LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, this one has been about honor – Chabert defending Marx from Derrida’s “cynicism” and misprision – or outright fraud - and LI lagging behind, defending the honor of Derrida. But that’s a harder task to do for a writer who was born into the decline of the honor culture than to do for a writer who was conversant enough, in his student days, with dueling clubs. So I have defended, instead, a Derridian approach to Marx – which is to see Marx’s texts not in terms of doctrines that become lessons to repeat, but as historically situated, and full of conceptual choices that pull against each other. Some are derived from ripostes and occasions and gradually entombed in the massive work - this is true, I believe, of Marx's materialism. Or, just the reverse, promising tendencies from the romantic years are not fully developed - Marx's idea of alienation, for instance, which never seems to be socially embedded to account for alienation across the classes. In any case, Derrida’s Specters of Marx is about entering the texts by a back way – for instance, by way of a persistent metaphoric – and which is fully connected to the history it made, which is, it should be needless to say, a preeminently European history. We are of course speaking of a writer who self consciously represented the framework for the European alternative in German history – as the cliché has it, Zivilisation vs. Kultur. The non-European tendency in German history – that urge to become the Volk der Mitte, which Thomas Mann writes about in The Reflections of a Non-Political Man – project a system of rejections that led to a bad end. One of the Chabertian themes that has been helpful to me in the past is her sense of how composite, how full of input from the outside, is Europe, and how full of forgetting the Eurocentric position has to be. I’ve been rather surprised that she has skipped this theme in Marx, for it is, after all, one of the major themes in the Specters – those ghosts from the “superstitious” past that must be chased away in the name of science. Among other things, the German Ideology is about the border of that so called European form of thinking.
Well, the duel has been conducted with some fierceness on both sides. And it has spread, I’m pleased to say. Tables have been kicked over, bystanders sprayed with breaking glass. Or at least there has been some responses, here and there. I particularly note Praxis, who has had a number of posts about Marx and Derrida.
And start reading here:
And now our frequent commentor, Amie, has written an incredible piece on Marx and is allowing us to post it. Hooray!
She hasn’t given it a title. I’m tempted to chose one from the Three Musketeers - for instance, LES MOUSQUETAIRES DU ROI ET LES GARDES DE M. LE
CARDINAL. But instead, I’ll call it The Phantoms of Ideology
....................................................................................
CLOV (regard fixe, voix blanche). –
Fini, c'est fini, ça va finir, ça va peut-étre finir.(un temps.)
- Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie, 1957.
I'm very late in entering the lists for the "duel" with the Colonel. If I haven't before, it's not that I'm afraid that I would risk losing my head in the duel, though that is highly likely. It has more to do with the fact that the set-up is more akin to lining up ducks in a tub and shooting at them from close range with an elephant gun. Where is the gallantry in that! The "production values" are not exactly water-tight. The tub has holes in it, the water leaks everywhere, the ammo gets all wet, and the ducks continue to speak in tongues. Or in French, which is the same thing after all.
But why quibble when the pay-off is that Derrida is a shorter Charles de Gaulle and an apologist for the Nazis, which is quite the dénouement.
Alas, the staging is such that it ends up shooting the hero of the drama in the chest. Poor Marx, his texts once again reduced to a doctrine, and him reduced to the role of an idealogue. I search on the Colonel's set in vain for the great Marx, the thinker, the revolutionary, the writer. The Marx who was too much of a thinker to hasten to conclusions or tailor them to suit the "facts" without submitting the facts or the cloth to scrutiny even if they fell apart in his hands, who was too much of a revolutionary to bow down to facts or reversals in fortune or to pass by catastrophes as if they had never happened, too much of a writer to not ceaselessly rework this texts and rectify them in the blinding light of events rather than succumb to the vanity of a finished work and the illusions of a total doctrine. Did he ever conclude?
The question I would like to ask concerns ideology. After all, the first post in the series began with bringing up ideology, of which the Colonel says that it might do or count for a "little something". What if ideology counted and did more that a little something for Marx, something he had to confront and account for and more than once?
