Thanks for the very much for your comment. It does indeed go quite a way towards filling in the blanks I left in my earlier comment.

Thanks, too, for reminding me of the “Justice to Freud” paper. It’s been ages since I read it, and I don’t think I ever read it closely enough.

The point about ‘the “historicity of the object” [being] tied to the “historicity of the critical consciousness that grasps it” (Postone)’ is one that is very often at the forefront of my thinking whenever the question of history and historicism comes up, and that’s what I was trying to get at in my lengthy comment at Nate’s WITH…?. I chose the language of iterability when I replied to you largely because, when dealing with questions of “the past”, there’s sometimes a temptation to see the structure of undecidability (or re-markability) that you speak of as a quality emerging from the temporal distance between the decades- or centuries-ago past and the present, whereas the notion of iterability seems (to me) to make it easier to think of temporal distance as inhering in any form of presence, and therefore even in “the present”. (Having said that, I’ve just noticed, quickly scanning the text, that D. is very able to bring home the point about the non-self-identity of “our age” and “our contemporaneity” in “To Do Justice to Freud” (pp.259-60).)

Happily, I think your reference to the Foucault/Freud paper also provides us with a concrete example for explaining that point in relation to the earlier question about normative evaluation and its relation to the future and the present. For the way I see it, Derrida’s “rescuing” of Freud doesn’t amount simply to an argument about the relevance or otherwise of Freud, nor simply a reading and evaluation of Foucault’s body of work. Rather, it is the production of an alternative to be bequeathed (as it were) to the future: it’s the creation of another possibility — another version of Freud, another way into the work of Foucault, and therefore another take on the philosophico-interpretive “programs” and practices that those intellectual figures engage and exemplify. Thus, D.’s paper (and his work generally, IMO) amounts to an expansion of an existing set of alternatives, so as to give the future as many options as possible to decide among, whenever any event in the future is so pressing as to call for such a decision.

And that’s (sort of) what I mean when I suggest that the normative evaluation of alternatives takes place in the future. However much it remains pressing upon “us” today to evaluate the past and the present, as well as visions of the future, no such evaluation is undertaken in the name of the future unless it works to “relativise” such evaluations (i.e. including its own evaluations), to imagine another way, and to defer the task of evaluation (or, if you like, of counter-signing one’s evaluation) to a future that must remain unimaginable.

Don’t know if that satisfies. In any case, it’s not intended as an objection to anything you’ve written here, but rather as a supplement, to which I owe you a deal of thanks for providing me with the opportunity to formulate it.

Regarding much of everything else that’s come up in this thread, I should confess that I am something of an imposter: my Marx is very underdeveloped and my knowledge of the history of Critical Theory can be reduced pretty much to a chapter from Negative Dialectics here and a couple of papers from Habermas there, so when it comes to issues related to those figures, I’ll just kick back and enjoy show…

Cheers

I saw “Into the Wild” last night, and perhaps the most powerful scene in the film (in my opinion) was when the main character “Alex”, who is tramping around the U.S., hitches a ride on freight train and is discovered and then brutally beaten by a security guard. The guard tells Alex he never forgets a face, and that the next time he catches him on a train he’ll kill him. And then he justifies it all by saying something like: the railroad company won’t allow its liability to be violated by freeloaders. Thinking about the nature of “abstract labour”, I think the brutality of that scene really sums it up for me. Because he doesn’t work, Alex’s living body, the organic basis of his existence as something which takes up space, occupies an ambivalent status within a universal system of exchange-value. It seems that even the unemployed body is worth something, as a potential “liability” (through injury or death, no doubt calculated on the basis of potential earning power); but since Alex refuses to compensate for that “risk” through his labour, his body on the train becomes less than zero from the perspective of capital – its occupation of that space becomes a form of theft. One can think of countless other real life examples. Abstract labour penetrates to the very heart of what it means to be alive in a capitalist / modern society. It becomes visible in the very blows struck against the bodies of those “workers” (who have only their labour to sell) who either don’t work or don’t work enough.

