Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Self-Reflexivity Beyond the Self

11 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on August 13, 2007

So of course I’ve been thinking about the recent conversations on self-reflexivity, at Larval Subjects and Now-Times – and, specifically, thinking about my own tendency to take a term that has quite a long-standing history (as the Now-Times’ post so elegantly demonstrated) and use the term in a somewhat perverse and idiosyncratic way. Now-Times pointed the notion of self-reflexivity back to the issue of reflection – and, specifically, to the “constitutive activity of cognitive life through which any experience is possible” – to a form of theory that attempts to grasp “the condition(s) for the possibility of all experience by articulating the synthetic, unifying activity of the ‘I’ via the relationship of its understanding of itself and its understanding of an object”. The resultant analysis is masterful – I enjoyed the post a great deal.

And yet I couldn’t help but be struck by how much this is not at all what I have in mind, when I suggest that “self-reflexivity” is an important standard for any theory with emancipatory intent. When I raise issues of self-reflexivity in relation to my own work, I am generally not trying to grasp something about cognitive life (historicised or transhistorical) – certainly not trying to talk about the conditions of possibility for experience as mediated by the activity of the “I” (whether the “I” is understood as personal or intersubjective). I may well walk about such things in various contexts, but these are not the sorts of issues am seeking to problematise, through the concept of “self-reflexivity”.

Self-reflexivity, for me, is really a concept that attempts to grasp whether a theory is able to articulate the determinate ways in which a given social context generates the potential for its own emancipatory transformation, even as that context also generates the potential for its own reproduction. A critical theory becomes self-reflexive, for me, when it can point to the determinate potentials for transformation that are voiced in its own critique, and when, as a parallel move, it can also identify the determinate potentials (or constraints) that are voiced by alternative forms of theory and practice. The question captured by the concept of self-reflexivity isn’t so much “how does the subject come to know?”, but “is the theory analysing society only in terms of that society’s potential for reproduction, or does the theory also point to determinate potentials for transformation?” The term “determinate” is important here: all critical theories assert that at least some aspect of society shouldn’t be reproduced, or that social reproduction entails unnecessary forms of constraint. Non-self-reflexive critical theories, however, engage in a form of argument I tend to call “abstract negation” – rejecting what they oppose, but without also identifying determinate potentials for moving beyond what is being criticised; explicitly theorising the reproduction of what is being rejected, without explicitly theorising the immanent generation of potentials for transformation (including the existence of critical sensibilities themselves). As a consequence, such theories tacitly exceptionalise themselves, thematising the reproduction of specific forms of constraint, without equivalently thematising determinate potentials for contestation and critique (and, often, leaving us to wonder how contestation or critique should ever arise, or treating contestation or critique as essentially ungraspable within our current situation).

The consequences are practical: it is difficult, I would suggest, for a non-self-reflexive theory to assist in the process of orienting action – to differentiate between forms of “being against” (not all forms of anti-capitalism, for example, just by dint of being anti-capitalist, are equivalent in their emancipatory potentials); to distinguish between forms of change (in a dynamic social context, the successful achievement of change is not equivalent to revolution, and the reproduction of capitalism in particular rests on transformations that can – and have – been mistaken for revolutionary transformations); to assist in the process of “brushing history against the grain” – of recognising how certain forms of practice or shapes of consciousness that have arisen in, and are integral to, social reproduction, can nevertheless be shaken loose from their current roles and turned to emancipatory purposes; etc.

Sinthome’s description of pessimistic theory casts some light on what is involved:

