Okay. From memory. And roughly. Postone wants to come up with a way of understanding the “quasi-objective” character of a certain kind of social relation constitutive of capitalism. He doesn’t want to go the route of claiming this objectivity is a mere illusion or an ideological veil: something about this particular form of social relation is “really” quasi-objective for Postone. And he wants a historically-specified argument – an argument about how this form of quasi-objective social relation is constituted in collective practice under capitalism specifically. And he wants an argument that allows at least the possibility that the market could be distinguished from this quasi-objective social relation.

He tries to meet these programmatic commitments by arguing that labour has come to fill two roles in capitalist society specifically: aside from its “normal” role mediating the relationship of humans to nature, labour has come to fill a distinctive role in capitalist society alone, in which it also mediates the relationship of humans to one another – under capitalism, labour has become a socially-mediating activity. Within Postone’s argument, something about this distinctive role is what confers a “quasi-objective” status on the social relations mediated this way. (As a side point, I’m using the vocabulary of “mediation” here, as from memory this is how Postone frames the issue; I tend for various reasons not to be fond of this vocabulary, as I can’t escape the sense that sometimes multiple meanings are smuggled in under the cover of this term – I’ll leave this aside, though, for now – this is more a stylistic thing than a serious complaint.)

Again from memory, when Postone sets about trying to explain why a quasi-objective character should be conferred on social relations mediated by labour, he has at least two distinct narratives about why this happens (this is the point I was trying to make in a very abbreviated form in my first pass at this above – just to confuse things, I have a vague memory that he might actually have more than two accounts, but it’s been a while, so I’ll stick here to the two accounts I can remember ;-P). I should note that, when I say Postone has two distinct narratives, these are not presented as two distinct narratives in the text: this was simply my impression when reading – that, as the text discusses this issue in different sections, the explanation actually isn’t always consistent – different explanatory mechanisms are evoked in different places in the text. I may be wrong about this, and have misunderstood the thrust of his argument; it’s equally possible that somewhere Postone explicitly thematises these multiple narratives, and explains why he moves between them, and I just missed it. Are you well caveated now?

One of those narratives, from memory, runs roughly: even when the labour process fills a second social function, it still does so as a labour process. In other words, the only way it can fill this second social function, is the same way it fills the first: by mediating the relations between humans and material nature. So the qualitative characteristics that come into play when humans mediate their relations with nature via labour, are carried over into this second, socially-mediating function, conferring on this social relation, the attributes of a relation between subjects and objects.

I don’t see this as the dominant narrative in the text (I’ll get to the one I do see as dominant in a moment), but I think it’s there, in places. To me, this narrative is somewhat question-begging in the context of an attempt to understand a theory of capitalism as a theory of the distinctive characteristics of modernity – since, among those distinctive characteristics, could be included the whole issue of how it becomes possible to think in abstract categories like a “labour process” to begin with, how our interaction with nature comes to be experienced in terms of an interaction with an “objective, material world”, etc. In other words, I see this particular gesture as potentially smuggling in as a form of explanation, some of what needs to be explained (and is, in other parts of Postone’s text, explicitly thematised as some what needs to be explained).

The second narrative, which I take to be the more theoretically central one in terms of the dominant line of argument in the text, focusses on labour as a self-mediating form of social relation. This has much more potential, I think, as a candidate for explaining how an “objective” character can be conferred on a social relation, in a way that allows our contemporary notion of objectivity also to be historicised – in a way that doesn’t smuggle that, e.g., labour as a form of interaction with nature was somehow an interaction with “objects” in the secularised, materialist sense, prior to the modern period. (Apologies if this is a bit condensed and unclear… I can try to unpack it if needed…)

The argument here is something like an autopoietic system emerges with capitalism, in which human labour inputs are steering the production and distribution of the products of labour, behind the backs of the social actors involved in the process. This argument has much more potential, from my point of view, because it opens the possibility to historicise the notion of objectivity (in other words, our experience of this sort of system provides the practical basis that we articulate into the concept of objectivity), and offers some more promising paths for understanding the historical emergence of other, related concepts (secularised matter, universal laws, etc.). This argument, though, seems to drift quite close to an identification of capitalism with the market – which might not be a problem, except that Postone sets out explicitly to avoid this, and to construct a more abstract concept of capitalism that can account for the more state-mediated forms that arise in the early 20th century. It also may commit Postone to particular kinds of empirical claims about labour inputs and their relationship to the circulation of goods on a concrete level. It’s a complex issue, and I really need to go back to the text in greater detail to work it through.