The good folk who have Marx well in hand and the Marx-Engels Werke at their fingertips will undoubtedly know the rather strange way in which ideology flits in and out of those texts. The term of ideology is everywhere in the texts from 1845-1846, reduced to a few marginal occurrences between 1847-1852, and then is almost nowhere to be found, until returning rather prominently in the 1870s. I'm not bringing this up as a matter of mere philological interest, there is something else involved.
Let's take up The German Ideology. I can hardly get into the entire history of the composition and publication of this text, but why does this text essentially written (mostly by Marx) between 1845 and 1846 not get published till 1932? Is it only because of the difficulties of finding a publisher, something that Marx was to endure more than once, or is there something else as well? And may I add, that one has merely to look at the composition and history of this text and the related correspondence between Marx and Engels to see that the two do not exactly share the Colonel's opinion that Max Stirner is a feeble-minded idiot not worth reading. On the contrary they go to considerable time and trouble to read, discuss and respond to Stirner and at some length. The "Saint Max" section in The German Ideology accounts for two-thirds of the entire text and the debate with Stirner is no less present in the first section on Feuerbach. Indeed, Engels is one of the first readers of Der Einzige und Sein Eigeuntum and recommends, even insists, that Marx do so. If Marx's response to Stirner is in scathing terms – which is hardly unusual for Marx – it is because Der Einzige und Sein Eigeuntum poses not a few problems for Marx and Engels, hits home, as it were. As I am not concerned here with Marx's setting of accounts with Stirner but with Marx's own settling of accounts with ideology, let me pass on and briefly rehearse some of the well-known themes of The German Ideology.
The guiding thread of the text is the division of labor from which Marx deduces the successive forms of property and State. The two main intertwined threads of the text are production and ideology. Marx analyses man's productive activity from its beginning which is man confronting nature to its end point which is bourgeois/civil society. Much of the text is organized around the notion of production and one might even say that here Marx is proposing a social ontology of production as it is production that defines and shapes man's being (Sein) and his "ensemble" of social relations. For to recall the much debated and discussed sixth thesis on Feuerbach (with its mixture of French and German): "But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations" (das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse).
Enter Ideology. With its abstractions and illusions – and its uncanny power. Let's first consider the most common reading of ideology in this text. It is one that is fostered by the rather misleading form of the text as it is published (which occurs in 1932 let us recall.) It is not a little misleading as it actually inverts the order in which the text was written by placing the polemical part second as if it had secondary value or was but an appendix and putting the first part at the head, presenting it as if it was a stand-alone account of "historical materialism". So then ideology can be read in terms of the development of the division of labor, can be read as a derivation of the "base" of "real life" and production. It would then be a matter of demystifying the mechanisms of illusion and of "autonomization" by which a "fantastic" world replaces – substitutes for – reality. The matter is of course not so simple or reassuring. For one thing, as we shall see, the process of demystification, the reduction of the "fantastic" world and the access to historical reality for Marx is only possible through historical change – revolution. But in such a reading of ideology one can at least rest secure and be (re)assured that in the realm of real life and the realm of production there is no ideology. Nor, of course, any ghosts.
Marx's account of ideology is undeniably an attempt at demystification, an attempt to dissolve the distortions of social relations and of intercourse(Verkehr) between individuals. Marx regularly uses this term Verkehr in order to underscore relation in both its productive and communicative aspects. And when he speaks of illusions he also makes use of metaphors, and ones with a venerable history, as for example, "the inversion of reality" in a cave. Permit me the "obvious" statement that metaphor as well as all the common figures of rhetoric are not absent from Marx's texts, far from it, his texts are a battleground of rhetorical figures. Marx is a master at marshaling a formidable array of tropes and marching them into battle. I'm not going to even attempt to delve into the question of the rhetorical modes of Marx's texts or of Marx's "style" or rather styles, since there is more than one, in different texts and quite often in the same text. I'm in over my head as it is. Anyway, the metaphor of "an inversion of reality" in a cave goes back a long way. The "owner" of this cave, one is told, was a rather crafty idealist with a theory about the power of ideas. Now, Marx's account of ideology in The German Ideology is not just about illusion, it is also about the power of ideas. Or more precisely, how ideas and ideology can take hold, take power, dominate. The question of domination is central to Marx's account of ideology. To dominate here has to be understood in two senses, more evident in the German word herrschend. It is a matter of dominating through exercising power but also by holding sway, reigning, extending universally.
