On my personal position, I’ve distinguished previously more metaphysical notions of immanence that often explicitly or tacitly sit in the background of theoretical discussions, from a more deflationary sense of the term, which is perhaps more specific to social theory and which doesn’t carry as strong an ontological claim, where the term “immanence” simply means that, whatever future we make, we are likely to make that future largely by reconfiguring materials that lie ready to hand – materials that might include social institutions, habitual practices, common sensibilities and beliefs, technologies, political ideals, forms of political organisation, etc. In other words, I am specifically not trying to intervene into the more high philosophic terrain of metaphysical claims about the nature of ontological reality – and, I’m trying to suggest that, although Marx appropriates some of the high philosophical tricks of the trade that are usually intended to intervene in these sorts of metaphysical discussions, Marx is actually using these philosophical resources to a different, more deflationary, more immediately practical, end than even certain social theoretic traditions seem to “grok”.

In other threads, I’ve held discussions more on the plane where I suspect your questions lie, so this answer probably isn’t as useful to your concerns as those other conversations might have been – just clarifying what’s going on in more recent discussions, where the vocabulary of “immanence” is being used somewhat perversely, in order to make a point that lies outside the normal intention of the term.

Hope this helps – and apologies I’m too rushed to offer a more useful guide to past conversations at the moment…

I see a lot of talk of Monism and Dualism, etc., but it seems to me that there is a more fundamental consideration with regard to the notion of IMMANENCE, and it surprises me that it is not discussed more often. It is this: most major faiths are committed to immanence at some level or other: God works *through* “nature” (phenomenon), aren’t they?

In fact, seems to me that belief in God stands or falls on the notion of immanence. Doesn’t it?

I am not talking about a commitment to Pantheism or any particular form of Immanence with a capital “I”. You can believe in a “God of the gaps” someone who intervenes and disrupts normal phenomenal causes. C. S. Lewis gave a Humean-style argument along these lines, to the effect that we can not rely on induction to prove that nature is uniform. FINE. But if you believe in a creator God, you still MUST EXPLAIN HOW GOD WORKS *THROUGH* phonomena. That’s immanence.

For instance, I would love to see some analysis of the implicit self-reference in the language of immanence.

Immanence involves a series of spatial metaphors. On the one hand, it is an “internal” principle, yet the immanent principle (usually an intelligence, either God or the soul) is somehow separate from phenomena, and in that sense, “external”.

I’ve described the opening sections as targets of the critique to make sure readers don’t take them too much at face value, and therefore miss the way in which later passages deepen and complicate what these early passages imply. Once you know where the text is going, it becomes possible to say – as you have above – that these early passages contain the seeds of what comes after. But, a bit like Marx’s comment about the anatomy of humans containing the key to the anatomy of the ape, this line of development only becomes apparent in retrospect – by which point you no longer understand the opening passages in the same way that these passages would strike you, if you were encountering them for the first time. (My good friend Nate has commented a number of times that one shouldn’t so much read Capital, as re-read it…)

For me, the first six chapters of the text build toward this sort of horror that becomes fully explicit once the text finally derives the category of labour-power. It’s at that point that it becomes explicit that all this discussion of commodities as “external things”, “things outside us”, has actually been a discussion of us, all along. And yet, this “reveal” does not mean that the opening discussion is, strictly speaking, “wrong” – it’s not that, with the revelation of the category of labour-power power, we can sigh with relief in the knowledge that it isn’t things that are the source of wealth, but rather human labour-power. Instead, what the text reveals is the horror of a society that enlists its members to treat part of themselves – their creative capacities and powers – such that these these personal capacities are embodied, subjectively experienced, and collectively enacted as “things outside us” – at least in this one dimension of collective practice.

I call the opening passage a target of the critique, not because the subsequent development of the text shows that this opening is incorrect, exactly – but because the subsequent development unfolds implications from that beginning that one wouldn’t particularly expect, if one just takes the beginning “at first sight” as an “obvious, trivial” thing. Once we know the line of development that issues forth from this beginning, that knowledge ricochets back on our understanding of the beginning itself, transforming our sense of what that beginning means for humans trying to subsist in capitalist societies.

It’s difficult to find a vocabulary to express this sort of move, since it’s not something many other texts do. Points are usually black and white – right or wrong. Capital instead involves a complex gradation of “rightness”, constantly attempting to specify in what way – and therefore within what bounds – something can be said to be “right”.

This doesn’t – in my reading – require any sort of blurring of the method of inquiry and the method of presentation: Marx’s method of inquiry is what is sprawled out across all the thousands of pages of draftwork that leads up to Capital; his method of presentation is provided in Capital itself. One of the points I’ve made in the thesis is that this method of presentation is, in part, a demonstration – in a limited way – of how it is possible to appropriate the raw materials of this process of the production of capital – how it is possible to re-produce this process, to achieve a different end result from what the process currently achieves. So I don’t think at all that you’re meant to confuse the method of presentation with the method of inquiry – the method of presentation of the text, I think, is intended to show a particular kind of making of history out of conditions that have not themselves been chosen – in the service of a more active collective remaking of history through political transformation.