But more important than these points, there’s a sort of tension in the text (and maybe this gets me back a bit to that third narrative that I said at the beginning of this comment that I couldn’t remember ;-P) between this “autopoietic” vision of labour as a social relation once it becomes “self-mediating” – which accounts for the “objectivity” of the social relation in something like systems-theoretic terms – and a more complex notion that something about capitalism has the effect of rendering a verdict on “empirical” labouring activities, assessing what of those activities gets to “count” as part of “social labour”. Postone uses this third notion to talk about the “treadmill” effect of capitalism – in other words, he talks about its “objective” effects, and then also does some excellent work on the subjective experience of time bound together with this phenomenon.

I suppose in my own work, I pull on this third thread, but in a different direction – not to contest what Postone does with it in relation to time, but in order to get back to the issue of what makes one dimension of social relations constitutive of a notion of “objectivity”, but from a slightly different direction: I focus on what I think is a fairly strong “Hegelian” line in Marx’s text, that works in some detail through the subjective implications for social actors of existing in a context characterised by a constant bifurcation between empirical entities that are the subject of their direct experience, and invisible “essences” that lurk behind the surface of those empirical entities, and whose ontological status and practical origin can be difficult to ascertain. My approach lets me be agnostic about certain things – like whether those “essences” are constituted by an autopoietic system governed by labour inputs, or whether they can be generated in other sorts of ways – without losing the ability to explain why certain dimensions of social practice are constitutive of a modern gestalt of asocial “objectivity”. I think my approach makes it a bit easier, simultaneously to open up the flip side of how certain social relations come to appear “quasi-objective” – which is the intrinsically related question of why other kinds of social relations come to be taken as overtly social. I tend to think these issues need to be thought together and simultaneously – and that there is a tendency across many works, not simply Postone’s, to take for granted something like the category of “overt” social relations, when the issue of how such a category should have come into widespread awareness is just as historically interesting and important for understanding aspects of capitalism, as the issue of “objective” relations. Similarly, I think I can open up a bit more easily the analysis of dimensions of capitalism that are not bound together with the market, and I can talk about a much wider range of forms of subjectivity and embodiment – I think.

But of course there’s no real reason to take my word for any of this And this wouldn’t be the kind of thing I could show in a comment, nor likely in a post – hopefully the whole thesis will get me some way there As well, there are gestures – particularly in programmatic terms – toward much of what I’m saying here, in Postone’s work and in the work of a number of other authors, so I’m not attempting a strong critique in my comments above: these are impressions, which need much more time and attention than I’ve been able to give them, in order to work out a clear position.

Sorry I can’t offer something better or more…

On Postone, and very very very inadequately: I agree with most of what he does – his attempt to understand Marx as a theorist of modernity, his reading of Capital as an immanent reflexive critique (although I may “situate” what this means a bit more narrowly than Postone – I’m too far away from his text to remember how he qualifies his argument in this respect). I find his arguments about the social structuration of time fantastic, and would have little if anything to add to this – which is the central – dimension of his work. Some themes that are tacit or underdeveloped in his work, come out a bit more explicitly in the reading I’ve outlining – particularly issues relating to the sorts of visions of the past that are constituted as moments within the present of capitalist modernity, the intuitive experience of the natural/social split, distinctive forms of embodiment and experience of self, and a more concrete analysis of political ideals and sites of contestation: much of this, though, I take to reflect a difference of interest and emphasis, rather than an underlying theoretical tension.

