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Category Archives: Critical Theory

Blind Process and Critical Vision

Leave a comment Posted by on August 15, 2007

So, since today is a horrific day teaching, and I’m unlikely to find time to write anything here, another pointer to Now-Times, where the discussion on self-reflexivity continues to unfold, in two main posts (linked here previously, but just to mention that the discussion in both is still “live”).

I also wanted to cross-post another comment fragment, again because it outlines some things that I should take up here in greater detail at some point – with the caveat that, since this is written contextually in response to an ongoing conversation, it’s rather… abbreviated and somewhat problematic as written, and should therefore be read as a placeholder in need of development):

Both Marx and Hegel make gestural comments in various places about “things appearing as they are” – among other things, this sort of comment indicates that they are both trying to develop a form of analysis that does not reduce from appearance to essence, while still capturing the qualitative determinacy of what they are analysing. Both of them are attempting to figure out what it might mean to criticise, without having a notion of objective truth at our disposal.

Hegel tries to square this circle with a sort of developmental notion, where the forms of thought being criticised are both necessary (as moments in an unfolding process), and yet also partial (as revealed when they are compared with later, more adequate, moments). Hegel can do this, though, because he has a concept of the universal realising itself in time.

Marx inverts this argument: his “universal” is capital – a blind, meaningless, destructive force – a mockery of Hegel’s Spirit. However, this blind, meaningless, destructive process is also generative: potentials for freedom arise from it, even though nothing and no one sets out to create them. Marx sees an historical opportunity for us to seize these potentials from the alienated forms in which they have been constituted, and derives from this potential the immanent critical standards against which he judges existing forms of social life wanting.

I tilt more toward Marx than Hegel. That is, I don’t think there is a “meaning” to the overarching process (historical or natural) that has brought us to where we are. However, I think this blind, aleatory process has generated the possibility for meaning. I don’t think history or nature “needs” the individual, but I think individuals have been generated – and, more specifically, potentials for free subjects have been generated. And I think that being constituted in and amongst such potentials has impacts on what we desire – on the kind of world we will find adequate to our own constitution: we do not feel at home in the world as it currently is, precisely because, as its creatures, we know that this world could be other and more.

I think this would be compatible with the evolutionary/emergent concept you suggest above – just with a stronger emphasis on the notion that nothing has necessarily been “pointing” human or natural history in this direction “all along” – and nothing is going to lead quasi-automatically to any kind of transcendence now. It’s just that the blind process that has tossed creatures like us out of itself as unintended side effects, has generated creatures who might be subjects – and it is toward the realisation of this immanent possibility that I would understand critical theory to be directed.

I’ve also been meaning for some time to point to Sinthome’s piece on Morphogenesis, Marx, and Coagulation– Questions for a Materialist Philosophy – a fantastic set of reflections on Marx’s use of metaphors of coagulation and congealment, which then moves to a discussion of morphogenesis and materialist philosophy. Sinthome’s post, I suspect, was part of the constellation out of which the above comment crystallised.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Materialism, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Transformation

In Process [Updated]

3 Comments Posted by on August 14, 2007

Just so Alexei doesn’t feel too different, I thought I should point to the current Now-Times (hmmm – can one have past Now-Times?) post on self-reflexivity “self-referential, performative actualization” that continues the cross-blog discussion on self-reflexivity begun at Larval Subjects, and that also responds to Gabriel Gottlieb’s reflections (non-reflexive reflections?) on Fichte over at Self and World. I tried to intervene in this discussion earlier, but have been told that I’m discussing reflexivity, not self-reflexivity, so I suspect I’ll continue to be selfless, and stay out of this… 😉 (At least until I’ve gotten a bit of work done today…)

Alexei’s concluding passage gives a taste of the post as a whole:

I take it that this final characterization of intellectual intuition in terms of an ontological difference between a given self, and the meaning of subjectivity, to be precisely what Pepperell is trying to suggest with the notion of self-reflexivity. That is, Intellectual intuition qua self-reflexive activity is an immanent development of the human potentials to act and understand, one that begins from a concrete, historical situation (although i can’t find the page, Fichte actually calls the development of the Absolute self, ‘History from a pragmatic perspective), and gestures towards an absolute ideal of human agency and freedom. It is critical, in other words, because it does not merely re-affirm the status quo, but recognizes its limitations and tries to move beyond them.

