These last paragraphs I find very hard to follow.

I think this is probably a very polite way to phrase it. :-) I really struggle to communicate what I’m after here, which probably indicates an underlying problem in the concepts…

Let’s try to back into the issue another way – writing as I am under the much-discussed Garden of Eden mural, I can’t help but be drawn to your reference to succumbing to temptation:

it seems to me that this logic could possibly be prey to the very pitfalls it attempts to avoid. How would such a perspective ever know that it is not succumbing to the temptation to naturalise itself, or conversely, to relativise itself? It may well have a normative ideal towards which it constantly aspires, but never reaches – but in this aspiration, what safeguards against the possibility that it develops new concrete relations, or new abstract rationalisations, of which it remains unconscious? In short, what prevents “self-reflexivity”, in this instance, from becoming a new dogmatism?

I’ll start with the first sentence of this excerpt (and, in the state I’m in today, may in fact never get beyond it…). My approach actually doesn’t try to avoid relativising itself – it just translates the question of relativisation from the realm of an analysis of individual subjectivity, to an analysis of collectively-available subject positions within a shared intersubjective context.

The form of relativisation that is generally used in what I’ve called an unmasking-and-debunking critique generally focusses on individual subjectivity – e.g., “I’m a white, male, upper-class, etc.”, and therefore you can’t trust me as far as you can throw me, etc… For reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere on the blog, positioning the problem of relativisation as a problem of individual subjectivity automatically tosses you into unmask-and-debunk territory, generating problems of how you could ever justify normative positions (sorry – I really should either recapitulate the argument or find a relevant link, but I’m profoundly tired right now – I’m happy to field questions on this, if the logic here seems too opaque).

Posing the issue of relativisation as a problem of understanding collectively-available subject positions within a shared intersubjective context creates new possibilities. On the one hand, it allows you to grasp the ways in which forms of thought are historically specific – to deal with evidence or with our experience or belief that particular forms of perception and thought have come into being or faded away in historical time. On the other, it allows you to leave open the question of whether particular forms of perception and thought that have arisen within a shared intersubjective context are adequate to standards of, e.g., truth, goodness, etc., that are also generated within that same context. So the issue isn’t really so much one of “have I shown everything to be unnatural?” – or “might I still be naturalising things myself?” – as one of “have I understood how my ideals are generated within my time?” – and “can I link my ideals to determinate historical potentials for change, so that I can demonstrate that my ideals are not utopian (unrealisable)?”

With this in mind, what I was trying to suggest in the brief recasting of Marx’s argument above (which, if people didn’t follow the Amazon link, borrows heavily from Postone’s reinterpretation of Marx as a self-reflexive theorist), is actually that Marx is precisely not considering the problem of historical materialism, or immanence, or dialectical thought, or anything else in general – but is trying to understand how the idea for such a theory might become plausible within a very specific historical context – so that the theory is the creature of its time.

So the argument would be that if, on a popular level (this is important, as many modern concepts have historical precedents within particular schools of thought – what is distinctive about modernity is the popular intuitiveness of certain concepts on a mass scale), a concept like “nature” – visualised as a secular space – as what remains when recognisably social and cultural artefacts have been stripped away – starts to attain intuitiveness, something must have changed in our collective practice to make this concept somehow adequate to at least some dimension of our practice. The example I gestured at briefly above was the notion that there might be dimensions of social practice that are genuinely indifferent to the concrete form of what we now think of as “social” institutions – a dimension of practice indifferent to what kind of state we have, for example, or what kinds of gender relations – and the existence of this dimension of collective practice thus serves to relativise such institutions – to render them visible to us as social – as contingent, potentially transformable human creations – precisely because this is exactly how we treat these institutions, in at least some dimensions of our collective practice.

This potential – realised accidentally, as practice was focussed on other things – can then be articulated into a normative ideal – into all sorts of normative ideals, in fact: people can contest whether all observable institutions fall into this category, or whether some institutions (the family, for example) actually are natural – or ought to be treated as natural, etc. So the practical process doesn’t dictate or predetermine what we “do” with the insights it motivates, or indeed how we conceptualise or articulate those insights – but it does generate the conditions of possibility for certain types of insights and contestations to begin to occur on a mass scale.

