Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Outline of a Practice of Theory

8 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 17, 2007

Just a quick pointer to Alexei’s “Philosophy and Social Change” over at Now-Times. In this post, Alexei picks up more systematically on several of the threads from the recent discussions here and at The Kugelmass Episodes (cross-posted to The Valve) on how to conceptualise the relationship of theory and practice. A brief teaser:

Such a concepion of the import of Theory for social, ‘radical’ change, might shift the implicit question that seems to guide the current politicization of the humanities. The predominant view that the Humanities lack any immediate effect hen it comes to social and political change of certain tendencies of theory, which is concentrated in Literary studies and Philosophy, or perhaps even from Anthropology and Sociology, stems from a guilty conscience that ‘necessarily attaches to our precise social position: we can study only within a system, but the price of being able to study is effectively the renunciation of any direct, practical activity. We don’t build bridges, or even dig ditches. We don’t save lives, or even make them ‘better’ (or maybe that’s just me and my relationship to my students). And since there are only 24 hours in the day, and some of us are profoundly lazy, we simply can’t be as directly engaged as we think we ought to be. Being an academic these days amounts to a guilty conscience precisely because we are aware of our paradoxical situation. We rely upon a system we wish to change and simultaneously insulate ourselves from this very system in order to pursue our academic — and generally impractical in the short term — studies. More than anything else, I think that the burgeoning guilt of being an academic (in the Humanities) accounts for the politicization of various fields in the humanities.

Now, I’m certainly not claiming that this is a bad thing. I would, however, like to point out that no one, prior to, say, May ‘68, would have ever thought that the humanities were somehow ineffectual. And it’s this shift that needs to be investigated.

I’ll have to apologise to both Alexei and Joe, as well as to anyone else who has been following these exchanges, for not being able to dive into this discussion in greater detail: I’m in the middle of some particularly difficult conceptual work at the moment, and need to remain a bit single-minded for the next several days. So, while I may (or may not!) toss up some further contributions to the series of posts on Capital, as these posts relate to what I’m currently working on, my ability to participate in other discussions will be severely curtailed for the moment. In the interim, there’s all kinds of interesting stuff going on in the comments here without me (!), and in Alexei’s post at Now-Times – and I do promise to pick up the various hanging threads from this discussion as soon as I can free myself of my current domination by the form of Value… ;-P

Conversations, Critique, Social Movements, Transformation

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Reflections on the “Greatest Difficulty”

7 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 15, 2007

In the Preface to the first German edition of Capital, Marx notes:

Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty.

Marx begins Capital with a chapter on commodities. Why this beginning? And what kind of difficulty, exactly, does this beginning present?

The other day, writing on the textual strategy in Capital, I suggested that one of the things that makes this text difficult – far more difficult, in fact, that the text appears to be at first glance – is that Marx starts with an immanently voiced presentation that aims to present nothing, initially, other than the forms of phenomenological experience “given” immanently within capitalism, and expressed by political economy (and other forms of thought Marx wishes to embed). I suggested that Marx starts from these forms of “givenness”, and then gradually unfolds other, more complex, categories – trying to make the case that the possibility for these more complex categories is already presupposed by the initial forms of “givenness” with which he begins. The strategic intention here is complex.

On one level – and over the course of Capital as a whole – Marx will suggest that the initial, apparently simple and “primitive” categories with which he begins, themselves could not exist – would not be “given” – without the whole complex social structure that Marx proceeds to analyse in the rest of the text. These simple initial categories, from which Marx appears to “deduce” more complex categories in the opening sections of Capital, are thus gradually revealed over the course of the argument to be products or end results of a process of historical development, rather than decontextualised and ahistorical starting points of Marx’s analysis. These products, however, are also productive: the results of this historical process provide the materials (“subjective” and “objective” – practical) to point beyond the process that produced them.

Which brings us to the other strategic intention of this mode of argument: Marx is trying to engage in an immanent social critique – and therefore needs to show that capitalism, in reproducing itself, also generates potentials that can react back on this process of reproduction and therefore ground the potential for transformative practice and critique. The immanent voicing of the text is one of the ways that Marx tries to flag, on a stylistic level, that this kind of immanent social critique is possible: by showing how phenomenological experiences that are part-and-parcel of capitalism – that presuppose capitalism and are themselves demonstrated to be the historical products of this social system – also and necessarily (if tacitly and unintentionally) express the contradictory potentials of this social form, Marx is trying to suggest that we do not need to reach outside capitalism to overcome this social form: that the resources necessary for transformation are already present, generated within that social form itself.

This concern with immanent voicing explains why Marx doesn’t begin his presentation somewhere else: with, for example, a declaration that capitalism is unjust, or a call to revolutionary arms, or a polemic about the conceptual limitations of political economy. Instead, he starts within capitalism – with the practices and forms of thought given by, and intuitive within, this system. He then gradually shows how these practices and forms of thought themselves betray the possibility, first, for us to understand their own intuitiveness – for us to grasp how these specific givens are given – and, second, for us to criticise these givens as partial, with reference to other perspectives that can also be shown to be immanently generated within the same social field – other perspectives whose existence is, in fact, implied by the partial perspectives expressed by political economy.