Very nice to see a roving discussion that highlights, from a range of different perspectives, how the sometimes very abstract-sounding debates around issues of (self-)reflexivity are motivated by the concern to understand the possibility for emancipatory transformation.

Updated to add: I just wanted to mention that I’ve tossed a few comments over at Now-Times to continue this discussion. Hopefully Alexei won’t mind if I cross-post a bit of one of my comments over here, as these observations may serve a slightly different purpose for regular readers of this blog, than they do in the context of the discussion of Fichte over at Now-Times and, if nothing else, I wanted to leave this as a placeholder for myself:

…the form of the presentation suggests that there is something already there – latent – that is then realised historically through some process of externalisation and actualisation. This is a common structure for an argument attempting to explain the origins of critical sensibilities: I tend to characterise this sort of argument as an account that describes “nature realising itself historically”. I also tend to see it as a non-self-reflexive form of argument in a very specific sense: it (tacitly or explicitly) takes as given the qualitative characteristics of the phenomenon it is analysing (critical sensibilities or whatever else) – it sees the historical process as a form of uncovering of what it posited as already existing in some latent form.

A self-reflexive theory, in the sense in which I mean the term, seeks a more thoroughgoing analysis of the constitution of critical sensibilities – such that these sensibilities are not latent, aren’t there waiting to be uncovered, aren’t a sort of target toward which we progressively reach ever-more-closely – but are themselves products through-and-through, constituted to their core, not pre-existing the process that constitutes them.

The distinction is a bit difficult to express, but the basic idea is: does a theory act as though its object was discovered or uncovered (in which case, I would suggest, its object is actually no longer a product or a producer within a process – it instead sits outside the process, which serves only to uncover what was already there, unconstituted, even if the existence of this unconstituted thing was only ever discovered in a particular time and place, when time was ripe). Or does a theory take seriously the notion that its object is a product (and, if a self-reflexive product, then also a producer that refashions itself out of the products generated by earlier rounds of production). This latter mode of theorisation, I would suggest, does not see in history a telos that points toward the realisation of some determinate thing (some latent object progressively uncovered or realised over time), but is instead more open-ended in its conception of what history can “achieve”: it doesn’t necessarily believe that we know what we can become, what history can do, what subjects can be – none of which precludes critique of the ways in which we are constraining ourselves in the present time from realising the determinate forms of freedom that we have taught ourselves to desire and shown ourselves are possible.

To shift again to Marx: Marx treats the commodity as a sort of telos latent within capitalism, generated by a historical process, progressively more and more clearly realised over time. But this teleological movement is Marx’s image of domination, not freedom: it is this with which we need to break, to forward emancipatory goals. This is Benjamin’s leap in the free air of history – breaking the treadmill of progress – a step that we can take, however, only by using those materials generated by this process of progress itself – those documents of barbarism, envies for air we could have breathed, experiences, resources and desires generated nowhere else, but in and through the reproduction of that very thing we now need to overcome…

At least, that’s my take on self-reflexive theory… 😉

Conversations, Critical Theory, Negations, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Transformation

Mirror Mirror

Leave a comment Posted by 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 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

Devaluing Labour

14 Comments Posted by 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

Vague Generalisations about Real Abstractions

1 Comment Posted by on July 29, 2007

So… I’ve been in several conversations recently where I’ve tried to clarify something by mentioning the concept of a “real abstraction”, only to realise that my interlocutor expresses familiarity with the term, but means something very different by it than what I’m trying to convey. As with the concept of “theoretical pessimism”, I understand “real abstraction” in a somewhat technical way – to refer to a form of argument that claims that at least some forms of abstraction should not be understood as the products of a conceptual generalisation, but should instead be understood as a particular kind of entity that is directly, but unintentionally, constituted in collective practice (more on this in a bit). What I’m finding is that the term “real abstraction” has various other technical and non-technical meanings, each more or less closely bound to particular visions of the object, standpoint, and mechanism of critique. I thought I would toss some generalisations onto the blog on the diverse meanings of the term, both to clarify (or further obscure…) what I’ve meant by the term when I’ve used it in other posts here and elsewhere, and as part of a process of deciding whether it causes too much confusion for me to retain this particular phrase.