The theory of social-formations that speaks of social structures, systems, forces, and so on and so forth is not unlike the account of the billiard ball that passively suffers the laws of mechanics. That is, agents are simply seen as props of these structures. Yet as Sartre points out, we must distinguish between the knowledge of being and the being of knowledge (CDR, 24). That is, we risk falling into theoretical pessimism so long as we fail to take self-reflexivity into account, for we come to see ourselves as passive sufferers of these social forces. Yet, to make a Pepperellesque observation, what this proposition forgets is, namely, itself: the subject enunciating the proposition. That is, this proposition forgets that the minimal condition for the possibility of enunciating the proposition that we are effects of structure is a marginal distance from structure, a minimal deterritorialization from structure, a small crack or line of flight within structure. That is, one must have in part already have stepped out of structure in order to discern structure as an operative force of conditioning in the life of the subject. Just as the symptom must come to be seen as split or divided so that the analysand might discern it as a formation of the unconscious (i.e., the analysand must no longer see the symptom as directly the problem to be solved, but rather see the symptom as signifying something other), similarly structure must already be split and fissured to enunciate the claim that we are effects of structure. What the theoretical pessimist forgets is precisely his own position of enunciation: he treats himself as being outside of structure, even as he makes the claim that he is but an effect of structure.

The notion of self-reflexivity put into play here is therefore not so much concerned with how we conceptualise the reflecting subject, but more with how we conceptualise the social field – and, specifically, whether our conception of the social field provides any tools for understanding how contestation or critique could ever arise. When a critical theory analyses a social field using only tools that can grasp social reproduction in its current form, the theory places the object of its critique in the frame, but exempts itself – omitting the position from which a particular form of society comes to appear contingent and wanting. Such an approach, I would suggest, fails to conceptualise the most important thing: the determinate potential for transformation, whose possibility is suggested by the very existence of critique.

No one owns theoretical terms, and my use of the term “self-reflexivity” to express such concerns, although not unique to me, may be unnecessarily obscure. The underlying issues, however, I do think are important – in slightly different ways, depending on whether someone is trying to unfold a socially immanent critical theory, or whether someone is operating in a broader conception of immanence. They revolve around the sorts of questions Sinthome asks at the end of the post that stimulated this discussion:

Where is that crack that might function as the impetus for the emergence of a new people? What would be the conditions under which this crack might emerge. The fact that we’re theorizing it indicates that it is already there, if only virtually or potentially. What would it take for it to become actual?

The concept of self-reflexivity is an attempt to specify at least some aspects of a form of critical practice that can best help us cast light on such concerns.

Conversations, Self-Reflexivity

Mirror Mirror

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on August 12, 2007

Alexei from Now-Times has written an extraordinary piece On the Concept of Reflection, which builds on elements from the recent discussion of self-reflexivity over at Larval Subjects. To be honest, at the moment I’m finding Alexei’s piece too perfect to respond to – I seriously doubt I have anything useful to add, but want at least to point readers to the piece if they have been interested in (or confused by!) the issue of self-reflexivity as it has been loosely discussed here from time to time.

Alexei situates the problem of self-reflection on the terrain of a theory of judgement – reminding me (and here I should stress that I’m not trying to gloss Alexei’s piece, but instead leave a placeholder for myself) that, in my various meanderings on the topic here, while I spend a lot of time tossing around terms like “critical standpoint” or “critical ideals”, I’m not sure I’ve ever spelled out clearly that the strategic intention of the notion of self-reflexivity, within the context of a critical social theory, is to ensure that the theory can assist in orienting action – can contribute to the task of making critical judgements without the need to reach for a transcendent ground, by pointing those judgements back to determinate potentials generated by the social field to be transformed, such that the theory speaks with the voice of those potentials (rather than, as Sinthome has occasionally expressed the issue, voicing itself solely as a rejection or a “being against” – as what I tend to call an “abstract negation”).

My earlier placeholder on theoretical pessimism was motivated by the sense that many forms of critical theory had currently moved away from this vision of orienting action based on an immanent social theory, had moved away from pointing critical judgements back to the determinate potentials generated within a social field. I was then, essentially, asking whether it were viable to rethink the possibility of immanent social critique in a way that might overcome some of the impasses I’ve discussed (and had others discuss) occasionally on this blog.

