Rough Theory

Sinthome from Larval Subjects has mirrored the entire monster comment I wrote yesterday, as my latest contribution to an incredibly productive discussion below with Joseph Kugelmass and Ryan/Aless. This discussion was itself begun in response to R/A’s post on people as means of production over at massthink, and has led to such productive and rich questions and comments from both Joseph and Ryan/Aless, that it has been distracting me from introducing new posts these past few days.

Sinthome adds a new layer to this discussion, juxtaposing reflections on Deleuze and Guattari, The Communist Manifesto, and Sinthome’s own recent work on assemblages. Sinthome’s post is fantastic, and quite difficult to excerpt in a way that does justice to the movement of the post – I’ll reproduce one teaser here, but you really should read the post as a whole (just keep scrolling past my stuff: Sinthome’s argument is at the bottom…):

This week the reading group in which I participate began reading Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. As I was introducing the material and what Deleuze and Guattari were up to with their synthesis of psychoanalysis, Marx, and Nietzsche, one of the participants piped up and said something along the lines of

Wait, for Deleuze and Guattari schizophrenia as a process is “good”, but capitalism is schizophrenic, yet Deleuze and Guattari are offering a critique of capitalism. Wasn’t Marx against capitalism? How can Deleuze and Guattari both see something positive in capitalism, yet be critical of capitalism?

I confess that I was absolutely delighted by this remark, for what this participant was articulating was a position that can be loosely described as that of abstract negation. On the one hand, so the story goes, there is a position that one can advocate called “capitalism”, and on the other hand there is a position one can advocate called “communism” or Marxism. If one is for Marxism, then they are against capitalism, and political engagement at both the theoretical and practical level (for me these levels are never separated) is then a matter of finding ways to overturn capitalism.

In reality, Marx’s position is far more sophisticated and nuanced. Marx does not simply provide us with an economic theory, nor does he simply provide us with a normative theory articulating “what is to be done” or what institutions we should form. Rather, Marx provides us with a theory that strives to explain why social-formations have taken the form they have taken today and what emancipatory potentials the situation in which we exist contains. As N.Pepperell so nicely emphasizes, this has the effect of showing both how contemporary social-formations and forms of subjectivity are contingent, how they can be otherwise, but also revealing those determinate lines of flight (lines of flight actually haunting the situation or bifurcation points that we might grasp and push further) where change might become possible.

Much, much more in the original post.

On a not entirely unrelated point, I also wanted to draw attention to the fantastic posts Joseph Kugelmass has been posting at The Kugelmass Episodes (some cross-posted to The Valve), now that his comprehensive exams have been successfully completed. I wanted both to congratulate Joe on the successful exam results, and also thank Joe for the very kind words he offered in his return post for both Rough Theory and Larval Subjects. Hopefully we can continue some of the collective theory formation and intellectual community building that Joe highlights in his post.

For those who haven’t yet updated their links, I wanted to mention that Ryan/Aless’ massthink is now back online after a brief hiatus, recharged and with a flurry of fantastic posts. The most recent post asks the question “What Is Capitalism?”, a question that Ryan/Aless answers using a fairly conventional form of Marxist theory:

Capitalism (let’s not mystify it) is simply an economic system where a group of people (the capitalists, the bourgeois) owns the means (i.e. the raw materials, the machines, the factories, land, etc., i.e. the investment money used to buy these, i.e. capital) of production (the process by which a society produces its economic goods) while the rest do not. The rest-the workers, the proletariat-have only their skills, their talents, their abilities, i.e. themselves. As such, in order to survive, in order to buy the goods (since they are, after all, also human beings who have needs) produced in the production process (managed, since they own the means of production, by the capitalists), the workers sell their skills, their talents, their abilities-labor (hence the designation laborers)-to the capitalists.