I’m finding that perhaps the most common interpretation of “real abstraction” that crops up in local conversation, takes the term to signify some sort of superlative abstraction. So the phrase “real abstraction” is understood to be trying to draw attention to concepts that are really, really abstract – by distinction, say, to concepts that are less abstract, and therefore hug more closely to concrete experience. This usage remains very closely bound to the conventional meaning of the term “abstraction” – where an abstraction is a kind of conceptual generalisation – and generally positions “real abstractions” as worse than… er… other kinds of abstractions. It sets up, in other words, a kind of normative privileging of concepts that hug more closely to what it takes to be concrete experience, views abstraction as something a thinking subject effects when reflecting on data (ruling out the possibility, for example, of “abstraction” as a particular kind of immanent structure or an actively and directly generated product of collective practice), and does not consider the possibility that we might miss some aspects of the “real” if we regard the qualitative characteristics of abstract entities solely as a kind of averaging out of the qualitative characteristics of concrete entities.

Even where interlocutors share a more similar “frame” to mine – even where they view a claim about “real abstractions” as an argument that something determinately abstract might be constituted in collective practice – there is a strong tendency to want to equate a “real abstraction” with an illusion, to view a “real abstraction” as a socially constituted form of appearance whose presence is masking some underlying “concrete” reality that critique is meant to uncover. This understanding of “real abstractions” is often put forward by people who see the market (or, sometimes, money) as the quintessential “real abstraction”, and who are interested in criticising the ways in which certain ideals or forms of thought they associate with the market, function to deflect attention away from the actual existence of domination in concrete practice. In this understanding, the forms of thought and practice associated with what is regarded as the “real abstraction” of the market are thus positioned as illusions that need to be unmasked to bring an underlying reality more clearly into view.

There is also a mirror-image position, which also sees a “real abstraction” as something constituted in collective practice, but which places the opposite “charge” on the abstraction: instead of treating the “real abstraction” as an illusion and as the object of critique, this approach views the “real abstraction” as the underlying reality, and sees other social institutions or forms of thought as illusory, or at least as more contingent or particularistic in character. This understanding of a “real abstraction” often arises from forms of critique that see some sociological group – the proletariat, the poor, the marginalised – as a “real abstraction”, where the abstraction is taken to arise because collective practice has placed a particular population into such a position of abject impoverishment or disempowerment or exclusion that they are reduced to what is most essentially, almost biologically (or spiritually), human – and are therefore positioned as the only social group with direct access to something like universal ideals, the only social group whose experiences render them capable of leading a genuinely universal movement for the emancipation of themselves and all other groups.

Okay. Broad brush strokes, I realise. There are many, many theoretical positions that couldn’t easily be lumped into any of these gestural categories. And now that I’ve run through these contradictory understandings of “real abstraction”, I’m beginning to wonder whether I should just drop the term… But before I make this decision, I’ll at least try to gesture at what I mean by the term – if only because I’ve been using it on this blog and in other writings for some time.

The basic idea, for me, behind the concept of a “real abstraction” is the claim that there are at least certain types of abstractions that are not being fully understood when they are interpreted as conceptual generalisations. When an abstraction is treated as a conceptual generalisation, it is being treated as though it arises from a process of subtraction – treated as a residual or a remainder, as whatever is left behind after a certain amount of qualitatively determinate properties has been stripped away in some kind of analytical process. Abstraction is here positioned as a form of pure or abstract negation, lacking its own determinate qualitative characteristics, but containing only those residue characteristics that persist once other attributes have been averaged out or peeled away. By contrast, I would understand the concept of a “real abstraction” to be an attempt to provide a sociological explanation of how at least some abstractions are constituted through collective practice – and are thus available to think, because collectively they are being enacted – they are existent entities constituted in and through collective practice. This process of collective enactment – like all processes of collective enactment – then confers determinate qualitative characteristics which are best understood as actively constituted in their qualitative determinacy, rather than as passively left behind after a process of generalisation away from more concrete characteristics.

From my perspective, even the more sociological approaches mentioned above don’t quite succeed in unfolding this kind of analysis, because they position “real abstractions” asymmetrically in relation to other dimensions of social practice, treating “real abstractions” as either illusions or essences, and therefore as entities that do not exist on the same practical plane as other sorts of social phenomena. This privileged positioning (whether negative or positive) of “real abstractions” tends to facilitate dichotomous visions of critique: visions that view the abstraction as an illusion and as the object of critique, because the abstraction is perceived to have occluded the qualitatively determinate reality of rich, sensuous, concrete existence; or visions that view the abstraction as the reality and as the standpoint of critique, because it reveals what is most essential and universal and unable to be stripped away.

