Marx, criticising the political economists for the “trinity formula”:
…the alleged sources of the annually available wealth belong to widely dissimilar spheres and are not at all analogous with one another. They have about the same relation to each other as lawyer’s fees, red beets and music.
My reaction is probably mainly due to the fact that it’s late, and (once again!) I’m coming down with a cold, but I burst out laughing when I read this: it captures a certain something that I also often feel when reading “classificatory” theories that group (or divide) elements descriptively, without being able to outline any non-descriptive logic for the classification system itself. I should confess that I’m currently feeling that this kind of critique applies to my own work, in relation to something I’m struggling to write: mired in descriptive recounting, without yet having discovered the immanent logic that can properly motivate the presentation…
Quick question (that likely does not have anything to do with this post). In a comment you made a while back on my blog you said that,
“When I write at Rough Theory about wanting to move past theories that talk about immanence in terms of a “totality”, this is part of what I have in mind: that it is possible to think immanence, without conceptualising this in terms of a closed system whose possibilities are mechanistically fixed – without a wall.”
At the intersection of immanence and materialism is it possible to NOT speak in some sense of a wall?
Are you rather accepting certain limitations in our engagement with reality while placing no limitations on other aspects?
If you have link to an older post that gets into this that would be great as well (I hope you are able create some space to nurse that cold! :) )
It might be a bit difficult to find something that one could call related to this post… ;-)
Also – my apologies: you have a couple of posts at your site to which I’d like to find time to respond. Aside from general time constraints at the moment, I can’t post to your site from uni, which is when I generally have time to make comments – our firewall seems to block blogspot comments, though not the sites themselves… So I can look, but not touch… ;-)
In terms of your question here: a few different layers of response. And apologies that I might articulate much of this very crudely or in an off-target way, as I may not have a clear sense of the sort of conversation you’re hoping to have – don’t hesitate to point things back in the direction you’re aiming for, if I go off on a tangent that doesn’t seem to be hitting the target.
The way I’m tempted to back into responding, is to say that I’m a social theorist, rather than a philosopher – and so my work is more oriented to understanding certain elements of a specific (if rather abstract) social configuration, and I tend not to make (or to feel that my work would entitle or equip me to make) broad claims about the nature of being in any universal sense.
The current intuitiveness of modern notions of “materialism” or “immanence” or related concepts is an object of study for me – something I find puzzling, and that I’m trying to understand – rather than a starting point on which I build a broader philosophy. One of my questions would be why a notion of nature as “matter” becomes intuitive, on a popular level, when it does, and how this intuitive “gestalt” of the natural world is reinforced once it does arise. Another of my questions would be why the notion of nature as “matter” is thematised ini terms of a process of “demythologisation” – as though earlier understandings of what we now call nature were illusions or projections, which we feel we have “stripped away” to uncover what remains when illusions or projections no long obscure our view – as though our current conception of nature represents a kind of enlightenment that is somehow not socially or historically conditioned, but instead results from the removal of social or historical conditioning.
I am interested in understanding the historical and social embeddedness of “materialist” forms of perception and thought. I am interested in how we might be able to think “symmetrically” about past and present forms of thought – so that we are not tacitly behaving, as Marx once accused the political economists of doing, as though “there used to be history, but now there is none” – as though other societies saw everything distorted through myths, but we now see clearly in a disenchanted world…
It’s not uncommon for theorists to declare that, e.g., materialism is some kind of cultural construct (often explained with some reference to western culture, etc.). It is less common for theorists to explain why this cultural construct might “resonate” or be taken as plausible by many people. I would understand my work as an attempt to look more closely at the issue of why such concepts might resonate. The details of this aren’t particularly important – and my individual theoretical work may be quite off the mark. I mention it here only to try to indicate that “materialism” isn’t a starting point for me – it’s something that I’m trying to understand as a product – as something that emerges as a plausible form of experiencing the world in a particular social and historical setting – something that, strangely, involves a heightened sensitivity to the potential for things to be “social” or “historical” in character, but that also often tacitly treats itself as an exception to this insight. So I ask: what sort of social circumstance makes such a form of thought intuitively plausible, etc?