In The German Ideology, ideology refers to the dominating class. The proletariat are entirely without it, they are outside ideology, pure of it, if you will. This last point is essential. It is from this point of view that Marx's account of ideology takes place. The German Ideology is considered to be Marx's clearest account of the proletariat as a Universal Class. But if one looks a little more closely, Marx does not present the proletariat as a class which would raise its particular interests in turn into universal interests, which would only be to repeat the process of mystification. Rather remarkably, we find Marx describing the proletariat not simply in terms of class but as a Masse, as a mass or as masses. But if it is not the proletariat's own proper particular interests which make it the bearer of change, transformation and revolution which Marx clearly considers it to be, what is it? It is precisely the proletariat's position outside of all ideology. The proletariat is eigentumslos (propertyless) and without any "particular quality" (Eigenschaft), and as such it is without illusions, absolutely Illusionslosigkeit. It is this extreme denuded position of the proletariat that is beyond ideology and without illusions that for Marx primes it for change and revolution. It is from this perspective or point of view that Marx can write in GI of a "real movement" that has nothing to do with the old order and abolishes it, and of the discovery - or promise - of "the language of real life" (Sprache des wirklichen Lebens).
It is not a matter of wondering why Marx does not consider or articulate a proletarian ideology. The matter rather is that if there is something like that, if the proletariat "has" ideology, well then the entire edifice constituting materialism in GI and its chain of equivalences between materiality, production, practice, history and revolution starts to give way, fall apart. Things, from this perspective, are not very different in The Communist Manifesto written the following year (1847). There again Marx writes of a proletariat which is totally Illusionslosigkeit and which has nothing to do with nation nor religion nor family nor morality nor political-juridical illusions. There again, as such, the proletariat is in the position of destroying the dominating class and its ideology and ending its reign. If in this process the proletariat is to become the dominant class in turn it is only to dissolve all classes and domination. Transparency of life and language and of intercourse. Such is the promise – of revolution. Exit ideology.
Enter 1848. Arrival of Revolution. 24 February in Paris. 13 March in Vienna. 18 March in Berlin. Le Printemps des peuples. The people will soon pay dearly for their springtime. In June, massacre of le peuple in the streets of Paris. A number of French socialists defect to bonapartism. Apathy of the proletariat faced with the coup d'état. Catastrophe. Instead of the dissolution of bourgeois power, one is confronted with the dissolution of the proletariat hope.
If the events of 1848-51 are a crushing blow for Marx, it is the measure of the man that he will face up to them and try to take their measure. Not the least of which is that Marx has to acknowledge and to confront the fact that the proletariat is not immune to ideology. The proletariat – the propertyless (eigentumslos) – somehow possesses or is possessed by ideology, which is not a little uncanny. Now, from this point on, the term of ideology virtually disappears from Marx's text. Which is not to say that the theme or its analysis does so. Even if not named, it is present everywhere in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851), a text which is also about repetition and how the past can haunt the present. Here again, Marx attempts to account for the mystification and the power, the domination that past figures (whether nationalist or historical or religious, republican or imperial ) exercise on the present and on the actors of 1848. Can it all be determined in terms of class interests? When Marx addresses the problem of the passage from the "class in itself" to the "class for itself" the very schematic of "two classes" splinters in a series of subdivisions. It would appear that in the time of revolution, when time "accelerates", classes decompose as well-defined entities defined by distinct and simple interests capable of finding direct political representation. Here again, when Marx speaks of revolutionary conflict and struggle he doesn't do so simply in terms of class, but rather in terms of masses, of mass movements. Marx doesn't say "classes make history" but that "masses (or men en masse) make history."
Let me quote a famous passage from the The Eighteenth Brumaire:
"Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and as the Roman Empire, and the revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets the native tongue in the use of the new."
Here again we find the question of revolution related to a "new" language, the language of real life of which The German Ideology spoke or promised. In order to learn to use this new language and to properly appropriate its spirit as the spirit of revolution, why is it necessary to forget and efface the maternal, the mother tongue?