But back to Alexei! Alexei suggests that, in order to back our way in to the concept of self-reflexivity, it might first be useful first to… er… reflect on the concept of reflection – and specifically to thematise the relationships between subjectivity, judgement, and reflection. Alexei organises the discussion around the concept of the transcendental subject, tracked through the works of Descartes, Kant and Husserl:

At its most basic, the notion of a transcendental subject captures what we might call the original spontaneity, or constitutive activity of cognitive life through which any experience is possible. As an essentially reflective theory of subjectivity, it attempts to uncover the condition(s) for the possibility of all experience by articulating the synthetic, unifying activity of the ‘I’ via the relationship of its understanding of itself and its understanding of an object. Or, more simply put, the notion of a transcendental subject articulates how two concepts – the concept of the subject itself, and the subject’s concept of an object – are coordinated, or synthesized in a manner that (to use a slightly problematic term) grounds all experience in this unifying activity. Hence, we may reformulate it as a Reflexionstheorie of the subject, which inquires into the possibility of experience. And we need to understand its theory the transcendental subjecting as essentially is a theory of judgment.

I’m hesitant to summarise the other sections, as the original is quite beautiful, and will suffer from translation – I’d rather readers check out the original, which will more than repay the reading.

I take this piece to represent a sort of promissory note – a beginning. As it stands, Alexei presents an analysis of a self-reflexive theory of judgement as something bound with a theory of a transcendental subject – in a movement that extends from the cogito through to notions of intersubjective constitution of meaning through reflection on historically-sedimented potentials. I found myself wondering whether Alexei intends to follow this piece, with further reflections on what happens to the concept of “self-reflexivity”, when it comes to be carried over (tacitly or explicitly) into approaches that aim themselves against the concept of the transcendental subject (in any of these forms)? On what is perhaps a related point, I’m curious whether Alexei intends to suggest that Husserl’s particular approach is adequate to the task of understanding the historical or constituted character of shapes of consciousness (and here I’m aiming myself, I think, at the connection suggested in the post between historical sedimentation and intersubjective achievements)?

Apologies for not writing more substantively on this – I’m in a busy period here. I am, though, excited to see these issues thematised with such clarity, and am looking forward to seeing how the discussion develops over time.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Self-Reflexivity

Nuncstans

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on August 9, 2007

So I’ve been feeling guilty at not having gotten back to my off and on commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology. I expect this guilt to increase, as I’ve now somehow managed to get myself invited to present a paper on the subject of “Hegel and Solidarity”. Given that I’ve accepted, this suggests I should perhaps do some more intensive writing on Hegel. And solidarity. Or something like that.

Since I’m currently occupied with other things, I thought I should at least refer readers to a fantastic new critical theory blog with a Benjaminian tilt – Now-Times, whose early posts suggest that we can look forward to engaged and thoughtful explorations of the blog’s chosen themes of “historical, aesthetic and political issues from the perspectives of Phenomenology and Critical Theory”. Author Alexei is currently working through Hegel’s Phenomenology – with posts up on the Introduction and Sense-Certainty, as well as on general reading strategies – well worth a look!

Critical Theory, Events, Links, Philosophy of History, Reading Group

Free Associations

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on August 8, 2007

Sinthome from Larval Subjects has written a beautiful reflection on self-reflexivity and the formation of collectives, beginning with the lovely multi-layered play on words in its title (free associations indeed), organised around a series of reflections on Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, and ranging both widely and masterfully through concepts from critical philosophy, social and anthropological theory, and psychoanalysis. Among many, many other things, Sinthome points back to, and expands upon, some of the themes recently outlined in my own sketchy placeholder post on the concept of theoretical pessimism. Sinthome concludes:

The theory of social-formations that speaks of social structures, systems, forces, and so on and so forth is not unlike the account of the billiard ball that passively suffers the laws of mechanics. That is, agents are simply seen as props of these structures. Yet as Sartre points out, we must distinguish between the knowledge of being and the being of knowledge (CDR, 24). That is, we risk falling into theoretical pessimism so long as we fail to take self-reflexivity into account, for we come to see ourselves as passive sufferers of these social forces. Yet, to make a Pepperellesque observation, what this proposition forgets is, namely, itself: the subject enunciating the proposition. That is, this proposition forgets that the minimal condition for the possibility of enunciating the proposition that we are effects of structure is a marginal distance from structure, a minimal deterritorialization from structure, a small crack or line of flight within structure. That is, one must have in part already have stepped out of structure in order to discern structure as an operative force of conditioning in the life of the subject. Just as the symptom must come to be seen as split or divided so that the analysand might discern it as a formation of the unconscious (i.e., the analysand must no longer see the symptom as directly the problem to be solved, but rather see the symptom as signifying something other), similarly structure must already be split and fissured to enunciate the claim that we are effects of structure. What the theoretical pessimist forgets is precisely his own position of enunciation: he treats himself as being outside of structure, even as he makes the claim that he is but an effect of structure.

