First, on Marx’s intersubjective/nonintersubjective social distinction: in a certain sense, I’m suspending belief as well, although I would find this sort of distinction incredibly handy, for where it slots into things I’m trying to understand. Part of the difficulty is that Marx, I think, really struggles to express what he’s trying to pick out – and I’m not sure the various ways I’ve attempted to translate his terms, into something more intuitive, have quite managed yet to “hit” that intuitive sweet spot where it’s clear enough what he’s trying to say, that it then becomes a bit easier to figure out what we might want to keep, and what we might want to discard, from his specific analysis. (I’m saying “we” here – the contents of that “we” might just be “me”… ;-P But my point is that I’ve been wrestling primarily – recently at least – with whether I understand what he’s trying to claim, and have therefore tended to bracket, for the moment, whether I find that exact claim completely persuasive…)

On the issue of doubting the intersubjectivity of religion: yeah, to be honest I don’t particularly like this step of Marx’s argument either – I’m not sure whether our objections would be exactly the same? First: something in Marx’s favour – I’m the one who is using the specific term “intersubjectivity” to pick out what Marx is after, when he raises the analogy of religion. So some (if not all) of the problems with my discussion may boil down to my selecting precisely the wrong term to translate Marx’s argument. I do, though, see the logic of the “christening” passage to take something like the following shape:

(1) example of something “genuinely” objective (seeing a visible object)

(2) example of something “intuitively” social (religion)

(3) new thing that Marx wants to pick out (fetish) – a social entity, but with specific qualitative characteristics that seem to resemble, not the characteristics of #2, but rather those of #1

Since the trichotomy subject-intersubjectivity-objectivity has a certain intuitive currency (at least in some forms of social theory), I’ve been sort of repurposing those terms, to translate what Marx is trying to do in the christening passage – which is why I’ve used “intersubjectivity” to express what he’s after with #2. But I’m using this, in a sense, without necessarily committing either Marx or myself to the various sorts of baggage that some particular notion of intersubjectivity might carry – for example, as in the conversations that were reported over at Praxis, this vocabulary can sound as though I’m talking about something conscious (I’m not trying to restrict the meaning of “intersubjectivity” to conscious thoughts, but the term implies that baggage in some contexts), it can also sound as though I’m trying to suggest that these elements of the social are somehow more under social actors’ control (I’m not trying to suggest that either), etc.

What I’m after, I think, is something more… agh… I want a nice, pithy, one-word term for elements of the social that come to be more easily destabilised/denaturalised and perceived as social – elements of the social that we more intuitively grasp as “social”. What are those elements? Well, there’s a whole grab bag of them – languages, cultures, institutions, customs – things we relatively readily perceive as resulting from things we do (whether this gives us any particular power to change them is another matter).

Somehow, Marx thinks the fetish is something different. And so I’m trying to work out how to express how he thinks it’s different. Something about the fetish generates a sort of gestalt impression that a very specific dimension of our social possesses the qualitative characteristics that we intuitively tend to attribute to “natural”, asocial, environments. (You know from the discussion at Praxis that the reason this interests me, is that I am myself interested – once I can sort of work my way through Marx – in the question of how we might “prime” ourselves in collective practice to expect or be particularly sensitive to specific qualitative properties in asocial environments, and other qualitative properties in social environments – and that I would be inclined to think that there is some way we are enacting these sensitivities. So Marx interests me, among other reasons, as someone whose theory has potential for talking to this question – whether he completely realises this potential of his argument, or not. At any rate…)

As a side point: there’s a tendency to do a quick gloss of the fetish argument that says that the fetish just naturalises dimensions of the social – it causes us not to realise they are human creations. As I read it, the argument is slightly more complex than this: political economy figures in this chapter as an explicitly historicising form of thought – and as something that is actively trying to bring into being what it nevertheless regards as a less “artificial” set of institutions. Now on it’s face this is actually extreme bizarre: what does it mean, to grasp that you are trying to change things – which means, intrinsically, to grasp that human practices are the contingent origin point for what you want to create – while still – in spite of this recognition of history and of social practice – making some sort of claim that what you are bringing into being is somehow less artificial – more natural – than what you want to replace? I love this question – it’s a beautiful question – not least because it actually captures so much about how so many different forms of critique (political economy ain’t the half of it) – tacitly or explicitly understand the ontological status of their normative ideals or standpoint of critique. This is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful questions Marx asks – and, in this chapter, he essentially asks it in a footnote… ;-P Go figure…