After 1848, Marx's main project is of course the immense research that goes into the writing of Capital. In this text the question of ideology is reworked in terms of the famous analysis of the commodity fetish and its "theological niceties". Here again one finds the theme of domination, of the market subjecting everyone and everything to its reign and power. And one finds that the enigma, the secret, the mystery, the mystification it would appear is all on one side, the side of commodity value and the famous turning and dancing table. Use value is apparently pure of such craziness. From whose point of view, one might wonder? The properties (Eigenschaften) of the thing of use-value relate to man, to what is proper to man and his needs. But what exactly is proper to man?
There is a famous scene where Marx wonders what the commodity-value would say, if it could speak. "If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse (Unser eigner Verkehr) as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values." Marx does not say what use-value would say, if it could speak. And, I wonder how a dialogue between use-value and commodity-value would go?
But, taking our cue from Marx, let us try and think what use-value would say, if it could speak. Would it say, "take me, I'm yours"? Is that what the bit of wood, the little piece of nature would say? Or would she be silent, keep her secret to herself? Phusis kruptesthai philei . Or would she lament.
"...all nature would begin to lament if it were endowed with language (though 'to endow with language' is more than 'make able to speak'). This proposition has a double meaning. It means, first, that she would lament language itself. Speechlessness: that is the great sorrow of nature.[...] This proposition means, second, that she would lament. Lament, however, is the most undifferentiated, impotent expression of language. It contains scarcely more than the sensuous breath..."
(Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, 1916)
After almost twenty years of immense unremitting research and writing, the first volume of Capital is published in 1867. The Workers Bible, as Engels calls it. A text that can also be read as an attempt to account for 1848. Then comes 1870, and the Franco-Prussian war. And 18 March 1871, the Paris Commune, or more simply La Commune. Ah, Vive la Commune! Alexis de Tocqueville recounts in a letter how a certain Thiers had proposed to the National Assembly in 1848 that they wipe out le peuple de Paris. This time, the butcher Thiers will not let the opportunity go by. The semaine sanglante is unsparing and is followed by massive deportations. Marx does respond with memorable pages devoted to the Paris Commune. But he has to acknowledge that once again events have not followed the directing forces and conflicts of history and politics as he had envisaged them. Once again, there are passions and other factors that cannot simply be reduced to the class struggle. And if revolution took place in France rather than Britain, this didn't quite follow the "logic" of it occurring from a crisis in capitalist accumulation. The writing of Capital is suspended in the midst of a chapter on "classes", and Marx will attempt to begin again. After the destruction of the Commune and the dissolution of the International, what response did Marx have to the question of "historical change"? After 1870 as in 1848, Marx has to acknowledge that history cannot simply be thought in terms of imminence or progressive maturation, as there is an irreducibly unforeseen and unexpected aspect to what comes to pass, arrives. In other terms, there is a non-contemporaneity to historical time, the time is out-of-joint.
So let me simply ask this. If we acknowledge that these questions of ideology, of historical change and time, remain for Marx insistent, open-ended questions that he takes up again and again, then it seems to me difficult to argue that Derrida in Spectres de Marx is somehow dismissing or mystifying Marx. On the contrary, it is precisely these questions that he attempts to renew and re-think. And if one were to say that these questions are of secondary importance for Marx, this would be, it seems to me, to dismiss and mystify a great deal of Marx and of the history in which his thinking is inscribed and to which it responds.
To say that there is no pure exit from ideology, which would be the ultimate ideological ruse, is not to reduce everything to it but to mark it as a site of conflict and struggle. As is history and the language of real life.
I have been suggesting that 1848 was "decisive" for Marx. Let me just point out that in Spectres, Derrida explicitly "links" the "New International" to 1848: " La 'nouvelle Internationale'[...] C'est un lien d'affinité, de souffrance et d'espérance, un lien encore discret, presque secret, comme autour de 1848".
