now - I think - ready to go back to some of the Marx material, in order to try to recast some of what I was writing late last year. Hopefully I’ll find the time for that very, very soon. For the moment, I’m obviously just happy to know that the parts of Hegel that are still confusing me, seem to be generally confusing by consensus - such that my particular confusion is apparently but a vanishing moment of a much more universal confusion… ;-P

So in February I’ll be presenting to the Hegel Summer School, an event that has been taking place for the past ten years, and that brings together activists and academics to discuss specific themes in contemporary critical theory. The format involves a sort of casual introductory event the evening before the formal presentations, at which presenters and other participants can meet one another in a less structured setting, and then two days of presentations and discussions - only four presenters, with half a day devoted to each presentation (one hour for the presentation, a break for tea, and then something like ninety minutes for discussion). The aim is to allow enough time, and an appropriate format, to make it possible for the presenters to demystify some of the theoretical material often sequestered off in academic spaces, and also to make it possible for all participants to engage in meaningful discussion about the possible connections or disconnects between “academic” theory and other forms of politically engaged practice.

This year’s theme is “Solidarity or Community? Philosophy and Antidotes to Fragmentation”. The title of my presentation is intended to be “Fighting for what we mean: Reflections on the unfinished project of critical theory” - which sounds very interesting, except that I haven’t written the presentation yet, so we’ll see if I can live up to my own title… ;-P My rough intention is to outline the idea of an immanent reflexive critical theory (in the sense I tend to use on the blog) then, given the traditional Hegelian orientation of this event, discuss how understanding a little bit about Hegel, and Marx’s relationship to Hegel, can help us appropriate Marx in a meaningful way to connect a critical theory to potentials for mobilisation. I then want to spend much of my time on the question of why it can be structurally difficult to “fight for what we mean” - using this theme to say a bit about how I understand Marx’s take on potentials for misrecognition “built in” to the reproduction of capital. I’m slightly concerned that this may not hit directly enough on the “solidarity or community” theme, so I may need to find room somehow to explain the ways in which the whole question of social fragmentation and integration is a pivot point on which political economy (and then, later, sociology) turns - such that both Hegel and Marx are trying to provide a different sort of response to this problem than the political economists were intending to do. Given that I’m two months away from presenting, I still have a great deal to work out, in terms of what I want to say, and how I plan to say it…

At any rate: so why am I writing about this now, you might ask? Well, the presenters have been asked to recommend some short, accessible, topical readings that can be recommended to participants who want a bit of specific background prior to attending the event. I need to put some recommendations together soon, and I’m simply drawing a blank on what might be useful. Some selections from the first chapter of Capital probably make some sense, but offhand nothing else is coming to mind. So I thought I would toss the concept out, in case something immediately springs to anyone else’s mind. If I’m understanding correctly, the idea is that the readings should prime participants to engage more actively with the presentations, by giving background, or clarifying terms, or providing an example of the sorts of theory discussed, or similar. I’m open to suggestions :-)

I had a conversation yesterday with a senior colleague who has long been sceptical about blogging as a medium - which is fair enough: there are limitations, and there is no particular reason for everyone to find blogging, or reading blogs, a useful activity - for either professional or leisure purposes. From prior conversations, he has some idea how and why I use the blog to develop my own concepts, but yesterday was curious how I keep track of other blogs - how I decide which ones to read, how I know when they’ve been updated, and why this sort of reading might be useful as more than a leisure activity, etc. With a bit of difficulty, as it’s not the easiest thing to describe to someone who’s never seen this at work, I talked about RSS and different kinds of readers and tracking services, and about the process of discovering blogs relevant for particular interests.

He then had some questions about how much time it takes to keep track of the blogs I follow, and I explained that there is really only a very small number of blogs that I read, so to speak, “cover to cover”. The rest of the blogs I track are more ways of managing my own strange interdisciplinary interests - keeping rough track of good blogs in a wide range of fields makes it at least reasonably likely that I’ll hear about important new work and trending research themes, in a way that can otherwise be difficult for a non-specialist. When I read blogs for this purpose, I may not read them closely or participate in the discussion, but will often skim entries quickly in order to jot down key authors or titles, so that I can follow up on them later.

For some reason - and I find that things like this often happen when I try to discuss how I use blogging as a professional tool - this then led to the statement - apparently serious: “So… you don’t read books now any more? Blogs have replaced that?” (Evidently, he hasn’t looked into my office, or seen me wandering down the hallway, lately…) I don’t mind this kind of question, but I always find it odd - the implied notion that there is an either/or involved - that I would either use electronic media, or read books - that the committed use of a particular technology necessarily means a devaluation of other technologies… The reality is much more mundane: my major everyday professional purpose for reading blogs is to help me discover and prioritise conventional books and journal articles to read…

Of course, this kind of mining of blogs for information doesn’t account for the bulk of the time I might spend reading other blogs - the smaller number of blogs I read closely, because they are working on similar themes or because I just enjoy the author’s interests and expression, are where most of my attention goes when I have time to read online.

But I still somehow manage to find time to read the odd book here and there, as well… ;-P

So now I’m curious: in this discussion below, both Nate and The Constructivist have raised the question of why Marx quotes himself in the first sentence of Capital:

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

The Constructivist has mentioned Keenan’s discussion of the same question, in Fables of Responsibility (around p. 104 in this edition).

I’ve offered my (very off the cuff!) guess here - or perhaps a little self-quoting will make this easier:

I don’t have a definitive take on the issue, but, given that I read Marx as self-consciously putting forward an immanent critical theory, the most straightforward thing Marx might have been doing in quoting himself, was treating himself as he treats the political economists: flagging himself, and the critical perspective he is putting forward in the text, as objects of analysis - hinting to the reader that this starting point is not a priori, but something that will eventually be embedded as the text unfolds. In this sense, he is treating himself symmetrically to how he treats the political economists, whose quotations he footnotes and occasionally brings into the main text, and whom he criticises for their failure to treat themselves as objects of analysis, in the same way that they treat older forms of thought that they criticise. So I would take that initial quotation as a quick signal that Marx is placing himself and his positions on the same plane that he will place the political economists - which means that he has to understand their errors as more than “mere” errors - as errors that were historically plausible given the circumstances in which they were working - and he also needs to position his insights as more than “mere” good thinking - he needs to explain why his insights have become plausible in his own historical period.

I’m curious whether others have an opinion on this question - or whether anyone knows of other secondary sources who have commented on this question.

While I’m posting on Marxian things, I should also mention Sinthome’s interesting post and discussion on “The Utopia of the Commodity– Revolution by Proxy”, and the discussion at Nate’s what in the hell… on a troublesome passage from the section on primitive accumulation.