As previously discussed, the strategy here is Hegelian – with theoretical concerns that interact in complex ways with principles set out in discussions like this one, from Hegel’s Phenomenology:

Among the many consequences that follow from what has been said, it is of importance to emphasize this, that knowledge is only real and can only be set forth fully in the form of science, in the form of system; and further, that a so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, even if it is true, is yet none the less false just because and in so far as it is merely a fundamental proposition, merely a first principle. It is for that reason easily refuted. The refutation consists in bring out its defective character, and it is defective because it is merely the universal, merely a principle, the beginning. If the refutation is complete and thorough, it is derived and developed from the nature of the principle itself, and not accomplished by bringing in from elsewhere other counter assurances and chance fancies. It would be strictly the development of the principle, and thus the completion of its deficiency, were it not that it misunderstands its own purport by taking account solely of the negative aspect of what it seeks to do, and is not conscious of the positive character of its process and result. The really positive working out of the beginning is at the same time just as much the very reverse, it is a negative attitude towards the principle we start from, negative, that is to say, of its one-sided form, which consists in being primarily immediate, a mere purpose. It may therefore be regarded as a refutation of what constitutes the basis of the system; but more correctly it should be looked at as a demonstration that the basis or principle of the system is in point of fact merely its beginning. (24 – bold text mine)

Hegel presents here the notion of a form of “refutation” or critique that is not simply an abstract “negation” – that does not simply reject what it sets out to criticise. Instead, critique takes the form of unfolding, from what initially appears to be a first principle or a simple, immediate universal, a demonstration of the way in which the “first principle” actually immanently undermines, or symptomatically reveals the inadequacy of, its own self-understanding as a “basis”. The unfolded analysis thus enables a critique of the perception that something is a “first principle”, but in a manner that preserves or “grounds” that “first principle” by determining it as a moment or partial perspective within an overarching system.

I’m sure this clarifies everything for everyone… ;-P My main point here is simply to gesture to some of the ways in which Marx’s vision of critique – and his presentational style – is not individually idiosyncratic, but can be situated in relation to Marx’s dialogue with Hegel’s work. The initial passages of Capital can most productively be read, I am suggesting, with certain Hegelian presentational and analytical principles in mind. Passages like the following, with which Hegel begins his discussion of Sense-Certainty, suggest some of what is involved. Hegel writes:

THE knowledge, which is at the start or immediately our object, can be nothing else than just that which is immediate knowledge, knowledge of the immediate, of what is. We have, in dealing with it, to proceed, too, in an immediate way, to accept what is given, not altering anything in it as it is presented before us, and keeping mere apprehension (Auffassen) free from conceptual comprehension (Begreifen). (90)

Hegel then proceeds (and not just in this section, but each time he moves to a new phenomenological perspective) to remind his reader that they cannot have direct recourse to the “for us” from whose perspective the text has actually been written: that they must instead unfold all insights immanently, as these would be given to each shape of consciousness under consideration. Look, for example, at the shifts between “we” and “it”, and at the use of words like “appear” and “seems” and “given”, in this passage from Phenomenology – looking not so much for the contents of the argument Hegel is trying to make here (much of which I’ve excised for brevity), but for the standards of argument that Hegel puts into play:

The concrete content, which sensuous certainty furnishes, makes this prima facie appear to be the richest kind of knowledge, to be even a knowledge of endless wealth–a wealth to which we can as little find any limit when we traverse its extent in space and time, where that content is presented before us, as when we take a fragment out of the abundance it offers us and by dividing and dividing seek to penetrate its intent. Besides that, it seems to be the truest, the most authentic knowledge: for it has not as yet dropped anything from the object; it has the object before itself in its entirety and completeness….

92. But, when we look closely, there is a good deal more implied in that bare pure being, which constitutes the kernel of this form of certainty, and is given out by it as its truth. A concrete actual certainty of sense is not merely this pure immediacy, but an example, an instance, of that immediacy….

93. It is not only we who make this distinction of essential truth and particular example, of essence and instance, immediacy and mediation; we find it in sense-certainty itself, and it has to be taken up in the form in which it exists there, not as we have just determined it. One of them is put forward in it as existing in simple immediacy, as the essential reality, the object. The other, however, is put forward as the non-essential, as mediated, something which is not per se in the certainty, but there through something else, ego, a state of knowledge which only knows the object because the object is, and which can as well be as not be. The object, however, is the real truth, is the essential reality; it is, quite indifferent to whether it is known or not; it remains and stands even though it is not known, while the knowledge does not exist if the object is not there.

94. We have thus to consider as to the object, whether in point of fact it does exist in sense-certainty itself as such an essential reality as that certainty gives it out to be; whether its meaning and notion, which is to be essential reality, corresponds to the way it is present in that certainty. We have for that purpose not to reflect about it and ponder what it might be in truth, but to deal with it merely as sense-certainty contains it.