My hesitation lies with his decision to articulate the dual character of labour in capitalism in terms of two functions or roles labour plays in capitalist society. I don’t really have time to develop this argument fully here (there are perhaps some hints in the “social character of labour” post, although this post wasn’t written directly to address this issue). My gut feel is that his argument might waver between two moves, when trying to deploy this concept to explain the “objective” character of (a dimension of) social relations under capitalism. One move, I think (and apologies, I can’t justify this claim here, so please disregard until I can walk the talk), involves a tacit naturalisation of a labour process – a naturalisation that sits in tension with explicit historicising aims of Postone’s text; the other move, I think, actually falls into equating capitalism with market exchange (admittedly, a sophisticated, autopoeitic vision of market exchange, but this is also a move that Postone aims not to make, in other dimensions of his text). If he is making these moves, I think I have a way of understanding what Marx is doing, that doesn’t rely on such steps. At the moment, I’m trying to get my head around my own argument a bit better – at that point, I’ll revisit all of the texts that have been formative for my reading of Marx, and try to work out, once I know what I’m trying to say, whether I see their arguments in a different light…

Apologies if this is simply unclear – and please feel free to correct anything that seems a misimpression, or to suggest your own way of making sense of what Postone does with the dual character of labour, as this is a discussion that could be very helpful to me. Running!!

Marx can be read as trying to point to the possibility for a… less logical form of social life – and trying to draw our attention to the ways in which we are already, even from within the “logic” itself, generating possibilities that the logic is not able to grasp.

Nevertheless, I think this kind of theory is bounded – that it is a theory of a specific object – of a pervasive layer of social experience – an important layer of social experience because it has global reach, and because it is constitutive of perceptions of things we take to be asocial in character – but not the only thing in social experience. I think, to be honest, that the perspective from which this appears to be the only thing happening socially, is probably itself a partial perspective suggested by a dimension of the reproduction of capital that takes itself to be have achieved an unviable independence – to have become genuinely presupposionless and self-positing. I take this social form to have enormous capacity to incorporate contingency into its logic – I don’t take it to eliminate contingency.

So, say, a Badiou, pointing to the possibility of an epochal event that could arise in some way completely unpredictable within the logic of the capitalist situation, and disrupt that situation: I see no way this could be ruled out, and no particular reason to deny that this sort of thing could happen – it would actually seem metaphysical to me to deny this – an unfair “move” in the context of what I take to be a secular theoretical approach. What I am saying, instead, is more like: yes, sure, that sort of thing might well happen, but the possibility of politics doesn’t live or die on whether it does, because there are actually theorisable potentials that arise within the situation itself that point to the possibility for determinate kinds of emancipatory change. So I don’t actually see my approach as requiring the additional step of ruling out the other sorts of theory I typologised (although, as I’ve mentioned in other places, I’m considerably more sympathetic to some moments of that typology than to others). I may think that – again to pick on Badiou (whom I have barely read, so I’m using the guy iconographically here, with apologies if I am completely misunderstanding him) – an approach like this is deficient to grasp the specific object of the reproduction of capital, because I think it gives up too soon on the complex potentials that arise within that object, and may operate so as to deflect awareness of potentials for critique and contestation that can actually be theorised, precisely because they do arise within a situation with self-contradictory potentials. But this isn’t a blanket dismissal of everything that sort of theory might have to say about political possibilities.

A sidestep into a less politicised terrain might be more useful (particularly given that I’ve chosen an example, with Badiou, where I’m worried about someone dropping in and contesting my representation of his argument – again: just using him iconographically, and more than happy to be told I’ve completely misunderstood): there are strong implications from this sort of theory for how to make sense of periodisations within the sciences – for how to understand the intuitiveness and plausibility of searching for certain kinds of attributes in the natural world. Yet the intention here – certainly in Marx – isn’t to call the sciences “deficient” in the sense of declaring their findings about the natural world nonsense. The sciences’ self-understanding may not be complete – they may take what Marx will sometimes call a “naive materialist” understanding of what they do, they may take themselves to be speaking from a position of objectivity, rather than from a socially located position, etc.: there are payoffs to developing an understanding of how the perspectives expressed in the sciences come to be “primed” by our collective social experiences, and one of those payoffs could even be opening a more nuanced set of potentials for interacting with and analysing nature. But the act of locating certain aspects of scientific thought as being homologous to forms of thought suggested somewhere in the circuit by which capital is reproduced, is itself insufficient to invalidate those forms of thought in any kind of comprehensive way. Again, the idea here is to appropriate, not to debunk – and appropriation also means a recognition that we can accidentally stumble across the possibility of something worth preserving, even in the apparently unpromising moments of the circuit of capital.