But all of this is by way of saying that, when Marx tries to understand the fetish as a form of naturalisation, it’s a very very peculiar sort of naturalisation in play – it doesn’t necessarily mean that social actors are unaware of what he describes, or even that they are unaware of its recent historical origins, or of its dependence on human practice. Weirdly, it’s possible to be completely aware of all these things, and yet somehow still perceive “fetishised” aspects of social reality as “natural” – in the sense of being more adequate somehow to an inner essence of humanity or society or material life (or, particularly as the text develops, technology). (If you haven’t seen it, Nate has a lovely post up on how political problems get attributes to technical causes – as we move increasingly into Capital‘s discussion of industrial production, it will be this sort of fetishisation – blaming aspects of our social life on the requirements of productive machinery – that will increasingly become the focus of the extended argument about the fetish…)

But I’ve gone way off on a tangent… Mainly: yes, I suspect that Marx isn’t quite hitting what he’s trying to hit here – but some of this problem may be accentuated by my own clumsy attempt to express what he’s trying to do, when I haven’t hit on the best vocabulary myself.

But in terms of what I meant, when I talked about Marx “sailing off into grandiose claims”: there is a certain… discipline to the argument in Capital. In general, Marx is trying in a fairly systematic way to demonstrate how particular things are generated in very concrete forms of practice, and then to show – through historical examples where possible, through more hypothetical or speculative analysis where history is silent – that the sorts of practices and institutions that are currently bound up with the reproduction of capital, could generate very different sorts of consequences if they were repurposed to a different end goal. He is generally very systematic in pursuing this sort of argument. Every once in a while, though, he does things that I regard as “sailing off”… ;-P By using this term, I’m not trying to suggest that Marx doesn’t mean what he’s saying in these sections – I’m just reacting to his own deviation from an argumentative standard that he regards as “scientific” – sections of the text where he seems to have abandoned his otherwise careful and systematic attempt to make plausible that his critical ideals are at least possible to achieve.

Now, we may not think he’s successful in demonstrating that possibility – my point, though, is that there are moments in the text where the argument is not really even attempting such a demonstration. Often, these are frankly exhortative moments – moments where he is, in a sense, trying to rally (and reassure) the troops – moments that would be performative enactments, in something like Derrida’s sense – where Marx is trying to bring about what he’s describing, by speaking as though it’s already there, or inevitably going to happen, or similar.

Late in the first chapter, there is a gesture that has some of this exhortative element – but that also has something in it of what worries Derrida about this text. Marx has christened the fetish – making the distinctions I’ve sketched above. The argument about the fetish is an argument about a very specific social property of a very particular element of human practice in an historically delimited sort of society. Changing practice so as to overcome the fetish character of those specific practices, would therefore (the argument goes) make our history citable in more of its moments – make it possible for us to do things that we hold back from doing now. Overcoming the fetish is therefore not particularly an eschatological goal – it’s an argument about a sort of social transformation that lies potentially within reach.

In order to try to be clear what he means by the fetish, though, Marx has introduced this analogy relating to religion. My read, to be honest, is that this analogy troubles him. It troubles him because he wants overcoming the fetish – overcoming capitalism – to be something… emancipatory in a somewhat absolute sense? The way the fetish argument is structured, precisely by distinguishing the fetish, from religion, Marx has set up the fetish to be something more specific – more delineated – more socially and historically specific – than religious forms of thought (of which Marx is also of course critical). But doing this casts a certain shadow, or raises a certain doubt, over what, exactly, it means to overcome the fetish – what sort of society issues out of that process of transformation. If religion can be distinguished from the fetish, does this mean that religion would persist into a communist society? Marx doesn’t like this – and yet the distinction he himself has just drawn in the christening passage, poses this very question.

So he needs to answer the question. He does so. Late in the chapter, after running through a lot of other material designed to show that the fetish character is not intrinsic in any of the parts of the commodity form, he returns to this problem. Immediately following a hypothetical/speculative analysis of “a community of free individuals”, but without any explicit transition to explain why this point “follows” at this juncture in his analysis, he abruptly launches into an analysis of religion. He says:

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.
The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.

My reading is that this passage “follows” from what Marx has just written, because of this nagging worry that is embedded into the christening of the fetish. Marx has distinguished the fetish from religion. Does this mean, then, that the fetish could be abolished – but religion not? What sort of “community of free individuals” would that be, if religion persisted? The possibility for the persistence of religion is a problem for Marx – he thinks he needs to address it – to show how religion will wither away.