I was trying to suggest above that the constellation of values associated with “materialism” – including the secular vision of nature expressed in the Deleuze and Guattari quote – are “good” things as far as Marx is concerned: when he comments on things like the product not expressing the form of production that produced it, he is actually pointing to:

(1) the possibility to divorce material production from any specific system of social relations – which is of course the most basic precondition for the transformation of those relations to be possible (if the product required or were perceived to require a specific constellation of relations of production, there would be no point in talking about transforming those relations, unless we want to step backwards in material terms – and Marx, whether for good or ill, is not a romantic critic – he doesn’t want to surrender material wealth or mastery over physical nature);

(2) a form of subjectivity integral to a “scientific” approach to nature, human society, etc. – a regulative normative ideal that (although Marx believes this ideal is also social) has provided an important, collectively-available critical standpoint for holding a wide range of human institutions up to critique.

I could go on… My point was just that there can be a reflex tendency, in some readings of Marx, to take him to be making more simple points than I take him to be making – such that you’ll get readings (and, from the two sentences above, I have no real way of knowing whether Deleuze and Guattari are guilty of this or not – Sinthome tells me they aren’t) that take Marx to be criticising things that, in my reading, are actually integral aspects of his critical standpoint – forms of subjectivity that are essential conditions of possibility for his critique, even if he also wants to “relativise” those positions in the sense of understanding why they are collectively available to our time.

A lot more is required than what I’ve written, but I think I’ll stop here to see if you (or anyone else) would like to jar this forward with more questions – I find it easier to articulate this stuff, for various reasons, if I can talk to someone, rather than just rant about it to myself… ;-P

My sense is that, in heavily reductive terms, you have taken Deleuze and Guattari as effectively invoking a “vulgar” form of Marx, as a debunker of the notion of everyday sense-perception of things being “concrete relations” which turn out instead to be illusory abstractions. I leave aside whether Deleuze and Guattari mean this – suffice to say that this is an historically orthodox reading of Marx. Against this you position Marx as more radically self-reflexive – considering the problem in general of how any theory could move beyond an inherent tendency to reify and naturalise its concepts (”there used to be history, but there no longer is any”). This implicates his own thought as being radically subjected to its own critique (what you elsewhere refer to, in trying to help me through a certain Hegelian fog, as “immanent critique”) – not outside history or somehow naturalised.

Your potential resolution to this dilemma (”very gesturally”) is to pose the concept of “real abstraction”. These last paragraphs I find very hard to follow – so my apologies in advance if I misconstrue this – but there you suggest “real abstraction” is a feature of our (late-capitalist?) society that perceives itself to have moved beyond “concrete social practices”, recognising them to be, not natural, but “contingent, arbitrary, dispensable”. This is what I take to be the “abstraction” part. The “real” part is then the perception that, stripped of our illusions, we are now liberated to view objects qua objects (scientifically, phenomenologically, without the trappings of social relations which sit between us and our objects). The “real abstractions” here are, you suggest, as much a product of our social and historical situation as the concrete relations they are intended to replace.

You then move on to suggest that the standpoint of concrete social relations might in fact be an adequate starting point for the development of a self-reflexive critique which a) returns back to these concrete relations, including now the “real abstraction” which proves to be only a differentiated form of such relations, b) shows how all such relations are brought about by the historical and social context in which they evolved and c) considers the liberatory and emancipatory value of what the abstraction, as a rationalising force, has in demonstrating the arbitrariness of the concrete, without the dire consequences of an abstracted world (in which rationalisation is taken to its historically horrific extremes). In doing so, the newly developed perspective would effectively take account of its own standing as concrete and socially determined, as abstracted and rational, and finally as, in being aware of both its concreteness and abstraction, in a position to avoid the pitfalls of both, through a kind of self-reflexive critical practice.

Assuming I’ve not butchered entirely the logic of these paragraphs, it seems to me that this logic could possibly be prey to the very pitfalls it attempts to avoid. How would such a perspective ever know that it is not succumbing to the temptation to naturalise itself, or conversely, to relativise itself? It may well have a normative ideal towards which it constantly aspires, but never reaches – but in this aspiration, what safeguards against the possibility that it develops new concrete relations, or new abstract rationalisations, of which it remains unconscious? In short, what prevents “self-reflexivity”, in this instance, from becoming a new dogmatism?

These comments are as much an effort at interpretation what I think are a dense set of considerations – so please feel free to correct the interpretation. But I am curious about the directions you think you might need to take become “adequate to your questions”.