95. Sense-certainty itself has thus to be asked: What is the This? (90-95, bold text mine)

In passages like this, Hegel outlines standards for an immanently-unfolded argument – in particular, the standard that the argument must proceed only on the basis of what is given to whatever shape of consciousness is being analysed. To meet these standards, Hegel provides long, immanently-voiced analyses, which seek to describe what is available from within particular perspectives. These immanently-voiced sections are then used critically – to show how each particular perspective points beyond itself – how each perspective suggests the necessity for something that, at the outset, would have appeared alien to the perspective under investigation.

Hegel isn’t, though, particularly shy about telling his readers what his presentational strategy is – what these immanently-voiced passages are intended to achieve. He also doesn’t hesitate to editorialise in the margins of his immanently-voiced argument, foreshadowing the conclusions the immanent analysis will draw.

Marx, in a sense, takes the issue of immanent voice more seriously – making his text far more unforgiving of readers who overlook the technical meaning or precise strategic intention of certain key phrases that bookend his presentation. Thus, in the very first sentence of chapter one, Marx thinks he is providing sufficient warning of his immanently-voiced, phenomenologically embedded, approach, when he begins:

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity. (bold text mine)

He offers other subtle flags as he unfolds new categories:

Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms. (bold text mine)

After these initial categories of use value and exchange value are introduced, Marx proceeds to offer what look like either deductive or definitional elaborations from those initial categories. The text is often read as though Marx is setting out his “first principles” or the key terms on which he will rely subsequently in the text, and then proceeding from these “incontrovertible” or “certain” foundations, to more complex aspects of his own analysis. I am suggesting instead that Marx is not speaking in his own voice much at all in these early passages – Hegel’s chatty stage whispers on textual strategy, as well as his constant foreshadowings of how things look “for us”, are largely missing from Marx’s text, while Marx tries to explore how capitalism “gives” itself to us – attempting to express the forms of perception and thought and practice that appear intuitive to people individuated within this context. He will then try – as Hegel also does – to demonstrate how these “givens” ultimately react back on themselves, undermining their givenness as “first principles”, and suggesting the need for a form of analysis that will instead capture them as products and as partial.

So a passage like the following, on use value, looks like nothing more than a definition – and a fairly obvious and intuitive one at that:

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.

Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history. So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention.

The utility of a thing makes it a use value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities. Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.

Only in the footnotes – and in a typically wry way – does Marx explicitly hint that “we” are not meant to agree fully with the definitional, and tacitly ahistorical, presentation offered in the main text. Marx’s footnotes offer a subterranean narrative quite distinct from the more immediately striking, overt narrative presented in the eye-catching centre of vision in the main text. As always, for Marx, the style of presentation mirrors the content of the critique: critical perspectives thus are available, even in these earliest moments of the text – but what is most immediately striking, and what therefore tends to distract the eye and the mind, is the central and textually prominent discussion of those forms of perception and thought that most evidently “give” themselves to awareness under capitalism – the reader has to work to unearth the counter-narrative suggested by the structure of the text. The footnotes map, for the most part without any explicit commentary on the strategic intention of this textual strategy, the earliest historical moment at which each position recounted in the text came to be articulated. This citational strategy got Marx into trouble in his own time, as hostile readers took Marx to be illegitimately citing these historical sources as support for his own views. Engels eventually attempts to clarify Marx’s strategic intent in the Preface to the 3rd German edition:

In conclusion a few words on Marx’s art of quotation, which is so little understood. When they are pure statements of fact or descriptions, the quotations, from the English Blue books, for example, serve of course as simple documentary proof. But this is not so when the theoretical views of other economists are cited. Here the quotation is intended merely to state where, when and by whom an economic idea conceived in the course of development was first clearly enunciated. Here the only consideration is that the economic conception in question must be of some significance to the history of science, that it is the more or less adequate theoretical expression of the economic situation of its time. But whether this conception still possesses any absolute or relative validity from the standpoint of the author or whether it already has become wholly past history is quite immaterial. Hence these quotations are only a running commentary to the text, a commentary borrowed from the history of economic science, and establish the dates and originators of certain of the more important advances in economic theory.

In stressing such strategic elements of Marx’s presentational strategy, I don’t wish to imply that Marx never breaks with his immanent voice. Increasingly he will do so in the text itself – initially mainly in transitional points, but the immanent analysis is of course intended to demonstrate that it is possible to unfold, from within what is “given” by capitalism, the categories that allow for a more explicit expression of Marx’s own critical standpoint in the main text. Even very early, Marx can’t always restrain himself, and he periodically bursts into sarcastic meta-commentary in the footnotes on the historical sources he cites. In the third footnote of the first chapter, for example – the footnote that hangs off the sentence “To discover the various uses of things is the work of history.” – Marx couples his historical citation with a dryly sarcastic observation:

“Things have an intrinsick vertue” (this is Barbon’s special term for value in use) “which in all places have the same vertue; as the loadstone to attract iron” (l.c., p. 6). The property which the magnet possesses of attracting iron, became of use only after by means of that property the polarity of the magnet had been discovered. (bold text mine)

The meta-commentary Marx is making here is extremely subtle (and also, I should note, isn’t phrased as precisely as Marx will put similar points in other places). I draw attention to it, however, because recognising that a meta-commentary is being made – already, in these opening passages – becomes important for fleshing out what Marx is trying to do in pivotal (but often misread) sections like the later discussion of commodity fetishism. Let’s spend a bit of time with this footnote.