Just to take a crass example: one of the things Marx suggests in the first chapter of Capital are some of the experiential reasons it becomes plausible for social actors to think in terms of a realm of invisible universal laws. That Marx can explain the plausibility of this insight with reference to an historically-bounded form of social practice, means that he can account for certain things that a more naive approach to the modern sciences cannot – particularly in terms of explaining matters of historical timing and the qualitative form of the sciences. It does not mean that there are no invisible universal laws: that’s a separate question, to be assessed in different ways. Marx’s critique may make it a bit easier, actually, to ask that separate question, by puncturing the self-evidence of the notion that there must be a realm of invisible universal laws; by itself, though, Marx’s theory has nothing specific to say about whether particular claims about particular laws are valid or invalid. To go beyond this would be a form of reductionism.

And on yet another level, a theory of this sort, that sees ways of being in the world to be primed by practical experience, is, I think, placed in a very awkward position, if it begins then to try to introduce hard ontological distinctions amongst types of practical experience that can do this sort of “priming”, and types that cannot. This is particularly the case for a theory like Marx’s, which, when I’ve been able to get a bit further along in the analysis would be clearer, actually relies on the notion that social actors (even the same social actor) have differing and often conflictual dispositions primed by their practical interactions with different dimensions of the reproduction of capital. I see no plausible way to make this kind of argument, while excluding the notion that social actors can also be primed by dimensions of social practice that, because they are not generated with the same sort of systematicity as necessary moments in the reproduction of capital, fall outside what this kind of theory can theorise.

So, on the one hand, I can make a claim like: the experience of the process of the reproduction of capital will carry implications for things like the gender division of labour – in all sorts of ways. The tendency to align women’s labour with labour that doesn’t “count” as “social labour” from the standpoint of the reproduction of capital is a plausible inflection of gender relations in the capitalist era, so the theory of capital can help cast some light on this. It can also help cast some light on how the self-assertion of women plausibly takes the form of rights claims, and on why particular sorts of ideals of equality might resonate, etc. The process of the reproduction of capital, however, does not necessarily rely on such things: capital will quite happily, given the right circumstances, reproduce itself in a gender-blind situation. This means that the theory of capital by itself is actually not adequate – to use your term, it is deficient – in accounting for the balance of gender relations in any particular capitalist setting, because other factors jointly determine such things.

This doesn’t mean the theory of capital can contribute nothing – any time you’re theorising ways of being in the world, forms of perception and thought, fundamental experiences of self, etc., these insights are portable – they will help make sense of broad dimensions of social experience that aren’t confined to, say, an “economic sphere”. But it does mean that it’s deeply problematic to speak as though the theory of capital is a sort of master key opening all doors: it is a master-key only to its own object, which is the process of the reproduction of capital. And, of course, I am happy to defend my variant of the theory on that specific front – I do think this approach grasps some things about that process of reproduction that other approaches aren’t grasping. I just don’t think I’m playing the only game in town.

I’m also deeply sympathetic to your sensitivity to the relationship between practical and ontological claims. And I didn’t want to suggest that you’re trying to rule out a particular interpretation, so much as point out, I think, that the subtler, deeper problem is that to motivate a particular interpretative strategy — to gamble on it — requires us to locate in it something that offers an interest-based advantage, which other interpretations lack Hence my question about the difference between my Kantian interpretation, and your Hegelian one. If it turns out that they are motivated by the same interests and arrive at the same end-points, then they’re not really different, functionally speaking.