Ryan/Aless then goes on to unfold a notion of contradiction/internal tension that involves pointing to how labour differs from other means of production:

But man is not a commodity. He was not produced by the economic system; he (unlike a piece of bread, or a table, or computers) was not a product of capitalism. Sure, his labor might have been trained, honed by the economic system (through the educational ISA, the workplace, the family)-but not even his whole labor at that. Some of his talents, his abilities, he inherently has, i.e. he already has labor even before he enters the economy. More importantly, man himself is produced outside the commodity system. He was not born as some kind of good to be used, some commodity to be exchanged (or are we?). Yet, in capitalism, by virtue of the wage, that precisely is what he is: something bought and sold, i.e. a commodity. And if he can be bought and sold, someone must be doing the buying and the selling: the capitalists. The worker, then, (since bought) must be owned by someone (more accurately: something): the capitalist system itself. Man, paid for, is a MoP owned by capitalism.

I unfortunately don’t have time to pick up adequately on this point now, but I want to suggest (1) that this particular narrative of what capitalism is has been historically very important in the development both of movements for the humanisation of capitalism and for the political self-assertion of the working class, but (2) this form of theory tacitly identifies capitalism with a particular form of group domination – with personal relations of domination – in a way that may compromise our ability to grasp the distinctive qualitative characteristics of capitalism, and may particularly impede our ability to understand capitalism as a contradictory social form.

Speaking very, very briefly here, Ryan/Aless’ identification of capitalism with relations of personal domination (the domination of workers by a group of capitalists) suggests that capitalism as a social form will be overcome by the abolition of this concrete social relation. In the form presented above, it also suggests that the essential contradiction is between social relations that are conceptualised as arbitrary or artificial, on the one hand, and an ontological property of labourers, on the other (“More importantly, man himself is produced outside the commodity system. He was not born as some kind of good to be used…” – italics mine) – so the critical standpoint of this form of theory (the standpoint or position from which the critique is being offered) tacitly aligns itself with something more natural, against an artificial social. This form of theory thus breaches an immanent frame of analysis, positioning the theorist as someone who has access to a “natural” perspective from which the social can be recognised as a contingent and arbitrary human creation. At the same time – and to step outside the issues thematised by Ryan/Aless’ post – I would suggest that this form of theory leaves unclear how to grasp peculiar qualitative characteristics of capitalist society that seem at best arbitrarily related to the class relation posited here as central: the dynamism of capitalist production, the specific (and, I would argue, noneconomic) qualitative characteristics of capitalist production, including its unique “instrumental” character, the resonance of distinctive forms of subjectivity characteristic of the capitalist era, including forms of subjectivity constitutive of specific kinds of oppositional movements, etc. (I say all this very much as a placeholder, with full awareness that there would be no reason for anyone to take the point seriously as formulated here).

I mention all this, even though I don’t have the time to develop the point in any meaningful way here, as it’s occurred to me that it might not be clear that some of the theoretical positions I’ve been unfolding here recently – on abstraction, counterfactuals, and immanent theory in particular – are intended to unfold an alternative conceptualisation of capitalism. One that understands capitalism in terms of impersonal forms of domination (within which personal forms of domination may then be situated) that constitute an unintended, nonlinear dynamic of historical transformation – a dynamic characterised by contradictory pressures for the dissolution and reconstitution of the need to expend human labour in particular concrete forms. Although I cannot develop this point here (gestures have been made in earlier posts), the point of this kind of theoretical approach – of redefining capitalism so as to grasp its impersonal social dimensions – is both to open up to a theory of capitalism many of the salient qualitative characteristics of capitalist society – including forms of subjectivity and practice that point beyond this social form – and to avoid a form of critique that tacitly replicates the classical liberal philosophical distinction between artifice and nature, by explaining how capitalism itself generates this distinction as a moment in its own cycle of reproduction. I would argue that such a move is required for a genuinely immanent critical theory of capitalism – one that voices its critique in terms of the contradictions within capitalism, rather than as a contradiction between capitalism and something else (whether natural or social) – and that this approach can also begin to help us make sense of some of the historical dynamics that have been stacked against movements that articulate their opposition to capitalism in terms outlined in Ryan/Aless’ post.

I say all of this as a placeholder in the most emphatic sense: Ryan/Aless can and should dismiss what I’ve written here as ungrounded – or, if feeling particularly generous, he could perhaps advance me some time over the next few months to see whether I can develop the point in more adequate detail. 🙂