In the main text, the form of thought being analysed – the form of thought that reflects the way things “present” in capitalist societies – looks at first glance like a historicising form of thought: how could it not be historicising, to point out that discovering the uses of things is the “work of history”?

And yet. The concept of “discovery”, as a way of understanding historical change, has strangely dehistoricising implications: for something to be “discovered”, it must already somehow be present – existent – waiting to be unveiled. “History” here – thematised as “discovery” – is a process that uncovers something that is already there – a process of unveiling – a process of uncovering what lies in wait within nature, which itself is thematised as possessing timeless and invariant traits, and as intrinsically devoid of anthropological determinations.

Marx’s sarcastic aside re-presents the loadstone’s properties, not as some timeless “intrinsick vertue” patiently waiting to be unveiled, but as something actively constituted as relevant for us by the way in which a particular kind of interaction with a natural object comes to be rendered socially meaningful in practice – in use, through the emergence of a particular kind of collective activity. Marx hints here at the importance of situating what present themselves as “discoveries” of the timeless and intrisic properties of things, in the context of shifts in collective practice that render socially meaningful a sensitivity to some specific selection from among the universe of determinate potentials tacit within natural objects.

Marx’s comments here are reminiscent of a criticism that he will repeatedly make of the political economists: that their specific mode of historicisation fails to be reflexive – that it falls short of treating their own position as fully historical – that it captures that capitalism is historically-emergent, but still somehow treats capitalism as a “natural” form of society – that it treats its insights as “discoveries” of principles that are “given”, but fails to analyse the determinate ways in which that particular given comes to be given, in this specific form, with determinate properties that necessitate that what is given possesses non-explicit properties that need to be “discovered” in a particular way.

Marx will hit this same point over and over again as he unfolds his analysis: he is constantly suggesting, on many different layers in the text, that qualitative characteristics that we intuitively take to be “natural” – more specifically, that we take to be material – are instead social. He means this in a more fundamental sense than may be apparent at first glance. As we will see when we reach the section on commodity fetishism, Marx will suggest that the very notion of a “material world” must be understood as a product of human practice – not in the sense that all of nature can be reduced to a human construction, but in the sense that the intuitive gestalt of “materialism” – of “matter” – of a natural world that exists independently of human cultural and social determinations – is the distinctive cultural and social determination that our society projects onto “nature”. (Describing this in terms of “projection” is a simplification – the term isn’t fully adequate to the requirements of an immanent critique. To avoid overcomplication at this stage in the analysis, however, I’ll stay with this expression for now, with the caveat that this issue will need to be revisited more adequately at a later point.) Marx will try to argue that we do this, of course. But, more importantly (since many theorists will “declare” the notion of “materialism” to be a cultural construct – and thus offer an “abstract negation” or ungrounded negation or oppositional stance to the notion of materialism), Marx will also try to show how we do this – why this is not a contingent or arbitrary form of perception and thought, but is instead deeply (if unintentionally) embedded in specific forms of collective practice. It is this that makes his account a determinate negation of materialism.

More on this, and other elements of the text, next time I return to this theme…

[Citational note: Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Capital are taken from the text of Chapter 1, Section 1 available at the Marxists Internet Archive; all quotes from Hegel’s Phenomenology are from the online text here.]

Critical Theory, Fetish, Materialism, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

Gender and the Culture of Academic Philosophy

15 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 14, 2007

Rushing, and unfortunately I don’t have time to write on this in detail at the moment, but I wanted to point those who hadn’t yet seen it to Sally Haslanger’s piece “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)”, which begins:

There is a deep well of rage inside of me. Rage about how I as an individual have been treated in philosophy; rage about how others I know have been treated; and rage about the conditions that I’m sure affect many women and minorities in philosophy, and have caused many others to leave. Most of the time I suppress this rage and keep it sealed away. Until I came to MIT in 1998, I was in a constant dialogue with myself about whether to quit philosophy, even give up tenure, to do something else. In spite of my deep love for philosophy, it just didn’t seem worth it. And I am one of the very lucky ones. One of the ones who has been successful by the dominant standards of the profession. Whatever the numbers say about women and minorities in philosophy, numbers don’t begin to tell the story. Things may be getting better in some contexts, but they are far from acceptable. (from the online version posted here – final published piece in Hypatia Spring 2008)