So, it seems to me that even if you’re willing to admit different species of immanent, self-reflexive critique as alternative species of theorizing the social, your mode of doing so has to offer something these other modes do not, which implies a rejection of these other kinds of critique. And you certainly intimate such an advantage here. To refresh your memory, you wrote,

“immanent, reflexive critical theory”. The form of theory that interests me involves an attempt, not simply to assert that all forms of criticism are inevitably located, but to provide an account of the genesis within collective practice of critical sensibilities. It involves, moreover, an attempt to account for the genesis of critical sensibilities through its analysis of the reproduction of some specific society, rather than societies in general, and it attempts to understand that specific process of social reproduction as contradictory in the sense that it simultaneously reproduces society in its existing form, and generates potentials, both material and ideal, that point beyond this process of reproduction in some specific way.

Within this framework, critical sensibilities are thus understood to arise in the core, rather than the margins, as an aspect of social reproduction, rather than as something that sits outside the reproductive process, as a determinate expression of the practical potential to transform our collective lives in some specific way, rather than as a generic and abstract potential for change.

If I may rephrase the matter in a Heideggerian register: the meaning and possibility of critique becomes a question for critique! Now, it may even be the case that this is the very interest that can provide you with a suitable linkage to move from the role theory can play (an ontic claim) and an ontological claim. Though I don’t think he’s consistent on this point, Marx himself seems to make such a claim concerning the proletariat’s interests and his own theorisation. So why wouldn’t it be legitimate for you to do something similar?

But, if I’ve understood you, here’s the rub: the relationship you sketch out between Hegel and Marx suggests that the cardinal virtue of Marx’s mode of critique is that it includes as moments all the other modes of criticism you outlined in you typology. But precisely because these other species of critique are included (as incomplete, one-sided moments), they are deficient. So maybe you have to bite the bullet here, and make the strong claim: my version of immanent reflexive critique is the only viable species.

Does that sound crazy?

What was bothering me… well… there are a few things – I introduce certain concepts a few different times, and in slightly different terms, to make it even worse – I prefer to have that sort of thing more streamlined, as I think it’s just distracting and potentially confusing. I also think the discussion on immanent reflexive critique is actually a tangent – it should either go at the very end of this chapter, or not in this chapter at all: as it stands, it basically interrupts and argument about Hegel and, now that I’ve shifted it around again (and for the moment put that tangent at the end of the chapter, still holding out the possibility that it doesn’t belong here at all), I’ve seen just a better way to articulate Marx’s relationship to Hegel – one that might actually address some of the concerns you’ve raised about this version: basically, I somehow managed to write this whole damned thing without managing to mention that I see Marx offering a practice-theoretic appropriation of Hegel – which becomes a way of approaching what, I agree, are actually some very nice discussions of the ways in which Marx is Kantian, rather than Hegelian (Patrick Murray, who agrees with my argument that Capital is structured in the form of an Hegelian “science”, also perceives Marx as a sort of Kantian – thinking the work has a “Hegelian” structure, particularly once you think that it has this structure in part in order to criticise Hegel, leaves things wide open on the Kantian front…)

So that’s, I guess, my problem with the piece, and why I was reluctant to post it (to be honest, I felt a bit ill after tossing it online, so I’m relieved that the comments are as generous).

I have a complicated relationship to arguments about immanence – one that I voiced a bit more clearly in a conference piece recently, where I sort of sketched out a typology of approaches to critique, explained what I took immanent social theory to be trying to do, and basically held out a sort of pluralist position – in other words, I do immanent social theory, among other things because I think the social is often thematised too one-dimensionally, and this form of theory allows me to talk about that – to get a better sense of theorisable non-identity within the process of social reproduction.

But I see no real reason to jump from this kind of argument – i.e., the argument that this sort of theory has a role to play, and something distinctive to contribute – to some kind of broader ontological claim about where critical sensibilities are capable of arising. It’s one thing for me to say: I can say something about some of the reasons a particular sort of contestation arises here and now. It’s quite another to try to go beyond this, in a sort of regulative way, and decide that my reasons are, in a sense, the only reasons – that no other form of theory has anything useful to say. I don’t see a basis for this kind of broad claim – but I think it’s probably not unusual for me to be heard the way you’ve heard what I’ve written above – as a sort of ruling out of the validity of other approaches. I don’t mean that – I’m just struggling with how to articulate what I am distinctively doing, clearly (as I find that it’s often just hard to get across) – and I think sometimes this struggle causes me to look much more exclusive about this form of theory than I am.