But this is not say, of course, that there are no differences between Marx and Derrida. Let me refer to just one of them. It relates to Marx's phrase, "let the dead bury the dead." As one knows, this is a phrase that Marx uses more than once, in his texts and in his letters. Derrida does not follow Marx in this, but insists that one must [il faut] not let the dead bury the dead. I was reminded of the weight and justice of Derrida's insisting on this by a recent post here at Limited, Inc I am also reminded of a woman who wrote in Marx's mother tongue and who, in the wake of the Second World War when apparently all the horrors and crimes and ghosts had been laid to rest and all was sweetness and light, was not finished with mourning and the dead and crimes in the present. "I've often wondered, and perhaps it has passed through your minds as well, just where the virus of crime escaped to – it cannot simply had disappeared from our world twenty years ago just because murder is no longer praised[...] Indeed, I maintain and will attempt to produce the first evidence that still today many people do not die but are murdered."( Ingeborg Bachmann, The Book of Franza, 1966)
The phrase, let the dead bury the dead, occurs in a very famous passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire: "In order to arrive at its own content the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead." This seems to me a terrible price to pay in order to arrive at one's own content. Call me weak for saying so. I will accept and even affirm such "weakness". But, let me ask, is this even possible, does one arrive at one's own content in this way? For what if this phrase, this very phrase which claims to break free of the past, to arrive to its own time and seize the day, is a repetition of the past and more than once and more than one time.
I can think of at least two. There might be others. One is Christ who repeats the phrase twice (Matthew 8:22, Luke 9.60). I am not going to explore this repetition here, except to note that here is another instance of the Messianic in Marx's text. No, Derrida didn't somehow invent or import it into Marx's text.
For there is an even older repetition and it goes back to an "inaugural" text of the "West": Pericles' Funeral Oration. There one finds the interdiction of mourning, an interdiction which is directed at women. There one finds the valorization of strength and hardness, and softness is called an Oriental vice.
Why is it, I wonder, that a certain marxist materialism valorizes strength and hardness, lays claim to it, claims it for its own? And why is it so bothered by others, such as Derrida or Benjamin who are not afraid of weakness and even affirm it. Perhaps there is an indominatable strength of weakness? To recall the past, to call a revenant so that it comes from the future – an arrivant.
CLOV:
Do you believe in the life to come?
HAMM:
Mine was always that.
This is wonderful, Amie.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Praxis.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that your exposition helps me understand a bit more is Marx's own position. It is a puzzle. He doesn't present himself as a witness. Unlike with Freud, we get no self analysis that leads to a body of doctrine. Rather, we get a doctrine that seems to put persons in Marx's own social position in the position of being prisoners of the ruling ideas - and that this prison is an almost insurmountable one is emphasized by his metaphor of the retina.
But I had not really thought of the 'masses' as being 'without illusions'. If there is a social position in which one can be without illusions, it makes it much more plausible that one can be in a social position to see through illusions.
Yet, of course, Marx didn't just see through illusions - he saw through them systematically. He didn't just, by an act of empathy, understand that the working class was exploited, he understood how exploitation figured in the creation of the whole social world he saw around him. 1848 would show that being without illusions and seeing through illusions is a false pairing. And that, of course, throws up the problem of Marx's position once again.
I guess I am interested in this question partly because Levi-Strauss brings it up in his introduction to Mauss's work - what is the position of the anthropologist vis a vis a society he is studying. How does one go from being a participant observer to making the kind of systematic inferences that describe the whole culture. What is extraordinary in Marx's case is that his justification came, in a sense, after his systematic insight. He only really understands the way capitalism functions - the system he wants to overthrow in the 1840s - by the 1860s. And even then the understanding is, as you point out, incomplete, as it must be - there must be a revolutionary opening, so to speak, into the system to justify Marx's own witness.
Or is that right?
Hmm, not enough comment on this fantastic piece of writing. Maybe I'll eliminate my tedious intro. Goddamn it, I hate it when something good pops up here on LI and it gains less of a readership than some toss off about Lady Bitch Ray! Am I to be eternally on the losing side of the tug of war between testosterone and the neocortex as the seas creep over the land and the icecaps melt?
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I'm dead or alive.
ReplyDeleteAmie
Amie, your comment is like my day.