Yet here emerges the question pertaining to the formation of collectives. A collective, as itself a critical entity, as itself a function of the breach in structure, must either punctually or gradually have encountered this breach in structure. Yet what are the conditions, by what confluence of forces, does this breach appear? In many respects this is the ten million dollar question. The elephant in the room that no one is talking about is the old Marxist question of the conditions under which the proletariat will be awoken to its own revolutionary vocation. Of course, social structure has changed significantly and we now know that the proletariat can no longer be identified with industrial workers tout court (this as a function of the shift to post-industrial capital and the emergence of communications technologies that have changed class relations… Indeed, Capital demonstrates that “class” is a far more fluid concept than it is often made out to me). Echoing Sloterdijk’s melancholy question, “why do we continue to do it when we know that we’re doing it?” Where is that crack that might function as the impetus for the emergence of a new people? What would be the conditions under which this crack might emerge. The fact that we’re theorizing it indicates that it is already there, if only virtually or potentially. What would it take for it to become actual? As usual, I have no answers and I’m not even sure that I’m posing the questions in the right way.

The excerpt simply doesn’t do the post justice – the original should be read in full. (And anyone who has any suggestions for a less ugly term than “Pepperellesque” can let Sinthome know…)

Conversations, Self-Reflexivity, Social Movements, Transformation

Turning the Tables

3 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on August 7, 2007

Lumpenprofessoriat has tugged on some of the threads from my recent post on Devaluing Labour. Lumpenprof raises explicitly one of the issues that was in the back of my mind when I wrote the original post – the common perception that the rise of information and communications technologies has entailed a fundamental transformation in the nature of capitalism – and then provides more robust references to Marx’s discussions of technology in Capital:

Marx devotes the longest chapter in Capital, Volume I to the topic of “Machinery” precisely in order to explain capitalism’s enthusiasm for large-scale mechanization in terms other than the highly suspect utopian notions of labor-saving devices being used to free workers from the need to toil. For Marx, machinery as used by capital is one of its most ingenious and devious strategies for extracting ever greater quantities of surplus-labor from workers. Digital machines are no different. Capital loves computers because they make workers more productive, cheapening commodities in general, and cheapening the commodity of labor-power in particular. Thus, allowing workers to donate an ever greater share of their labor time to capital for free.

That work resulting in the production of digital commodities strikes us as so different from work that produces other sorts of commodities is perhaps simply the latest version of the ability of the commodity form to dazzle us that Marx describes as the “fetishism of commodities.”

I did have one quick question, on the concluding passage:

Digital commodities seem even more clever than wooden tables, and evolve out of their computerized brains ideas yet more grotesque. They seem to take on a life of their own — they move, grow, replicate, spawn, and evolve — and so hide and obscure the human labor they embody.

I agree with the main point here – I see nothing in digital commodities that is different in terms of the role they play within capitalist reproduction to other sorts of commodities (this doesn’t of course mean that new technologies can’t introduce novel potentials for the development of new forms of subjectivity, embodied relationships, etc., but it does mean that there is nothing intrinsically non-capitalist about the new technologies). I tend, though, to describe Marx’s strategic intention slightly differently (and this may just be a matter of phrasing and emphasis). The emphasis in the passage above seems to be on the fetish as something that hides or obscures – and therefore as something Marx’s critique is trying to strip away, in order to reveal the underlying reality beneath – in this case, the reality that, in spite of the growth of technological potentials, human labour remains central.