I tend, by contrast, to restrict the term “real abstraction” to a form of analysis that steps outside this dichotomy, by taking seriously the notion that certain things that we experience as “abstractions” are not negativities left behind when everything has been stripped away, but are instead socially-constituted positivities – actively constructed with their own determinate qualitative characteristics generated (unintentionally) in collective practice – representing neither illusion nor essence, but rather alienated potentials. Such potentials are contingent, in that they are the results of collective practices that could well have been different – that, in other periods, seem to have been different – but they are also real, for us, in our time, which has (albeit quite accidentally) brought them into being. Their “abstract” character, however, places these potentials at risk for not being recognised as such – for being mistaken for conceptual generalisation, or for human nature, or for illusion – all interpretations of real abstractions that can be criticised for the ways in which such interpretations impede our ability to seize actively on the positive potentials we have generated in this peculiar form (I say this, realising that the point would need to be developed in significantly greater detail – for present purposes, I’m simply trying to hand wave at the way the concept of a real abstraction might function in a reworking of the concept of social critique, within a framework that rejects the structure of an unmasking and debunking critique).

So… Nice grand claims about the strategic intentions behind a technical term I still haven’t deployed in more than the most gestural way in any actual social theory… ;-P In spite of my criticisms above, a very, very rough sense of what would be involved in deploying the concept of “real abstraction” in something like the sense in which I use it, can be found in some analyses of the market as a “real abstraction”. The argument would go something along the lines of: in one dimension of the social practices that bring markets into being, markets express a genuine, collectively enacted, indifference to the determinate properties of the goods exchanged, the labours used to produce those goods, the purposes for which those goods might be used, etc; in other dimensions of social practice – including other dimensions of the social practices that bring markets into being – these determinate properties are directly and profoundly relevant. The tension between these two dimensions of social practice provides a “real” – or practical – collectively enacted, basis for rendering socially plausible the existence of certain kinds of dichotomous concepts – between exchange and use value, abstract and concrete, etc. Both poles of the dichotomy, however, are equally qualitatively determined by social practice – one pole does not reflect an essence and the other an appearance (although it may be socially plausible for essence-appearance interpretations to arise). Both poles – and the tensions between them – generate determinate potentials, the exploration and expression of which can then provide standpoints for criticism of the ways in which available potentials are being held back or restrained by the existing organising of social life.

To be clear, I offer the example of the market above because I suspect it will be at least somewhat familiar to most readers – it’s not unlikely that people will have read works using something like the technical notion of “real abstraction” I deploy, with the market as the case example. I feel some discomfort with the example, however, as I think that focussing on the market as a “real abstraction” reinforces the tendency to define capitalism in terms of the market, and makes it difficult to understand some periods of capitalist history. My own work focuses instead on the collective constitution of a long-term and non-linear pattern of historical transformation – on this pattern as a “real abstraction” – and can be seen, in some senses, as a critique of approaches that rely on a focus on the market. I’ll leave this issue aside for present purposes, however, since my main goal here is outline various meanings that seem to have attached themselves to the phrase “real abstraction”, and to explore briefly how these different meanings lend themselves to different conceptions of social critique.

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Critique, Empiricism, Materialism, Negations, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Sociology of Knowledge

Fragment on Theoretical Pessimism

22 Comments Posted by on July 24, 2007

I’ve been invited to present at an event that brings together critical theorists and activists to reflect on the relevance – or lack of relevance – of particular forms of critical theory to contemporary activism. The event won’t take place until early next year – the organisers are still finalising the details of the format and specific theme in consultation with the presenters. I’ll post more specific information to the blog when things are further along. For the moment, I’m just trying to get my head around what I might present, to give the organisers some information they can use when making decisions on format and promotion for the event.

The invitation has me thinking about the concept of theoretical pessimism – and wondering specifically how many current, “living” traditions of critical social theory are not pessimistic. It will already be clear from this question that I must mean the term “theoretical pessimism” in a very specific sense. There are many critical theoretic approaches that seek to ground some potential for emancipatory transformation – in the everyday sense of the word “pessimism”, many theoretical traditions are not pessimistic at all. My question relates more to the somewhat technical meaning of “theoretical pessimism” used in discussions of the trajectory of the Frankfurt School.