ReplyDeleteI was reading outside of the Whole foods today when two people came up to me and asked me if they could give me a spiritual quiz. They introduced themselves as college affiliated, but I figure they were affiliated with some church. But, being in the mood for conversation about my spiritual state, I let them do their spiel, which consisted of giving me a pack of pictures and asking me questions about myself - like, what three pictures represented my life right now. Etc., etc. So, we did the picture raffle with my life, and then one of them, the younger one, posed the question they'd obviously been leading up to, which was, if I died tonight, what would I say to God to get into heaven? So, making up theology on the spot, I said, God has no choice but to let me into heaven. I'm in heaven now. Heaven isn't a matter for God to choose. Which certainly sort of muddied the lines for these boys. But, thinking about it afterwards, I was rather disappointed that I didn't mention that myself, being in the image of God, could as little go to hell as God could uncreate himself. All of which sounds true! on a lazy theological afternoon. Because maybe I could have founded my own cult right there and then, like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood. Or at least founded a Gnostic-Borgesian heresy. I'll call it Heaven Now - I think Heaven's gate is taken..
Although actually, if I die tonight and come before the Divinity's throne, I have no idea how snappy my repartee would be. I'd hope to be as much of a wisecracker as Philip Marlowe, but I might be another dumb tonguetied American, asking for a raise.
what does Fini, c'est fini, ça va finir, ça va peut-étre finir.(un temps.) mean?
ReplyDeleteand it better not mean "dumb tonguetied American, asking for a raise"!
ReplyDeletei have a migraine & must go get victuals (luckily, not by piracy, there's money in the bank account!). then i will come back & say something numerical here.
Here's the play, all in the lovely first language of Mr. Beckett.
ReplyDeleteAnd, though I couldn't find the Youtubery with that passage from the endgame, I did find Beckett's guide to Illusionslosigkeit. Except not. Who can tell about these things. You think you have divested yourself of every scrap of illusion, and then who knows? what narcissism still lurks in the burial urn.
ReplyDeleteAnd maybe not to be watched while the migraine lasts.
It is probably a good idea not to confuse:
ReplyDeletea) The intellectual defeat of dogmatic marxism (vengeful spirits come to settle accounts and rewrite history, like Rambo in Vietnam, notwithstanding). Derrida upholds this, deepens it even - (a certain) Marx contra (a certain) marxism.
with
b) The triumph of neo-liberalism, the "new left", the "new right", and the hasty establishment of a jury-rigged consensus against any manifestation of the communist hypothesis whatsoever. Derrida diagnoses this, protests it, declares its omissions and falsifications: (a certain) Marx contra (a certain) anti-communism.
LCC's trouble is that she can't tell her enemies apart.
Dominic, I don't think Chabert feels the same way you do about dogmatic Marxism - that it is some automatically bad thing. I think she knows who her enemies are. Her posts outline what I'd call rational choice Marxism. You take as your criteria the level of exploitation, and you use that to determine how the sides line up. The appendix to this notion is a form of self-interest in which the individual academic entrepreneur gains points from the ruling class (points being publicity, tenure, students, etc.) for either defending the ruling class outright or weakening the resistance to the ruling class. There's a certainty about this, and an elegance in the model, that is much like the elegance of neo-classical rational choice theory itself. I just think it is wrong. I also think it is a reading that is forced to overlook the all too numerous moments in Marx's own writing that deviate from rational choice, as per Amie's post. In fact, I'd go out on a limb and say that all of Marx's political writing deviates from the Marxist rational choice model. And I'd say that even in Capital there is an intense pull between, on the one hand, this rather attractive model, and on the other hand, Marx's much more complex vision of a social reality in which social revolution exists as a real possibility. And as such, it is our starting point for understanding social processes.
ReplyDeletePS -hmm, I don't quite think it is wrong. Marxist rational choice can be a very enlightening model. I think it is a self-limiting heuristic, however.
ReplyDeletewell, apparently I'm not quite dead yet. LI, I do want to respond to your comment above about witnessing and the participant observer. It is a great question, and one I can't do justice to right now, as I'm a bit rushed for time.
ReplyDeleteBut hey can I indulge in a few pics from my native land, where some demonstrations are going on today and where my "spirit" is a wandering.
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/portfolio/0,12-0@2-3224,31-1045613@51-1013456,0.html
Amie
"for it is, after all, one of the major themes in the Specters – those ghosts from the “superstitious” past that must be chased away in the name of science."
ReplyDeleteI didn't skip it! You just don't want to address that "negroidity".
Derrida, like Heidegger, believed in a mystical Europe, which invented science, but it simply. ain't. so.