She continues:

Why there aren’t more women of my cohort in philosophy? Because there were very few of us and there was a lot of outright discrimination. I think a lot of philosophers aren’t aware of what women in the profession deal with, so let me give some examples. In my year at Berkeley and in the two years ahead of me and two years behind me, there was only one woman each year in a class of 8-10. The women in the two years ahead of me and the two years behind me dropped out, so I was the only woman left in five consecutive classes. In graduate school I was told by one of my teachers that he had “never seen a first rate woman philosophy and never expected to because women were incapable of having seminal ideas.” I was the butt of jokes when I received a distinction on my prelims, since it seemed funny to everyone to suggest I should get a blood test to determine if I was really a woman. In a seminar in philosophical logic, I was asked to give a presentation on a historical figure when none of the other (male) students were, later to learn that this was because the professor assumed I’d be writing a thesis on the history of philosophy. When I was at Penn as a junior faculty member and told a senior colleague that I was going to be married (to another philosopher, Stephen Yablo, then at UM), his response was, “Oh, I’m so sorry we’ll be losing you.” This was in 1989.

I’ve written here before about the frank discussions people feel comfortable having in front of me about whether “young women” – especially “young mothers” – can handle this or that position for which I’m being considered. I’ve been getting the “are you really female” jokes (or the simple declarative: “you aren’t really female”) since I was a young child. In my previous program, I found myself continuously having to explain that being female, and having theoretical interests, did not mean that I considered myself a “feminist theorist”: people kept asking whether, instead of working on whatever I was trying to work on, I wouldn’t rather “do something about women” instead. At any rate – not enough time to discuss this properly now, and the topic tends to evoke non-productive fury. I’ll leave it here for the moment: go read the article and the discussions, which will be more useful than what I would rant about right now…

The discussions at Inside Higher Education, Lumpenprofessoriat, and Crooked Timber are also worth a look.

Professional Life

Fragment on Textual Strategy in Capital

12 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 12, 2007

Marx is, as a rule, sparse in his explicit methodological reflections. Major sections of Capital often begin in the voice of a position Marx will subsequently invert, such that what initially appear to be abstract definitions integral to Marx’s own stance, are revealed in later sections to be forms of thought Marx is trying to criticise. Even where this critical edge is recognised, it can be unclear what sort of critique Marx is offering: his frequent use of metaphors of moving from light to darkness, or from surface to depth, can suggest that Marx is engaging in a form of “abstract negation” – that he is trying to unmask and debunk “surface” illusions against a more essential “depth” reality. Thus, a particularly common reading of Marx is that he is criticising the illusory values of the sphere of circulation – which Marx delightfully describes as “Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” – against the authoritarian realities of production.

At pivotal transition points in the text, however, Marx suggests that another strategy may be in play. His central analytical category – value – is expressly described at key moments as a social form that is expressed in both circulation and production, generated in both, but reducible to neither. I discussed one example of this at the end of the recent post on Marx’s discussion of the general formula for capital. Another, more famous, example can be found in the discussion of commodity fetishism in section 4 of chapter 1:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development. And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.

Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself.

Marx explicitly rejects here the notion that either of the intuitive phenomenal categories put forward by classical political economy – use-value or exchange-value – offers a clear insight into the distinctive qualitative characteristics Marx wants to grasp through the category of value. He gestures quickly to the factors in terms of which the political economists claim to explain use value and exchange value – the satisfaction of human wants, the expenditure of human labour power measured by time, and the process of producing for others – and argues that nothing intrinsic to these factors accounts for the peculiar qualitative characteristics of value.

The textual strategy here – the motivating concept of critique – is Hegelian. Marx is not abstractly negating the categories of use value or exchange value – he is not dismissing the forms of thought characteristic of political economy as “mere” illusion. He is instead setting up for an argument that the phenomenological self-understanding of political economy both expresses, and yet fails to grasp, the social field in which this form of thought is embedded.

Marx is here beginning to position the phenomenological self-understanding of political economy as a necessary moment that arises within, and expresses determinate aspects of, an overarching process. Marx’s critique thus takes the form of embedding the phenomenological self-understanding of political economy – of demonstrating that he can make sense of why the forms of perception and thought characteristic of political economy arise – while also revealing this phenomenological self-understanding as partial and inadequate to grasping the overarching process within which it is but a moment. To be adequate to this form of critique, Marx will need to unfold an explanation of competing forms of thought that reveals them to be determinate moments within an overarching process, while also providing an account of that overarching process that reflexively explains the standpoint for Marx’s own critique.