In this context, the concepts of theoretical pessimism, self-reflexivity, and socio-historical immanence are intrinsically intertwined. By theorising its own socio-historical context in a way that reveals how that context generates determinate, socially immanent, potentials for its own transformation, the theory becomes self-reflexive. Self-reflexivity, in this framework, therefore means simply that the theory can account for its own existence as a potential generated immanently by the socio-historical context it is analysing. Critical social theory accounts for itself by showing how its own socio-historical context internally generates determinate potentials for transformation, potentials that are then expressed in the ideals or values articulated by the critique. Self-reflexivity is thus intrinsically aligned with – defined in terms of – the theory’s ability to identify determinate, socially immanent, practical potentials for transformation. Within this framework, when a theory cannot identify how a specific socio-historical context generates determinate internal potentials for transformation, it ceases to be self-reflexive or immanent, and becomes a pessimistic theory – a theory whose critical objections to its own social context can no longer be linked with a determinate analysis of how that context might be transformed. This is, in fact, what happened to the first generation of the Frankfurt School.

One thing that is sometimes missed – in part because earlier forms of Marxist theory sometimes attempted to extrapolate some kind of general sociological principle from this vision of immanent critical theory – is that this kind of social critique would only ever be possible if the socio-historical context were to have very specific qualities. There is no reason to assume that all forms of human community would generate determinate internal potentials for some specific form of transformation whose character could potentially be theorised before it occurs: it’s not difficult to imagine scenarios in which something like immanent social critique wouldn’t make sense – scenarios in which change is solely aleatory in structure, or driven by human actors from outside the community being theorised, or catalysed by natural events, etc. The claim that something like an immanent and self-reflexive social critique might be possible, is therefore already a strong claim about the determinate characteristics of the particular society being analysed: only in the idiosyncratic circumstance in which a socio-historical context generates some kind of systematic potential for transformation, would this model of critique make any sense. Again, the first generation Frankfurt School theorists recognised this – and therefore drew the appropriate pessimistic consequences, when their particular theory of how capitalism might generate transformative potentials seemed no longer to apply.

Many forms of critical social theory appear to have stepped away from the vision of immanent critique sketched above – accounting for the existence of critical sensibilities in other ways, if at all, rather than attempting to locate determinate potentials for transformation that provide perspectives or standpoints that the critique expresses. Instead, the socio-historical context is often positioned as the object of critique – perhaps as something that provokes the recognition or mobilisation of certain critical ideals – but not often viewed as constitutive of the qualitative characteristics of critical sensibilities, by generating the potentials for particular kinds of immanent transformation. For this reason, many forms of social theory remain “pessimistic” in the technical sense of not identifying aspects of the socio-historical context that point beyond that context in determinate ways. This level of “pessimism” could be entirely appropriate, if our socio-historical context doesn’t have the strange characteristics required for some kind of systematic internal generation of transformative potentials. What I would like to explore in my presentation, however, are approaches that still try to “cash out” the instinct that something like an immanent and self-reflexive social critique might be possible – approaches that still attempt to conceptualise social critique as an expression of a determinate potential for transformation that is generated within our specific form of social life. More on this, hopefully, when I’m a bit less tired – and apologies for the rough and overgeneralised quality of these preliminary comments, which I’ve tossed here mainly so I don’t lose track of the chain of associations in the beginning-of-term crush.

Critical Theory, Critique, Events, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Social Movements, Transformation

Critique by Necessity: More Random Reflections on Marx and Deleuze

2 Comments Posted by on July 15, 2007

Jared from Sportive Thoughts has been organising a Deleuze Carnival. The first carnival is up – and Jared is also asking for feedback on some ideas for future carnivals.

I’ve been wanting to do a bit more writing on Deleuze – over my short holiday this past week I’ve been attending an excellent lecture series on Difference and Repetition and trundling through the book. Unfortunately, I’ve also come down with (yet another!) annoying illness, and have felt a bit too fuzzy to write.