I do think Marx was trying to do the sort of theory I’m discussing – but I also don’t think that whether Marx is read “correctly” is that high a stake, if that makes sense. The reason I push on this point is that there are actually some interesting payoffs – particularly when it comes to understanding certain things about the timing and periodisation of the natural sciences, the intuitiveness of certain forms of experience of self, and such – so it’s those payoffs I have in mind, that I think can’t be seen when Marx is taken to be criticising a contingent social form, against something non-contingent. Trying to foreground the elements in his work where it’s “social all the way down” helps me open up certain problematics – so, in a sense, I may be pushing this line harder than can make sense at this point, as I haven’t shown anyone why they should possibly care

I absolutely agree with your comment about Marx regarding the forms of labour (rather than solely the empirical conditions of work) to be alienating – that’s actually a core point for me, as it is for someone like Postone (although I have a different conception than Postone does of what those forms of labour are). This was another thing I was sort of annoyed with myself about: that this issue somehow didn’t manage to come out in this piece. Although, to be honest, I’m not completely sure how to get it to come out, without completing reorienting what I’m saying – I think I’m just going to reserve it for the following chapter. I’m not completely happy with that, though… But in any event, the issue is that I think the “form of labour” for Marx is the commodity – the whole thing is the form, not just the value dimension. This point is important for understanding Marx’s critiques (and the critiques of someone like Lafargue) of “workerist” forms of socialism, which articulated themselves, from Marx’s point view, actually as “bourgeois” forms of critique – as movements that wanted to ditch the “unproductive” classes, and have the “productive” ones be dominant: Marx sees the assertion of “use value” as a standpoint of critique to be aligned with this position – and not to be an adequate critique of capitalism, which as a social form is distinctive for Marx precisely because it directly renders the expenditure of human labour central…

Your comments about German Ideology are, essentially, one of the things I’ve just included in the revision today – not specifically with reference to that work (there are actually a number of places where it’s possible to draw on explicit methodological points to reinforce the reading I’m doing – I’m not really as “down” on doing this as I sound in this piece: mainly, I’m being strategic – this is a “methods” chapter, and what I mainly do is… interpret the text of Capital by doing a close reading… so what I say is basically meant to deal with the question of how I can rationalise doing a close reading, rather than trying to show what Marx “meant”. I’m probably over-worried about this issue: at my previous university, where I was meant to be an intellectual historian, I seemed to have great trouble convincing people that you could “show” something by any means other than finding a bit in the archives proving than something was explicitly intended – this was probably an institutional idiosyncracy, but it’s left me a bit sunburned, so I was probably more aggro that I should have been, saying that I wasn’t going to engage with this material. The reality is, this chapter actually pivots on two explicit methodological statements from Marx, where he refers directly or tacitly to Hegel: I can’t really be as opposed to it as I was claiming ;-P).

But the point I’ve tried to make clearer in the revision, is that this is a practice-theoretic approach, structured in the stylistic form of a Hegelian science – so, it’s a science of the logic of capital, exploring the “necessity” of the moments of the process by which capital comes to be reproduced, based on the tacit claim that forms of perception and thought are shaped by social actors’ participation in the forms of practice associated with this process of reproduction. That Marx’s practice theoretic account can take the form of a “science of logic” is a substantive claim about a particularly weird feature of this social process: that it has “logical” properties in a Hegelian sense.

I meant this in the draft above, but didn’t express it particularly well. I’ve tried to foreground this more in the redraft – not least because it also gives my particular spin on what Marx means when he talks about the development of consciousness from the world – that the referent is social, even though the language is often “material”.

Just noticed your final sentence – no! Not harsh at all! I really, really appreciate this. Sorry to blurt at such length – product of being cooped up with this for too many hours… Hopefully not too boring…