If this textual strategy is not recognised, much of the strategic intention of the first volume of Capital remains opaque. Marx spends an enormous amount of time in this text on careful logical “derivations” and immanently-voiced presentations of various elements of classical political economy (and other forms of thought he is also trying to embed) – only then to jump abruptly into passages that directly contradict what he was carefully outlining in earlier sections. Such rapid shifts can seem deeply perplexing, if the abrupt transitions aren’t seen as transitions from an immanently-voiced presentation, into the perspective offered by Marx’s own developed critique. The strategy is similar to Hegel’s constant movement between, e.g., “in itself” and “for us” in Phenomenology – carefully exploring what can be seen from a very particular phenomenological perspective, in order to demonstrate that these phenomenological perspectives actually can’t make sense of – are not adequate to – what they purport to grasp, and are therefore constantly expressing or symptomatically betraying the existence of a more adequate perspective – pointing toward the “for us” that is the actual standpoint from which the text is written. Hegel stage whispers more often, and provides a more explicit account of the point of this textual strategy – just to take one example, in the Preface to Phenomenology:

But contradiction as between philosophical systems is not wont to be conceived in this way; on the other hand, the mind perceiving the contradiction does not commonly know how to relieve it or keep it free from its onesidedness, and to recognize in what seems conflicting and inherently antagonistic the presence of mutually necessary moments.

The demand for such explanations, as also the attempts to satisfy this demand, very easily, pass for the essential business philosophy has to undertake. Where could the inmost truth of a philosophical work be found better expressed than in its purposes and results? and in what way could these be more definitely known than through their distinction from what is produced during the same period by others working in the same field? If, however, such procedure is to pass for more than the beginning of knowledge, if it is to pass for actually knowing, then we must, in point of fact, look on it as a device for avoiding the real business at issue, an attempt to combine the appearance of being in earnest and taking trouble about the subject with an actual neglect of the subject altogether. For the real subject-matter is not exhausted in its purpose, but in working the matter out; nor is the mere result attained the concrete whole itself, but the result along with the process of arriving at it. The purpose of itself is a lifeless universal, just as the general drift is a mere activity in a certain direction, which is still without its concrete realization; and the naked result is the corpse of the system which has left its guiding tendency behind it. Similarly, the distinctive difference of anything is rather the boundary, the limit, of the subject; it is found at that point where the subject-matter stops, or it is what this subject-matter is not. To trouble oneself in this fashion with the purpose and results, and again with the differences, the positions taken up and judgments passed by one thinker and another, is therefore an easier task than perhaps it seems. For instead of laying hold of the matter in hand, a procedure of that kind is all the while away from the subject altogether. Instead of dwelling within it and becoming absorbed by it, knowledge of that sort is always grasping at something else; such knowledge, instead keeping to the subject-matter and giving itself up to it, never gets away from itself. The easiest thing of all is to pass judgments on what has a solid substantial content; it is more difficult to grasp it, and most of all difficult to do both together and produce the systematic exposition of it.

The beginning of culture and of the struggle to pass out of the unbroken immediacy of naive Psychical life has always to be made by acquiring knowledge of universal principles and points of view, by striving, in the first instance, to work up simply to the thought of the subject-matter in general, not forgetting at the same time to give reasons for supporting it or refuting it, to apprehend the concrete riches and fullness contained in its various determinate qualities, and to know how to furnish a coherent, orderly account of it and a responsible judgment upon it. This beginning of mental cultivation will, however, very soon make way for the earnestness of actual life in all its fullness, which leads to a living experience of the subject-matter itself; and when, in addition, conceptual thought strenuously penetrates to the very depths of its meaning, such knowledge and style of judgment will keep their clue place in everyday thought and conversation. (2-4)

Marx is much less explicit that he also regards critique as a detailed immanent working out of the necessity of the positions being criticised, rather than as a rejection of the purpose or results of a competing approach (the conventional notion of “critique”, which Hegel sarcastically labels “a dogmatic assurance exactly like the view we are opposing” (6)). Marx’s methodological subtlety occasionally provokes Engels to remind Marx that not all readers will be well-versed in Hegelian dialectics, and to demand a much clearer and more direct form of presentation. While Marx does explicitly voice his “for us” – tipping explicitly the standpoint of his critique – periodically in the text, he tends to do this in the interstices, leaving the reader to work through a great deal of immanently-voiced material whose strategic point has not yet been flagged explicitly in the text.

***

No time to edit – horror teaching day today… Hopefully I can revisit the section on the fetish in more detail soon…

Critical Theory, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

What Is Radical?

15 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 8, 2007

Hopefully Alexei won’t mind if I lift his latest comment into a more prominent space. The original context for the comment I’m reproducing below is in the still-percolating discussion of self-reflexivity: this comment was posted here, and was written as a direct response to this comment from Joe. I don’t want to deflect the original discussion, but my feeling was that Alexei’s response raises issues that are much more general (and – without speaking for Joe – might also be closer to the sorts of issues Joe has been trying to discuss all along). Alexei here defends a particular understanding of the value of theory and of the nature of radical transformation, to which I would like to draw attention:

Joseph,

while I too share your concern for the practicality of theory or philosophy, and I agree with you hat there is no such thing as ‘neutral theorizing.’ But I’m not at all sure I would agree with either of your metaphors. Like you, I don’t buy the idea that theory is mere observation. Nor, however do i think that there is an incisive — and decisive — moment, which, if missed, signals the failure to actualize whatever possibility it uncovered. Even if one picks the lock to an other’s home, bt takes nothing, and the other installs a new deadbolt, one still has the tools — and the skill — to pick it again, not to mention the knowledge of where the valuables are kept. As I see the matter, only fashion and reactionary politics can be “revolutionary”; Radical change, I think, is slow in coming.