Okay. Now for another bit of the project. Some forms of theory act as though, when you’ve “historicised” something, or explained how something is generated in human practice, you have therefore “debunked” that thing. This approach to theory – which I sometimes refer to here as an “unmasking and debunking” approach to critique – implies, in a sense, that the only kind of knowledge worth having, would be knowledge that is timeless, “objective”, untainted by history and without origin in human practice.
I don’t tend to operate this way. Identifying the way in which something emerges in time or in social practice may have an impact on how we evaluate the self-understanding of the thing being analysed: if, for example, something presents itself as timeless, and you can show that it emerged in fairly recent history, then the claim to timelessness may have been “debunked”. If something claims to be “natural”, and you can show how it is generated in contingent social practices, then you can undermine the claim to naturalness. Even where these kinds of critiques can be made, however, something useful or resonant or productive may remain in the now-historicised entity.
So… On the one hand, I try to make sense of how, in collective practice, we have rendered plausible to ourselves, the notion that nature might be “matter” – and why we might plausibly interpret this notion as resulting from a process of “demythologisation”, in which we have “stripped away” human projections onto nature. But here it gets complicated.
On the one hand, I don’t accept the self-understanding of “materialism as demythologisation”, because I am, in part, giving an account of how materialism is – to use Marx’s term – our contemporary “fetish”. On the other hand, I don’t take this analysis to “debunk” materialism: I don’t argue that, once this particular self-understanding has been rejected, the entirety of a materialist approach to the natural world must necessarily be devalued.
Instead, materialism becomes something like a potential – a hypothesis about the natural world that we’ve unintentionally made available to ourselves, through the spread of certain kinds of collective practice that have sensitised us to particular possibilities (and, no doubt, made other possibilities more difficult for us to grasp). Seen this way, the concept of materialism – of nature as matter – can be explored critically and in a more open-ended way, not as a dogma about Being, but as a possibility whose contours we can now explore. Exploring those contours may lend further support to the materialist hypothesis – we may find more and more, for example, about our environment that we can explain without recourse to notions of something that transcends matter. But materialism remains a potential – something we’ve accidentally suggested to ourselves might be possible – rather than a “discovery”.
This is a somewhat indirect way, perhaps, to approach the questions you’ve asked above. I suppose I’m trying to suggest that I don’t see my work as making (or requiring) declarations about what is possible or impossible, about what humans (or nature) can and cannot be, etc. Instead, I’m more starting from the materials lying to hand – which, since I’m a social theorist, tend to be social materials and materials generated within human history – and asking “what potentials does this open to us?” and “what potentials might it close?”
There’s more to it than this, but this has already gotten fairly long for a comment. In terms of where else I might have written about this: the posts I’ve begun to write on Marx will thematise some of these issues – although perhaps not in the clearest way, as I’m still trying to work out how to express what I’m trying to communicate, and so those posts may well trip over themselves quite a bit (I tend to start out sounding more technical than I’ll eventually – hopefully – become, as I’m trying to work through concepts myself, and therefore don’t always have the brain cells spare also to focus on how to communicate clearly). Elements of what I think on these issues are scattered all over the blog, but often just in margins of posts that are primarily on other things, since I’ve written more here, so far, on questions like how I conceptualise critical social theory in relation to a theory of capitalism, than on these particular questions. This will change over the next several months, but there’s no concise material to point to now.
As for the cold: thanks for the well-wishes – unfortunately, my son has been in daycare for the first time for the past six months, and so I’m a sort of perpetual viral battlefield at the moment… ;-P This one seems as though it will be milder than most, so I have high hopes… ;-P
Thanks for that extended comment. It was very helpful in terms of your assumptions and starting point. I will keep reading.