While I’m thinking about the issue, I did want to toss up a couple of quick quotations to passages to capture some of what has been resonating with me in the work. I’ve been particularly engaged by Deleuze’s interest in how certain structures that clearly do have determinate characteristics, come routinely to be described as mere negatives – creating the problem of how to understand (this question should seem familiar to regular readers here) how something positive should come to be mistaken for a pure negation. Deleuze asks how should we understand the status of negation, given that he rejects the centrality often accorded to negation by other approaches:

One final consequence remains, concerning the status of negation. There is a non-being, yet there is neither negative nor negation. There is a non-being which is by no means the being of the negative, but rather the being of the problematic. (p. 202)

Deleuze’s argument here does not take the form of a simple denial – he doesn’t engage in what, in other contexts, I often call an “abstract negation” (asking forbearance for the confusion that can arise when juxtaposing what Deleuze means by “negation” and the way I use this term). Instead, Deleuze engages in what I generally call a self-reflexive form of argument: he regards it as incumbent on his theoretical approach, not simply to reject a particular conception of negation, but to explain why the conception he rejects would be a plausible position – why someone might come to hold this position, why this position is readily available, even though Deleuze will also argue that the position is inadequate. He does this by arguing that negation is a necessary appearance of the problem it both expresses and conceals:

The negative is an illusion, no more than a shadow of problems. We have seen how problems were necessarily hidden by possible propositions corresponding to cases of solution: instead of being grasped as problems, they can then appear as no more than hypotheses or a series of hypotheses. As a proposition of consciousness, each of these is flanked by a double negative: whether the One is, whether the One is not… whether it is fine, whether it is not fine… The negative is an illusion because the form of negation appears with propositions which express the problem on which they depend only by distorting it and obscuring its real structure. Once the problem is translated into hypotheses, each hypothetical affirmation is doubled by a negation, which amounts to the state of a problem betrayed by its shadow. (p. 202)

As in the reflections I posted on Deleuze’s comments on empiricism, I’m struck by the structural or formal similarity between the movement of this argument, and the movement of Marx’s analysis in Capital, which also takes the form of demonstrating how the necessary forms of appearance of a determinate structure operate to conceal the existence of the structure whose existence, however, those forms of appearance also express (cf. Postone on the structure of Marx’s argument). This similarity derives in part from the way in which both authors recognise that, once critique becomes immanent, and thus renounces access to a privileged realm of objective truth, the criticism of competing positions assumes a new form: it becomes incumbent on the critic, not simply to reject competing positions as untrue (for how could this be done, without implying a move into some realm of objectivity?), but to demonstrate the plausibility of those positions, while also criticising them as partial. It becomes necessary, in other words, for critique to become self-reflexive.

Hegel will make a first pass at developing a form for self-reflexive and immanent critique, using the organic and developmental metaphor that shapes of consciousness are successively more adequate attempts to realise the same notion – a position that both Deleuze and Marx, for their own reasons, will reject. Interestingly, in rejecting Hegel’s approach, both Marx and Deleuze then move to a similar notion that consciousness can find itself beguiled by forms of appearance that are necessary modes of expression for structures that manifest only in such forms of appearance, but that are nevertheless also concealed by the forms of appearance in which they become manifest. Deleuze argues that this self-reflexive move – which enables the appearance of negation to be grasped – is essential to a radical critique of negation:

The negative is indeed, therefore, the turning shadow of the problematic upon the set of propositions that it subsumes as cases. As a general rule, the critique of the negative remains ineffective so long as it assumes as given the form of affirmation ready made in the proposition. The critique of the negative is radical and well-grounded only when it carries out a genesis of affirmation and, simultaneously, the genesis of the appearance of negation. (p. 206)

This “radical and well-grounded” critique is what enables Deleuze to exclude negation from the Idea, by identifying the determinate conditions in which the negative will appear:

Consequently – and this is all we wish to say – the negative appears neither in the process of differentiation nor in the process of differenciation. The Idea knows nothing of negation. The first process is identical with the description of a pure positivity, in the form of a problem to which are assigned relations and points, places and functions, positions and differential thresholds which exclude all negative determination and find their sources in the genetic of productive elements of affirmation. The other process is identical with the production of finite engendered affirmations which bear upon the actual terms which occupy these places and positions, and upon the real relations which incarnate these relations and these functions. Forms of the negative do indeed appear in actual terms and real relations, but only insofar as these are cut off from the virtuality which they actualise, and from the moment of their actualisation. Then, and only then, do the finite affirmations appear limited in themselves, opposed to one another, and suffering from lack or privation. In short, the negative is always derived and represented, never original or present: the process of difference and of differenciation is primary in relation to that of the negative and opposition. (p. 207)

There are many other threads in this section I’d like to discuss – in particular, some of Deleuze’s examples of how determinate structures come to be perceived as negatives, which in some respects hug closely to things I’ve written on the blog from time to time, since my work hinges on a similar problem. This section of Difference and Repetition also offers some interesting explicit reflections on Marx, motivated by a different reading than I have used above, but pointing in interesting and suggestive ways to some of the practical implications Deleuze sees from his work. These sorts of issues should wait, though, until I’m a bit less fuzzy and can think them through in a more adequate way. This may well have been true of the comments I’ve already made above 🙂 – I’m just chafing at being ill, and wanting at least to get a bit of writing done before teaching starts up again next week… Hopefully I won’t have done too much damage to the text, in tossing up these very preliminary associations.