So, if I might proffer my own analogy, I tend to think that philosophy/theory is much more like (but not identical to) Schrödinger’s box in that it is always already a world constituting and transforming intervention — although its effects are not as immediate or as direct as perhaps we would like them to be. It’s objects are social kinds, and hence produced by social practices, which can be changed by different modes of thinking. To pick up the example you used here, we need only think about the number of people who smoke today, compared to the number of folks who smoked in the first half of the 20th Century. And, while it may be true that I can come to recognize that I am addicted to cigarettes, and that smoking is killing me (however slowly), but nevertheless continue to smoke — and enjoy it — I may also affirm the various anti-smoking (by-)laws that prohibit smoking in public places, attempt to make sure minors cannot begin to smoke, etc. I can change the way we think about smoking. And, with a little luck smoking will be passé, a few generations down the road, . It may not help me, but it nevertheless changes the complexion of our social spheres.

Similarly, a theorist pursues a political interest by thinking and writing about it (I realize this probably sounds naive, but please bear with me). He disseminates his mode of thought by talking, by teaching, and by publishing, though not necessarily to bring about any immediate change, but rather to initiate its possibility (think here of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex). That is to say, a theorist creates politically important issues by making them public.

Now, perhaps I’m too patient, but I’m sceptical of every brand of millinerian theory, any Leninist avant-guardism (like Zizek’s), which promises that the revolution is (or could be) imminent, or that Utopia must come here and now. I’m sceptical of quick fixes, since they tend to come in moments of crisis, of implacable guilt, and they only lead to the continuation of crisis. At the moment, I actually think that we need more thinking, and less (mindless, instinctual, or responsive) action. We need to understand what it means to act politically, what a political action entails, whom it affects, and what it requires. And all this is this is a far cry from picking a lock, and stealing the establishment’s stereo for the good of the folks on the street.

I admit that, while I might tinker around the margins, I am sympathetic to the positions Alexei is sketching here.

We have no shortage of revolutions. Capitalism is a dynamic social form, which reproduces itself through dramatic cascades of structural transformation. The dynamic nature of the context means that it is extremely easy to confuse whatever transformation happens to follow the next crisis, with a movement toward liberation. The distinctive form of social reproduction – and the abstract character of what is being reproduced – makes it particularly important for transformative practice to gain a sense of what our context is, how the context operates, how the context is reproduced – and means that these questions lack simple and intuitive answers.

This doesn’t mean that no meaningful or important action can take place without some particular theoretical insight. It doesn’t mean that theory is a unique or exceptionalised reservoir of critical ideals. It certainly doesn’t mean that theorists have any “vanguardist” place in the leadership of social movements. It does mean that the dichotomy often drawn between “theory” and “practice” may be uniquely and specifically debilitating – may function as a form of “ideology” in the service of social reproduction – if we are oriented toward achieving emancipatory change in the present time.

Theory is a moment within collective practice, a moment which seeks to recognise and work through the implications of potentials that collective practice has already created (often unintentionally and unawares), a moment that seeks – along with other forms of practice – to deepen, extend and cultivate those potentials, to make them more available for targeted and deliberate political action in the service of emancipatory goals. The premise here is not that theoretical insight is somehow immediately and intrinsically transformative – that theory will snap its conceptual fingers, break the spell of identification, and instantaneously liberate us all. The premise is that, even in conditions where the spell is already broken and desires for liberation hang palpable in the air, we still need to work out how to extricate ourselves from the cycle that William Morris describes so well:

…men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name…

Critique, Transformation

Carded (Updated)

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 7, 2007

Since I clearly have nothing substantive to read and write about…

I seem to remember L Magee having an idea like this some months back – theorycards:

The Theory.org.uk Trading Cards are a pack of 32 online cards featuring theorists and concepts close to the hearts of people interested in social and cultural theory, gender and identity, and media studies.

It’s very funny – I was just telling someone yesterday that Adorno is most widely known as “that guy who wrote elitist things on popular culture”. What timely confirmation! ;-P

My favourite description, though, has to be of Luhmann, whose answer to the question “what are your research plans” I might consider borrowing…

Hat tip Wildly Parenthetical – whose post also preserves a priceless reflection on the theoretical symptomology of styles of baldness.

Updated to add: Andrew over at Union Street seems to think these trading cards are “tokens to true nerdiness” – but hasn’t he seen the game that goes along with them? Doesn’t he believe most people would want to spend their evenings doing something like this?

1. Divide cards between players.

2. Decide who will go first.

3. The player whose turn it is, studies the card on top of their pile and selects either ‘Strengths‘, ‘Weaknesses / Risks‘ or ‘Special Skills‘.