And talking about movies, your comment about sci-fi futures made me think of The Matrix as a great example of an allegory for abstract labour. Somebody else has probably pointed this out already, but the great twist in The Matrix which distinguishes it from similar dystopian visions is that the triumphant machines keep humans alive in a comatose state, ostensibly as a battery-like power source. In such a world, labour has been completely taken over by machines – no humans do any work. But at the very moment of liberation from toil, humans become completely dominated by the system of labour. In this perfected logic of capitalism, work does not become redundant, but instead people become redundant! And again we find that the human body, as the organic basis of life, must give itself over to the system of exchange if it is not be obliterated – in this case, by providing a feeble amount of energy which the machines can feed off.

My impulse was to wonder whether Postone might strangely get caught up in Marx’s presentation of his categories (which, admittedly, is an easy place to get caught), and therefore might miss what “abstract labour” is, as in, what the ontological status of this category is, in Capital – which is strange to me, in a way, because Postone sort of “shouldn’t” miss this, given other things he says programmatically about Capital.

I read “abstract labour” in Capital as something that is produced – as in, it’s a shorthand term Marx uses to describe the results, or unintentional side effects of collective practice, that determine what gets to “count as labour” – as a phrase Marx uses to hold onto the question of why the category of “labour” is so narrowly operationalised and flattened in collective practice in capitalism. So I don’t see “abstract labour” as a function (or as something that labour “does”), but as a result or a product of a rather wide range of other social practices that are aiming at producing very different results (and that do produce very different results, but that also happen, accidentally, to produce what Marx refers to as abstract labour).

Like so much else in Capital, abstract labour is presented in the text as a category whose ontological status is difficult to understand (it’s genuinely, in Marx’s argument, hard to grasp how “abstract labour” is being generated in collective practice, because the process through which it’s generated is impersonal, unintentional, and only really perceptible over time: look at any immediate object of empirical experience, in any synchronic state, and “abstract labour” won’t be visible). As a result, the “gestalt” of something like “abstract labour” floats around like a concept in search of an empirical referent – sometimes confused for being a conceptual abstraction, sometimes confused for being some kind of telos driving historical change, sometimes confused for being some physical or material property that subtends human practice, etc. So you get all kinds of theories (lay and formal) popping up, attributing the category to all sorts of empirical referents (including, I think, Postone’s notion that it’s a specific “function” of labour), with most of these theories not quite capturing what, from the standpoint of the argument in Capital, is the collective process that generates this category.

So, from my point of view, Postone shouldn’t be talking about a “socially mediating function of labour” at all. Historically specifying this mediating function (which he does in order to differentiate his approach from other forms of Marxism that take labour to be socially mediating in a transhistorical sense), doesn’t quite go far enough. Once he does what he does, though, and places the category of abstract labour on that particular empirical plane, then, yes, it opens his approach to a variety of critiques.

That said, I don’t so much mind Postone’s use of Marx’s recurrent metaphors of how production in capitalism seems geared to “soak up” human labour: Marx does say things like this, and is wrestling, among other things, with the question of why human labour power should remain so important, given the tendencies toward increasing productivity – so, the question of why all those science fiction futures, where robots do all the work, etc., never materialise, but instead we just seem to reconstitute labour in new forms when we displace it in others. I take this to be what Marx has in mind by “the labour theory of value” – he means something more like “why the hell do we value (human) labour so much?” This can still be an interesting problem to consider, even if “labour as a social mediation” might not be the best tool with which to crack the problem.

I’m ambivalent toward systems theoretic approaches – I like the concept of what I sometimes call a “lumpy” social context, and I want ways of conceptualising internal complexity within a social context (and, as well, less totalising ways of understanding capitalism). But I think that the notion of a “functionally differentiated society” is sometimes wielded in a less grounded way than I’d like to see – in ways that can make it difficult to make sense of homologous qualitative changes that periodically sweep through what are posited as autonomous subsystems. I think Postone has a valid point that part of the problem on the table for contemporary theory is to provide the conceptual tools for thinking the complex sorts of progressions and reversals that seem to have characterised recent structural transformations. The question then becomes whether his theory offers the best foundation from which to begin to consider such questions.