" If we acknowledge that these questions of ideology, of historical change and time, remain for Marx insistent, open-ended questions that he takes up again and again, then it seems to me difficult to argue that Derrida in Spectres de Marx is somehow dismissing or mystifying Marx"
I think whether Derrida mystifies Marx is a question one could only form an opinion about based on the content of what Derrida wrote, not on the mere fact of his writing about Marx.
I don't get the rational choice thing - what do you mean? This is some individualist notion, "everybody wants more" or something? It can't have any meaning in Marxism. You can't find out what everybody wants, there are too many people, it's just not interesting. You may want your coconut to have a zipper. If it doesn't, it doesn't, you have to try something else or leave it alone.
ReplyDeleteSome duel huh! Well, as I said, the set-up is no duel.
ReplyDeleteA couple of sketchy thoughts on your question re witnessing and the participant-observer, as the picture is more than what a sketch or a comment can cover.
You're of course right that Marx doesn't only empathize with the proletariat and its exploitation and misery, but attempts to systematically account for such, produce its account systematically. And Marx and Engels don't just speak of the proletariat as an "idea", there is this element of encountering and witnessing. As Engels says in the Condition of the Working-Class in England ( a book that would have a formative impact on Marx ) - and I am quoting from memory - I have met workers who don't only want to be Englishmen but men.
An entire tradition of thought would call such witnessing "empirical", which of course raises all kinds of questions about its systemic account(ability). What exactly happens when Marx in The German Ideology makes such witnessing of the proletariat a point of view from which to construct an entire systemic account of ideology and one which is totally outside of the system it is to account for? (It is perhaps not so different with Levi-Struass?)
LI, as you say, Marx's testimony needs revolution to attest to it. There is an systematic account and there is the unaccountable, and one must bear witness to both. To bear witness is also one of Derrida's questions. To bear witness as in to undergo, carry, testify. And to give birth. To the child one bears, sometimes called revolution.
Anyway, let me switch tracks here, and go to a film I saw again just the other night, here in NYC, as part of a festival commemorating May 68 in France, Chris Marker's Le fond de l'air est rouge/Grin without a Cat. It is all about history, memory, testimony and the "impure impure history of ghosts" . I started this comment with wanting to talk about it, but an other time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS1LlG66s_w
Amie
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AO 19 = JIHAD (AO-28 STRIVEN) = XTERM (AO-28 TERMINAL).
ReplyDeleteAO 29 = STRUGGLE = LIBRA 20° = MDM FA2 CARD = PSALM 91:4 = TAURUS 21°.
I'd like to duel! But there's nothing for me to respond to here really; I agree Marx writes about ideology; there are three uses of the term, one is ruling class ideology, one is political ideology, which can be "revolutionary", another is hazy. Derrida doesn't ever mention any of these things, except to say the first concept is invalid - that's just an assertion, no argument, in passing. He's concerned with what marx called "consciousness". Use value is human labour, a relation and a process, - it can speak. It's the only thing that can speak. Marx didn't say the proletariat were ideology free; on the contrary they participate in ruling class ideology like everybody else, but can have a critical perspective and will not themselves create a new ruling class ideology - present their exclusive class interests as universal - because they can't become a new ruling class, because they have no property and nobody to exploit. (Nonetheless there is, in capitalism, proletarian ideology distinct from the dominant ideology.) They have to abolish classes altogether; their capacity to do this is due to their power over social reproduction and their common interest in abolishing their own exploitation. Being "ideology free" in the sense of being freed from the illusions of bourgeois ideology - the dominant ideoology - is not the cause of a consequence that is revolution. For Marx there is a constant interplay; only through revolutionary activity and the abolition of capitalism will the proletariat (and everybody else) be freed of bourgeois ideology. Bourgeois ideology is not just "fancy"; conditions have to be changed, concrete existence, for ideas to change. Property relations have to change before ideas of justice change, though an intimation of others exists to spur change, it is not realised, it is not embodied, it is not meaningful until the new ideas can be practised and lived. Thinking is not idependent of every other feature of human life.