4. All players then look at their own top card, and discuss who has got the best characteristic in this category.

For example:

— The Giddens risk, “Misguided postmodernists may attack”, is preferable to the Butler weakness, “Increasingly impenetrable writing style”. (It doesn’t matter if some postmodernists misunderstand your argument and slag you off. But if no-one can understand your argument in the first place, that’s bad). So here, when comparing ‘Weaknesses / Risks‘ , the player with the Giddens card wins (unless someone else’s card beats theirs).

— The Foucault strength, “Model of power innovative and realistic” is better than the Psychologists strength, “Resistance to postmodern self-doubt”. (Self-belief isn’t much of a contribution to the world, but good ideas are). So here, when comparing ‘Strengths‘ , the player with the Foucault card wins (unless someone else’s card beats theirs).

5. The winning player takes one card — the card which just lost that battle — from each other player.

6. If several players are involved, the discussions about who has the superior characteristic on their card will inevitably be more complex. In case of dispute, a majority vote decides the outcome. If this still does not decide it, then for God’s sake, go and watch TV instead or something.

7. The player with all (or most) of the cards at the end, wins.

Actually, my reading group sessions sort of work like this already… (Hmm… I wonder what sorts of cards could be written about the reading group members… ;-P)

Links, Procrastination, Reading Group

Tracking Conversations?

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 4, 2007

I just wanted to draw attention to Adam’s technical question, posted in a comment below:

Great discussions like this one make me think there is a gap in our technology.

What I want is a metasite that only tracks conversations. It would represent the posts (including comments) relevant for any conversation sorted by time posted and post responded to, much like a threaded forum or mailing list. Does this exist? Can anyone make it?

Does anyone have a good workaround they’ve been using to keep track of this sort of thing?

To be honest, I tend to follow conversations via RSS readers and via wandering off to check out incoming links, and have therefore never looked into conversation tracking tools. On a very quick glance around (it’s amazing how motivating marking can be… ;-P), something like blogpulse’s Conversation Tracker looks designed to do something like what Adam is after.

When I entered the URL for the theoretical pessimism post at this blog, for example, it generated this. For Sinthome’s Problems of Self-Reflexivity, which was the more proximate epicentre of this discussion, it produces this. Some moments of the broader conversation drop out of these searches, perhaps because of the specific URLs with which I started – the discussions at Nate’s what in the hell… and Gabriel’s Self and World are two that come to mind…

Other ideas? How do people tend to track these things, once they start unfolding? This strikes me as the kind of thing that Kerim over at Keywords might have some thoughts on, perhaps… Or maybe GGollings or LMagee?

Blogging, Conversations, Procrastination

As It Is

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on September 3, 2007

I’ve spent the weekend trying to piece together abstracts and get my head around things I will present for various upcoming events – an activity that has torn my thoughts into all sorts of directions other than where I wanted to be thinking right now. Too scattered for focussed posting, and heading into my teaching week, which typically doesn’t leave me with time for substantive comments, I thought I should at least toss up something to change the scenery. 😉

From Adrienne Rich “The Spirit of Place” II & V

taking on the world

as it is   not as we wish it

as it is   not as we work for it

to be

…

The world as it is: not as her users boast

damaged beyond reclamation by their using

Ourselves as we are   in these painful motions

of staying cognizant: some part of us always

out beyond ourselves

knowing   knowing   knowing

Are we all in training for something we don't name?

to exact reparation for things

done long ago to us and to those who did not

survive what was done to them   whom we ought to honor

with grief   with fury   with action

Critique, Self-Reflexivity, Transformation

Getting from A to Z

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on September 1, 2007

So I had an extended meeting the other day Read more of this post

Supervision

Spring Research Carnival

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

So that presentation on blogging that I mentioned a couple of weeks back, which was originally tentatively scheduled for today, has now been repackaged into something called the “Spring Research Carnival” – a set of events that will take place over the next few months, covering a range of topics (most of which are more useful, I suspect, than my own presentation will be). I’ve attached the carnival flyer for local folks who might be interested. The basic dates, times and details for these events are:

Monday, 10 September, 3-4:30 p.m.: How Will the Research Quality Framework Affect Academic Careers?

Wednesday, 19 September, 3-4:30 p.m.: Using ABS Data in Social Research

Friday, 5 October, 3-4:30 p.m.: Online Tools for Building Research Networks

All events are in the Research Lounge, which is across from Swanston Library, in Building 8, level 5 – no RSVP requested. I have the impression that something pub-ish might happen after the events.

I will be (a very small) part of the panel for the 5 October event. The organiser tells me: “You don’t need to prepare, just come and show people your blog and talk about your experience with it, pros and cons and advice for others with similar ideas.” I’m not sure about the “showing people my blog” part (and am mildly nervous that the URL for the blog has appeared on the event flyer), but I’ll cobble something together that will hopefully be of interest.

Blogging, Events

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