Critical Theory, Links, Negations, Self-Reflexivity

What Is To Be Done?

6 Comments Posted by on July 7, 2007

Sinthome from Larval Subjects has re-emerged from a recent silence with a beautiful critical challenge:

Marx famously said that the point of philosophy is not only to explain the world, but to change it. But what is it that is to be explained? What is it that is to be changed? And how is it to be changed?

Sinthome notes – and criticises – the attraction of authoritarian and anarchistic visions of transformation, and then returns to several pivotal questions:

Returning to Marx’s conception of the aim of philosophy, it seems that there are three relevant and interrelated issues:

1. What is to be changed?
2. How is it to be changed?
3. Why does the world take the form it takes at this particular point in history?

Sinthome then suggests the scaffolding for an analytical framework that would seek to analyse potentials for transformation by grasping three main elements: attractors – relatively stable, equilibrium states toward which a system is drawn; vectors – processes through which attractors come to be; and the current state of play at a particular moment in time. Sinthome suggests that different critical theories can be characterised by which of these three elements they emphasise, but argues that the main strength of this approach is not classificatory, but rather practical:

The point of these distinctions is not merely sociological and anthropological. While it is certainly the case that a rich sociology and ethnography could be developed using these concepts– indeed, it could be said that economics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, etc., study nothing but various types of attractors and vectors without using this precise language –the aim is ultimately a response to the first and second questions: “what is to be changed?” and “how is change to be produced?” At what points, in a particular social system, do disequilibriums appear, such that new attractors either become possible or appear? What dimensions of a social formation are to be targeted? Can particular attractors and vectors be strategically targeted, or is the cadence of change an inexorable process immune to social engineering? Can the formation of new attractors be targeted in a precise way, or are we necessarily faced with the demon of unintended consequences when targeting the vector-fields of a particular social system (i.e., we end up with a situation like Pol Pot)? Why is it that certain strategies of transformation are often so unsuccessful? For instance, the protests throughout the world leading up to the current Iraq war? What is it about the current social system that was able to absorb these events without a disruption of the dominant attractors, as if they didn’t even exist or occur? Why did protests have a much greater impact during the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements of the 60s? Is there a relationship, a social memory, that annulled the efficaciousness of the contemporary protest movements? Without posing questions of disequilibrium, it is difficult to pose any of these questions clearly.

I’ve condensed the post severely here – read the original for a real understanding of how the argument unfolds.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Critique

Empirical Questions

2 Comments Posted by on July 5, 2007

As part of my attempt to recover and recharge from the term, I’ve been very casually reading through Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. I was struck by the following passage, which I will reproduce here as a sort of bookmark, without making any assumptions about whether Deleuze intends the passage in the sense that it struck me:

A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction. By detective novel we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have spheres of influence where, as we shall see, they operate in relation to ‘dramas’ and by means of ‘cruelty’. They must have a coherence among themselves, but that coherence must not come from themselves. They must receive their coherence from elsewhere.

This is the secret of empiricism. Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple appeal to lived experience. On the contrary, it undertakes the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard. Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of concepts, but precisely one which treats the concept as object of an encounter, as a here-and-now, or rather as an Erewhon from which emerge inexhaustibly ever new, differently distributed ‘heres’ and ‘nows’. Only an empiricist could say: concepts are indeed things, but things in their free and wild state, beyond ‘anthropological predicates’. I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentred centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differenciates them. The task of modern philosophy is to overcome the alternatives temporal/non-temporal, historical/eternal and particular/universal. Following Nietzsche we discover, as more profound than time and eternity, the untimely: philosophy is neither a philosophy of history, nor a philosophy of the eternal, but untimely, always and only untimely – that is to say, ‘acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come’. Following Samuel Butler, we discover Erewhon, signifying at once the originary ‘nowhere’ and the displaced, disguised, modified and always re-created ‘here-and-now’. Neither empirical particularities nor abstract universals: a Cogito for a dissolved self. We believe in a world in which individuations are impersonal, and singularities are pre-individual: the splendour of the pronoun ‘one’ – whence the science-fiction aspect, which necessarily derives from this Erewhon. What this book should therefore have made apparent is the advent of a coherence which is no more our own, that of mankind, than that of God or the world. (pp.xx-xxi)