I still do find it difficult to get at what I’m after in brief summary, though – and there’s always a problem that a form of expression that seems more or less to get things across when someone is coming from a particular space, gives entirely the opposite impression when someone is coming from another… I doubt there’s going to be an ideal vocabulary for describing what I’m after – it’s more a process of attacking the problem from multiple perspectives, so that through the collage that results something comes a bit less blurrily into view…

However, I do recognise that what you’re talking about has far more to do with the dialectical development of concepts than any kind of idealist auto-genesis; on your model, the work of the negative (or whatever you want to call it) seems to be carried out by comparing concepts to empirical and historical data, rather than through reason itself – and yet even so, this seems to jar – for me – with Marx’s statement that the mode of exposition is not the same as the mode of analysis, i.e. not the same moment.

Sure, just as there are historical preconditions (presuppositions) for Hegel’s presuppositionless thought, so too are there conditions for Marx; bourgeois economics needs to have boiled everything down to the essential concepst (which it mistakenly views as trans-historical). Marx then – as you rightly state – shows that they are not trans-historical at all, but rather relate to a specific historiocal moment soon to evolve into another.

I’ve always thought that this means that the opening chapters and concepts are the seeds from which the whole thing will grow – as pretty much stated on the opening page of Vol. 3 – but I think that’s slightly different from presenting them as a ‘target’, i.e. as the concepts of bourgeois economics rather than Marx’s own (e.g. he’s talking about socially necessary labour value rather than labour value per se). …but then I guess that relates to your contention that there are multiple ‘voices’ in the text.

Anyway, it may well be very productive to read Marx in this way, so I’m not going to argue the point. I raised the iossue solely because it seemed to relate to the question of a materialist form of presuppositionless thinking, which is an issue I’m interested in at the moment. It was good to catch up on Tuesday; we should try and get a beer or two next time. I hope all goes well with the thesis

Tom

Marx’s critique of Hegel, I have argued (but elsewhere – not in this paper!), takes the form – as do Marx’s critiques of many other figures – of showing how it becomes possible to account for the practical generation of phenomena that Hegel takes be metaphysical. My thesis, among other things, attempts to show how that account plays out in Capital – and therefore why, for example, Capital can do seemingly problematic things like comparing capital to the Geist (which the text quite clearly does in chapter 4), without this step causing any particular problems for Marx’s critique of capitalism. This issue, though, comes out much more in the thesis – or even in my previous talk to the Marx & Philosophy Society – than it does in this paper, which was concerned with other aspects of Marx’s work.

When Marx translates aspects of Hegel’s method onto the terrain of a critical social theory, he retains the attempt to “presuppose” as little as possible – but this attempt takes the form of offering a theory that tries to be more deflationary than competing forms of theory – a theory that takes phenomena that political economy, for example, treat as black boxes, beyond explanation, or treat as intrinsic attributes of human nature or material production – and Marx says, in effect: I can show you how these things are made. Because he can do this, he does not have to merely presuppose the existence of these phenomena or take them as given – he can instead show how they are produced – and therefore cast light on how they can be transformed.

This isn’t “presuppositionless” in any absolute sense – it just has the power to explain a helluva lot more than the approaches it is criticising – and can thus convict those approaches of making inappropriate metaphysical assumptions about phenomena that Marx can explain in naturalistic terms. This is what the method of a “presuppositionless” philosophy becomes, in Marx’s critical appropriation.

But all of this is very difficult to say briefly, while remaining accurate… I think I do better – though it can still be improved – when I have more room to stretch. The thesis was, in that respect, a really good opportunity to put some flesh on the bare bones that are all that make it into conference talks…

A Marxist application of Hegel’s presupositionless, self-grounding approach to political and economic data is – on Hegel’s own terms – just as inadmissible as is its transposition into a philosophy of praxis. To do so is to import presuppositions into the operation of thought, and thus to lose all claims to legitimacy. Maker writes that this “would necessarily involve bringing into the system merely given and not systematically and autonomously generated determinacies”, thereby “invalidat[ing] the system’s claims to being self-grounding and hence its claim to being philosophical science.”(p.169 of Philosophy Without Foundations)

I think he’s completely right (although I’m not convinced that we shoudl care too much – as I think Alberto said to me once, to be a good Marxist is perhaps incommensurable with being a good Hegelian) – and I cannot see how your notion of transcendental material categories could possibly avoid this critique, unless you coudl somehow claim them to be derived from the pure operation of thought itself (which is hardly a productive road to head down). As I said, I’m not convinced that this is a particularly pertinent critique, as I don’t see why adopting aspects of his system entails the necessity of the system’s own concept of legitimacy. I am however very interested in the idea of a material form of presuppositionless thought, however impossible it might seem – which is why I asked the question on Tuesday.

Tom