I tend – and this difference is somewhat slight, but has some important implications – instead to present Marx’s argument about the fetish as part of an attempt to pose the question of why human labour should remain important, given the hypertrophic development of new technologies and the increases in productivity that are structural tendencies within capitalist development. Rather than simply trying to reveal the centrality of labour, Marx is, I think, trying to foreground precisely how irrational it is that human labour should remain central – trying to nudge us in the direction of realising that there is no material reason for this centrality – that material production could quite comfortably shift to something ever-more technologically mediated, and ever-less dependent on the expenditure of human labour. So: yes, on one level he is drawing attention to the human labour that continues to be required – but with the strategic intent of suggesting that this requirement is essentially bizarre – that it is “social”, that it is arbitrary – and, therefore, that it can be transformed without a regression back to premodern levels of material wealth.

Apologies if this is very unclear – and I’ll stress that I take this to be more a presentational issue, than a substantive one. Writing on the run this morning, with no time to edit… Sorry!

Fetish, Links, Materialism, Political Economy, Technology

Ticket Insurance

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on August 2, 2007

Via Marginal Revolution – perhaps Russ should use this concept in his Transport Planning course?

“My favourite ticketing system was in Mumbai, India,” Kim enthuses. “No one actually buys a ticket, but you can buy ‘ticket insurance’ from private entrepreneurs who work at the entrance of the station. The ‘ticket insurance’ is about half the price of a regular rail ticket. It gives you a guarantee that, in the extraordinary event that you are booked by a railways inspector for taking a free ride, your fine will be paid. A relative was once booked and the ticket insurer paid the fine exactly as promised.”

Here is the link, and thanks to Brendan Leary for the pointer.

At the very least, it’s a new way of thinking about Russ’ free rider problem.

City Planning, Links

Paying Attention

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on July 31, 2007

Sinthome from Larval Subjects has posted a particularly poignant set of reflections that take as their starting point Deleuze and Guattari’s challenge:

“It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of existence” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 75).

And then goes on to reflect:

Yet it is hard, is it not? It is hard to find those tenors of life that are inherently affirmative, where we are not beset by a dark malaise. When I was young I was so blissfully ignorant. When Lacan talks about the imaginary, one of the things he has in mind is the way in which we treat others as being like us, as thinking in the same way, as having the same values, beliefs, and views. I really can’t say that I was aware of “otherness” when I was young. For me the first real shock of otherness came in 2000, with the election of George Bush; but even more strikingly it came following September 11th, when I watch my fellow countrymen rally around this president’s ideology, falling for just about every trick George Orwell had described in his novel 1984. Here, before my eyes, I saw everything Orwell had described materializing and I wondered how we could be so stupid, how we could forget so easily. All my assumptions about the world and people evaporated, and I no longer knew what thoughts lurked behind the twinkling eyes of those about me. It seemed that the worst nationalistic, repressively religious, fascist madness had been loosed upon the land… And if not the worst, at least seeds of madness that could easily become the worse.

It is difficult not to go a little mad if you’re paying attention. Everything in this world seems as if it is upside down, as if viewed through Caroll’s looking glass.

Much more in the original.

Conversations

Devaluing Labour

14 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on July 31, 2007

I’ve read several works recently that argue that Marx’s labour theory of value, while appropriate for the period in which it was written, now needs to be updated to account for the role of technology in the production of wealth. I have no problem with the general notion that, in significant respects, Marx’s argument remains bound to the 19th century, but I can’t help but find this particular notion of what is outdated in Marx’s argument somewhat odd. The implication of this line of criticism is that, when Marx was writing, it remained unclear that technology would become increasingly important in the generation of material wealth, and that Marx – creature of his time, as are we all – simply couldn’t see that human labour would not remain as important to the material reproduction of society as it undoubtedly was in his own day. This line of criticism assumes, then, that Marx’s principal aim was to theorise the material reproduction of society, that Marx believed that wage labour was key to material reproduction in his era, and that he developed the labour theory of value in order to cast light on the ways in which, in spite of deceiving appearances created by the market, wage labour played this pivotal social role.