Many things strike me about this passage. Deleuze may not mean any of them… ;-P The notion that concepts should be understood as having a relational coherence with other concepts, but that this relational coherence must simultaneously be understood as coming from “elsewhere” – as pointing back to a “local situation” in which those concepts intervene – reminds me of some of the things I’ve occasionally written on Marx’s passing suggestions about logical deduction: Marx implies, particularly in his reflections on Aristotle and the labour theory of value in the first volume of Capital, that certain “logical” relationships become so only once a given local situation can be presupposed – only once a context has been constituted that renders a particular conceptual leap intuitive. The implication is that even the operations of logic – when these are applied to determinate content, when “deductive” reasoning is applied to phenomena in the world – cannot be understood in terms of the operation of an abstract and instrumental procedure, but instead owe their plausibility to the ways in which they incorporate substantive contents that lie ready-to-hand only in very specific situations.

The focus on the mystical nature of empiricism also reminds me of Marx – specifically, Marx’s discussions of the fetish, which revolve precisely around trying to understand how social determination in capitalism presents itself in the historically distinctive shape of an absence of social determination – in the shape of a kind of empiricist sensibility, a “view from nowhere” – Deleuze’s “free and wild state”. Marx suggests that forms of perception and thought that are qualitatively specific to capitalism appear not to be social – not to be historical, even if they are self-evidently historically-emergent – because their distinctive social character consists precisely in their claim to be devoid of social character – in their claim to be devoid of “anthropological predicates”. Thus Marx speaks of political economy as evaluating social institutions from a standpoint in which “there has been history, but there no longer is any”: as simultaneously expressing the corrosive recognition that social determinations exist, that forms of thought and practice can arise and fade away, but also veiling this recognition, by failing to apply this insight self-reflexively to thematise how this recognition itself expresses a distinctive social determination – and therefore failing to ask the pivotal question of how our “empiricist” concepts themselves manifest determinate potentials constituted in particular ways in our local situation.

Marx views political economy as a non-self-reflexive form of thought – and therefore as a form of thought limited to applying its insights negatively and in a backward-looking fashion, to other targets of critique, rather than to itself. For Marx, this means that political economy can recognise the “artificiality” of the institutions and beliefs of other times and places – and can therefore engage in an unmasking and debunking critique that declares this artificiality, that brings this artificiality “to light”. These negative and backward-looking critiques are offered, however, as if from a standpoint free of “anthropological determinations” – and, more importantly, as if the concept of a standpoint free of anthropological determinations were not itself the product of qualitatively distinctive anthropological determinations.

To move beyond this kind of negative, backward-looking critique requires, for Marx, a self-reflexive move that seeks to identify and understand the anthropological determinations that underlie the emergence of the concept of a standpoint free from anthropological determinations. The object of this kind of self-reflexive critique is precisely not to “unmask and debunk”: Marx isn’t seeking simply to point out that political economic thought is itself “guilty” of the same artificiality it discovers in competing forms of thought. The object is instead to link particular kinds of critical insights to the determinate forms of practice constitutive of a “local situation” – and thus to open that situation to a critical exploration of the generative and creative potentials the situation itself possesses.

From this perspective, the distinctive forms of perception and thought associated with empiricism can be recognised and valued for their corrosive and creative potentials – for the ways in which they prime and open us for an appreciation of dimensions of a broader natural world decentred from the human community, for how they sensitise us to the potential for the transformation of human institutions and beliefs. At the same time, we can self-reflexively remain aware that these critical insights do not themselves mean that we have stepped “outside”, into a position of neutrality or asociality – instead, these insights are themselves expressions of a determinate form of social imbrication. Understanding the determinate characteristics of our social – the distinctive forms of practice and interconnection – that open us to such critical forms of perception and thought, will help us understand and cultivate the immanent potentials for transcendence that our context generates.

I offer all of this, of course, more in the spirit of free association, than as anything substantively connected with Deleuze. While I found the passage striking for the thoughts it provoked, I am not trying here to suggest anything about Deleuze’s position – to which perhaps I can return in a more informed way, once I have read in much greater depth.

Critical Theory, Critique, Empiricism, Materialism, Negations, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

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