So what does he do? Well, first, he says – yes yes: but it’s not any old religion we will be dealing with – it’s a particular kind of religion – a religion that has been itself shaped by the experience of living in a society characterised by this fetish character. By establishing this connection, he begins to make it plausible how the abolition of the fetish might also abolish the form of religion that expresses (unbeknownst to itself) this fetish character. If Marx had stopped here, I wouldn’t be accusing him of being grandiose.

But the question still bugs him: okay – so let’s say we get rid of the fetishied religious forms, when we abolish the fetish. What about some other form of religion – couldn’t that arise? Marx doesn’t want it to. He simply doesn’t think religion is compatible with a “community of free individuals” — he doesn’t think the individuals would be “free”, if they are also religious… So we get a passage that I think sits very much on the terrain of Derrida’s critique – a passage where Marx really is talking about stripping away veils to reveal an underlying reality of the life-process of society. The problem I have with this passage is not that Marx wants to make an argument about the disappearance of religion – it’s that this passage doesn’t make the sort of argument he is otherwise putting forward as the type of argument that needs to be made, in order to operate on the terrain of a non-utopian critique. Marx is extremely close here to talking about communism as the realisation of the natural society – a sort of position for which he lambastes political economy in the very next paragraph, where he complains that the political economists treat previous societies as historical, but not their own. I read a great deal of complex voicing in the first chapter of Capital, so perhaps I’m mistaking what Marx is up to here, but I can’t help but see this whole segment as an expression of a rather intense ambivalence – it reads to me as though he is terribly worried about this problem, feels he needs to address it, and yet tacitly provides the resources to criticise this manner of addressing the issue, immediately following his own argument… I may be missing some shadow play here – there’s certainly enough of it in this chapter – but I read this part of the chapter as conflictual…

So that’s what I had in mind, with the quick reference above to the grandiose nature of the claims. The developed argument about the fetish doesn’t really justify eschatology – but I think Marx does move into an eschatological space in this brief section of the text. The he seems to sort of beat himself up over making this move, and then the argument moves on… This is of course provisional, as a reading – if nothing else, I’ve learned to treat this text with great caution…

In terms of your second question – and inadequately (apologies – I wrote more than I had intended above, and now I have no time ): I think the issue is that it boils down to a specific question about complexity – in other words, the claim would be that perhaps we don’t react to all forms of complexity the same way – and that the argument about the fetish is intended to capture some of the qualitative characteristics of the forms of conceptual or symbolic simplification that lie most ready to hand. In other words, I take the underlying impulse of the text to be sympathetic with what I hear you to be saying – and I don’t think, in general, that the argument about the fetish is an attempt to unveil (I just think Marx then makes a very different gesture in the passage I’ve quoted above) – but rather an attempt to talk about the qualitative characteristics of what we do, in a way that wants strongly to resist the gesture of treating some of those characteristics as subsisting on some separate plane of existence from others.

Apologies for tackling this so briefly (and thanks for the opportunity to tackle the material above at such length ) – bit of a lopsided response…

(Btw, I should confess here that although I’m very interested in you I’m not much interested in Derrida, simply because he seems to me derivatively optional in a way that Marx is not; and I’ve made other choices in my branches of derivation. I see his value in your process, though.)

1. You talk about Marx very carefully constructing a critique of the fetish that distinguishes it from religion as a non-intersubjective, emergent product of social relations. Nice. I’m still suspending disbelief on this distinction (following Durkheim and Geertz, so really the part I doubt is the intersubjectivity of religion); because of this tuning I’m pinged by the part where you then say that Marx’s expository discipline collapses and he ‘sails off into grandiose claims’. Well, gosh, I do that but I’m basically just duffing around with this stuff; Marx is a different order of fish. Your argument in the first part hinges on his text being fully intentional. So is it possible that Marx wants the earlier distinction to get recollected into a more comprehensive theory of social processes of symbolic abstraction?

2. Then: I really feel simpleminded, but how does this not all boil down to the usual problems with symbolizing? We take big scary complicated relationships and get them manageable by packing them into a word, a label, a concept, what have you; the map is not the territory; then we take those symbols and stack them back on top of each other, creating second-order complexities requiring new symbolic reductions to manage; and so on. You can unpack the layers of symbolic reduction and stacking all you want, but you get back to complexity that needs to be symbolized to be manageable no matter what. So the question ends up being not unveiling or exorcizing but being mindful of the inputs and outputs shaping any particular symbolic regime, which is what Capital is.

Cheers.

I’ll be there, and will certainly be attending your paper

Nice post, and thanks for the ref, both NP & Rob. I’ll have some more up shortly.