I’ve run into this criticism of Marx a number of times before, and I always find it extremely strange, mainly because it seems to block out any historical awareness of the industrial revolution and the utopian hopes that were placed in technological progress well into the 19th century (and beyond, of course, but my point here is that Marx would have been well aware of the concept of technological progress when he was writing). At best it seems historically implausible to think that Marx – who was attempting specifically to theorise the central historical dynamics of his time – should have been insensitive to the visibly growing role technology was playing in the production of material wealth, particularly given the contemporary attention this phenomenon received. More to the point, Capital makes frequent reference to recent technological innovations, and to the ways in which such innovations make possible the production of greater amounts of material wealth with less investment of human labour per unit output: in light of such passages, Marx can hardly be said to be unaware that the production of material wealth had come to rely more and more heavily on technology, and less and less on the investment of human labour. But if he were aware of the increasing reliance of material reproduction on technological forces – if he even drew attention to this trend in his own text – then it is worth asking what he could possibly have intended by proclaiming a “labour theory of value”: can this element of Marx’s theory be seen as anything other than the most perverse contradiction?

If we’re to see the “labour theory of value” as anything other than the most bizarre of anachronisms – not simply in our time, but in Marx’s – I think we have to consider the possibility that Capital might be trying to do something more than theorising how material wealth is generated in capitalist society. Marx in fact suggests this fairly directly, early in the first volume of Capital, first by defining exchange value as something that does not contain any use value:

As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.

And then – and more importantly – by defining value as a social substance:

If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.

Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values.

Marx argues that this social substance – but not material wealth – is measured in terms of socially average labour time. Significantly, he does this in a passage that explicitly thematises the role of technological progress in increasing productivity:

A use value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article. The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours.

Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.

We see then that that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour time socially necessary for its production. Each individual commodity, in this connexion, is to be considered as an average sample of its class. Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value. The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other. “As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour time.”

The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour time required for its production also remained constant. But the latter changes with every variation in the productiveness of labour. This productiveness is determined by various circumstances, amongst others, by the average amount of skill of the workmen, the state of science, and the degree of its practical application, the social organisation of production, the extent and capabilities of the means of production, and by physical conditions. For example, the same amount of labour in favourable seasons is embodied in 8 bushels of corn, and in unfavourable, only in four. The same labour extracts from rich mines more metal than from poor mines. Diamonds are of very rare occurrence on the earth’s surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an average, a great deal of labour time. Consequently much labour is represented in a small compass. Jacob doubts whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value. This applies still more to diamonds. According to Eschwege, the total produce of the Brazilian diamond mines for the eighty years, ending in 1823, had not realised the price of one-and-a-half years’ average produce of the sugar and coffee plantations of the same country, although the diamonds cost much more labour, and therefore represented more value. With richer mines, the same quantity of labour would embody itself in more diamonds, and their value would fall. If we could succeed at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks. In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; and vice versâ, the less the productiveness of labour, the greater is the labour time required for the production of an article, and the greater is its value. The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it.

So what’s going on here? Why these strange manoeuvres of distinguishing between value and use value (and the even stranger manoeuvre of distinguishing between value and exchange value, although I’ll leave this latter point aside for present purposes)? The passages above already suggest what’s at stake (and apologies in advance for being very abbreviated here – some of these points have been developed in greater detail elsewhere on the blog, and I’m pressed for time tonight): the distinction between use value and value allows Marx to begin to drive a wedge between a potential role technology could play, in a different organisation of social life, and the role technology actually does play in a capitalist context. Use value – material wealth, the material reproduction of society – can be generated in the absence of the expenditure of human labour: it can be produced (as Marx says somewhere) “gratis” by nature, or it can be generated by technology. Use value, or the material reproduction of society, is therefore completely indifferent to whether human labour is expended in the creation of material wealth. Capitalism, however, is not indifferent. Instead, this contingent social configuration imposes – this is Marx’s claim – a purely social coercion for the expenditure of human labour, which has – this is key to Marx’s argument – nothing intrinsically to do with the need to expend human labour for the generation of material wealth.