I guess I’m saying that I like elements of how he poses the problem, but I agree with you (and I think a number of reviewers also pointed this out) that the issue of potentials for transformation is left very underdeveloped in the book, there are some tensions between programmatic statements, on the one hand, and what the book actually does, on the other, I am tempted to attack some of the problems he poses in a different way, and tack on some other problems that he doesn’t appear to consider, and (least important) I don’t quite share the underlying reading of Marx.

And I may change my mind on all of this when I actually find time to re-read the book properly… Hopefully I haven’t blabbed so much that rob will lose track of your original question!!

I look forward to your series on Marx!

I have some discomforts with aspects of how Postone tries to do this, although I like (and am myself trying to follow through on) the impulse of thinking a theory of capitalism as a theory of modernity. (I also think Postone’s embedding of a sort of Leibnizian notion of time in practice-theoretic terms is quite brilliant.)

From my point of view – again, with the caveat that I really need to re-read the work in a more thorough way, and so this could simply be an unfair comment based on a poor memory of Postone’s argument – but, with those caveats: I’m far less convinced by how Postone attempts to understand the category of “abstract labour”, and his attempt to grasp the “dual character” of labour in capitalism in terms of two “functions” labour serves. I think there’s a missed opportunity, here, to capture something far more interesting in what Marx is doing with the concept of “abstract labour” (and I think the attempt to express the notion of abstract labour in terms of two functions of labour also tacitly reduces capitalism back to market-mediated relations, which Postone expressly states he’s trying not to do – I think his approach might unintentionally smuggle in certain concepts that are more closely bound to market mediation than he realises). But – seriously – I may be wrong about this: it’s a complex text, and I should take a thorough look before launching into critical comments.

On a more quibbly note, again from distant memory, I think Postone is generally less sympathetic than I am, to the… simultaneous validity? of competing forms of critique. There’s a certain tendency in the work, I think, to believe that, if something has been linked back in some way to the process of the reproduction of capital, then other phenomena can perhaps be reduced back to this process. I think this reductive move is probably out of bounds – that it doesn’t directly follow from this kind of argument: there’s a difference between saying “this process of reproduction generates [x]” and saying “and therefore the other ways [x] seems to manifest can be taken as epiphenomena of this process of reproduction”. It’s also always felt to me that there were certain unacknowledged ontological claims floating in the background in Postone’s text – about the qualitative character of labour (although he does problematise this more than I think Habermas does), about some of the more tacit normative concepts on which the critique relies, and a few other things. I call these “quibbles”, though, because – aside from the fact that I might not perceive them to be there on re-reading – I wasn’t sure at the time whether these elements are presentational artefacts (things that are in the text because they just seemed the clearest way to express certain concepts, in the awareness that they aren’t fully adequate to the programmatic theoretical principles in the text), or whether they are actually expressive of theoretical commitments…

When I’m back from the conference, I’m thinking of doing an occasional series on “Marxes”, running through some of the readings of Marx I’ve found most useful for my own work (aside from Postone, I tend to like Sayer, Rubin, and I’d like to write something properly on Lukacs, Sohn-Rethel, and a number of others – and I should probably cover some of the more mainstream readings, as well…). So there may be more opportunity to discuss this material much more adequately. Also, please feel free to correct anything I’ve gesturally said above – I’m quite self-conscious about tossing out vague critiques of a text that deserves a better reading than I can provide right now.

I’m curious in which context you’ve encountered Postone? I recommend him from time to time on the blog, but you’re perhaps the second person who’s ever spontaneously mentioned him to me – he doesn’t seem as widely known as I would expect him to be.