This social compulsion for the expenditure of human labour – which Marx understands as the impersonal and unintended side effect of collective practices consciously directed to other ends – is what Marx is trying to capture with the concept of the “labour theory of value”. Seen in this light, the “labour theory of value” is intended, among other things, to thematise the ambivalent implications of technological development under capitalism. On the one hand, technology figures in Marx’s argument as a force that increases productivity and represents a reservoir of historically-constituted potential for a form of material reproduction that is not reliant on the expenditure of human labour. On the other hand, as realised in the current social context, technological development figures as a form of actual compulsion, in that each technological innovation contributes to resetting the socially average labour time required for the production of particular goods – a distinctive social role, not intrinsic to the creation of material wealth, that binds technological innovation to a restless dynamic of coercive revolutionisation of the means of production (and of the social bonds, institutional structures, and other elements of social life that are also caught up in such transformations), such that technology comes to figure – for contingent social reasons – as the master, rather than the servant, of humankind.

Marx’s “labour theory of value”, far from being unaware of the role technology would come to play in generating material wealth, can better be understood as an attempt to grasp a central paradox of technological progress: Marx was seeking (among other things) to provide a social explanation for the boundless, “instrumental”, character of technological development in the modern era, trying to grasp why technological progress didn’t appear to be living up to the utopian hopes invested in it, asking why the restless advance of the productive forces did not appear to be accompanied by a commensurate advance in human freedom – all questions that remain quite contemporary in their resonance, even if we reject the details of Marx’s theory. Moreover, Marx’s “labour theory of value” was intended to lay the foundation for a non-pessimistic response to these questions – to argue that this paradox does not reside intrinsically in technology – that it has nothing to do with material reproduction as such – that it instead resides in a purely “social substance”, in the unintended consequences of collective human action – and, as a product of human practice, could be overcome without sacrificing technologically-mediated material production. Marx was therefore attempting to operate on the terrain of an immanent social critique – trying to identify the practical foundations of coercive dynamics, while also mining those same dynamics for the unrealised potentials they carry in their wake. In this respect, his theory compares favourably to some other critiques of “instrumental reason”, which identify these same paradoxes as central to modernity, but which claim to ground them in labour, material reproduction, or technology per se.

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Technology

Site Access Issues

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on July 30, 2007

Just a quick note that my web host will be carrying out various upgrades over the course of the week, and so the site may occasionally be down. In theory, there shouldn’t be more than a couple of outages, the longest of which should be for @90 minutes, and everything should be back to normal by Thursday. In practice, if people could please let me know if they notice anything not working as normal, it would be very helpful.

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Placeholders on Alfred Sohn-Rethel

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on July 30, 2007

When I have a bit more time, I’ll try to follow up on my recent over-generalised reflections on real abstractions with a more grounded post on the different ways in which this concept is deployed in the works of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Theodor Adorno. I’ve been trying to decide on a topic for an upcoming conference, and a comparison of these two authors on the issue of real abstractions may not be a bad organising concept for a paper – but I can perhaps test the waters here before I make final commitments. As I’ve been considering the concept tonight, I’ve been paging somewhat idly through some online selections from Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour: a Critique of Epistemology, reminding myself of the main lines of Sohn-Rethel’s work.

I always find myself strangely affected by Sohn-Rethel’s writing, which expresses an eager and breathless excitement about the insights that led him to his life project, and a sense of passion and urgency about what he is trying to communicate. His preface sketches with a poignant brevity the crisis that informed the development of his intellectual work:

I was stirred by the political events, partaking in discussions at street-corners and public meeting-halls, lying under window-sills while bullets pierced the windows – experiences which are traced in the pages to follow. My political awakening started in 1916, at the age of 17 and still at school, when I began reading August Bebel and Marx. I was thrown out of home and was part of the beginning of the anti- war rebellion of students in my first university year at Heidelberg in 1917 with Ernst Toller as a leading figure. For us the world could have fallen to pieces if only Marx remained intact. But then everything went wrong. The Revolution moved forward and backward and finally ebbed away. Lenin’s Russia receded further and further into the distance. At university we learned that even in Marx there were theoretical flaws, that marginal utility economics had rather more in its favour and that Max Weber had successfully contrived sociological antidotes against the giant adversary Marx. But this teaching only made itself felt within the academic walls. Outside there were livelier spirits about, among them my unforgettable friend Alfred Seidel, who in 1924 committed suicide. Here, outside the university, the end of the truth had not yet come.

There’s something immensely moving in this formulation – the sense that the “end of the truth” – the dying away of revolutionary hopes – did not happen suddenly, all at once, but instead fell in stages, hitting first the university, and then much more slowly descending on those outside. Sohn-Rethel’s response was to bury himself in a detailed study of Marx, in an effort to hold on to the revolutionary momentum – but also to understand more about why this momentum was fading away:

I glued myself to Marx and began in earnest to read Capital with a relentless determination not to let go. It must have taken some two years when in the background of my university studies I scribbled mountains of paper, seizing upon every one of the vital terms occurring in the first sixty pages of Capital, turning them round and round for definitions, and above all for metaphorical significance, taking them to, pieces and putting them together again. And what resulted from this exercise was the unshakeable certainty of the penetrating truth of Marxist thinking, combined with an equally unshakeable doubt about the theoretical consistency of the commodity analysis as it stood. There were more and other things in it than Marx had succeeded in reaching!

The result – and I’ll try to summarise the contours of this argument more adequately when I can treat Sohn-Rethel’s work in more detail – was an eventual insight that Marx’s theory might be most relevant to something other than economic analysis – that Marx’s work might provide some important, if undeveloped, pointers for the development of a self-reflexive critique of the concept of the transcendental subject. Sohn-Rethel sees in this line of analysis a means to move beyond epistemological arguments, which he regards as predicated on explaining fundamental categories as somehow immanent to the subject or to mind. He also sees an opportunity to respond to Kantian and post-Kantian approaches without a detour through Hegelian dialectics, which Sohn-Rethel regards as fundamentally bound to an untenable notion of immanence to mind.

To move beyond these impasses, Sohn-Rethel picks up on elements of Marx’s work that suggest the possibility for a form of abstraction that does not reside purely in thought – a “real abstraction” as I generally intend this term. Sohn-Rethel’s specific argument about the nature of this real abstraction is not quite the one I would make (again, I’ll leave this critical point aside until I can write on his work in greater detail), but he nevertheless situates his problem on a terrain very familiar to me, asking how we can understand the practical collective enactment of an abstraction, which can then no longer be understood adequately in terms of mere conceptual generalisation from more concrete entities:

It is not people who originate these abstractions but their actions. ‘They do this without being aware of it.’ In order to do justice to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy the commodity or value abstraction revealed in his analysis must be viewed as a real abstraction resulting from spatio-temporal activity.

Significantly, Sohn-Rethel also argues – and here I would agree – that the concept of real abstraction is both tacitly central in Capital, and that this locates Capital much more on the terrain of a critical social grounding of philosophy and natural science, than of a critique of political economy narrowly understood:

Althusser believes that Capital is the answer to a question implied but not formulated by Marx. Althusser defeats the purpose of his search for this question by insisting ‘que la production de la connaissance … constitue un processus qui se passe toutentier dans la pensee’. He understands Marx on the commodity abstraction metaphorically, whereas it should be taken literally and its epistemological implications pursued so as to grasp how Marx’s method turns Hegel’s dialectic ‘right side up’. The un-proclaimed theme of Capital and of the commodity analysis is in fact the real abstraction uncovered there. Its scope reaches further than economics – indeed it concerns the heritage of philosophy far more directly than it concerns political economy.

Like Adorno, Sohn-Rethel will try to make sense of the notion of a real abstraction in terms of the division of mental and manual labour – a step that I will examine more critically when I can treat the argument in more detail. My suspicion with both authors is that their attempts to understand fundamental aspects of modernity in terms of the mental-manual labour split (and, more tacitly, their attempts to understand capitalism primarily in terms of the market or commodity exchange) end up blurring some key historical distinctions between modern and nonmodern societies, to the detriment of the theories’ ability to grasp some core dimensions of modernity. Nevertheless, Sohn-Rethel’s work does represent an exceptionally ambitious attempt to unfold an analysis of a real abstraction, while exploring often-overlooked epistemological and philosophical implications of Marx’s work. I’m looking forward to having the time to write on the subject in greater depth.

Abstraction, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Sociology of Knowledge

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