ReplyDeleteI didn't say Derrida apologised for "the Nazis" - I was really specific. He apologises for certain specific Nazi policies, carried out by Heidegger, and the echoes of this apology are all over Spectres of Marx. What do you make of those echoes? How do you interpret the "spirit" which links them, the spiritualisation of Nazism Derrida praises as good will and rejection of nastiness, condemns as a blunder, and regards as having one really bad consequence which is not Nazism but far worse Cartesianism, and the spiritualisation of Marx he repeatedly advocates in Spectres? Does this say anything to you?
ReplyDelete"I am not going to explore this repetition here, except to note that here is another instance of the Messianic in Marx's text. No, Derrida didn't somehow invent or import it into Marx's text."
ReplyDeleteI'm sure no one has ever denied the messianic rhetoric in Marx. Of course we know it is exhortation - the inevitability of communism (though, only if people organise, struggle, and indeed wage war to bring it about). It's not clear at all that this has anything to do with what derrida has to invent a word for - messiancity - and which plays a huge role in his text, with antecedents in the Heidegger book. The relation of Derrida's messianicity to Marx is obscure;moreover, Benjamin seems to be called in for the name and nothing more; this messianicty has no affinity to Benjamin, a fact which derrida himself underscored in his reply to his critics - it's not Benjamin's metaphor. Which is a metaphor, intertextual, summoning Luria and a whole topos for energy and detail; its openly inextricable from a revolutionary commitment, as is Marx' messianic theme.
You may not find the distinction an important one , but one of the most important distinctions for marx is the distinction between living labour (human beings - speaking use value) and dead labour (capital), because his aim is not to be a "great writer" writing a complex and arcane philosophical oeuvre that a hundred years later philosophers in capitalism will be mining for mysteries while billions of people lead horrible short lives, but to explain something clearly in order to contribution to the self- liberation the population of the world from poverty and exploitation. His analysis of class societies and capitalism in particular is geared to showing how capital is all tht accumulated suffering and pain, generation upon generation, and how people need no longer toil away so that a tiny minority can continue to accumulate their dead labour - their lives condemned to unfreedom and exploitation, thingified and alienated and expropriated - as property with which to continue to control and exploit them. This is the central topic of all of Marx' writings. It is the indispensible basis of everything - nothing he writes makes sense if you reject this. (I mean you can reject the goal, but not the sense of the text.) If one cannot accept this distinction, and its importance, there really can't be anything in Marx of interest, because it is the basis of all this thought, this distinction between living and dead labour, between human beings - who can and do speak, and Marx can't speak for them - and the private property which condemns them to toil.
So -maybe you're lot harder than you think.
I've been following this from Colonel Chabert's end, and I have to say this: she makes sense. Her criticisms of Derrida make sense. What Marx writes of use value and exchange value makes sense.
ReplyDeleteI'll be damned if I can figure out what the Derrida and the proponents of Spectres of Marx are trying to say—except that there is a "good" Marx who is OK and non-dogmatic, and you just have to ignore the critique of the capitalist mode of production and pay attention to these little doo-dads in the text. "Oh, looky, he said, 'first,' but if use-value is first, then..."
Why is a straight-forward, it's just-what's-there-on-the-goddamn page reading of the analysis of commodities and how wage labor is exploitation by capital—how is that dogmatic? Hasn't anybody here had a regular job and been told to think about how they can "add value" to their employers bottom line or else? Doesn't the description of how capitalism moves accumulated value from workers to owners ring true to anybody?
And this business about strength and hardness...Milton Friedman was a vicious hardass. Thomas Friedman, cheerleader for globalization, is a vicious hardass. Gordon Gecko in Wall Street when he said, "I don't make, I own," was articulating the credo of the capitalist mode of production: capital, accumulated dead labor, gets to call the shots and fuck the people who do the work, make the products. They're the losers. If simply saying that the Friedman/Friedman/Gecko viewpoint is vicious, illogical, and should be challenged makes you a bad guy/gal who "valorizes strength and hardness" then......
I can't remember who said it--maybe it was Benjamin--but IIRC, the phrase (translated, because I don't know German) was that there is tenderness only in the coarsest demand of socialism: namely, that no one should ever go hungry again. But people continue to go hungry because the prerogatives of capital are treated as if they were natural, and they're not. And when someone writes that some ghostly form of exchange value is already there in any commodity, I don't see them as being very helpful--except to give a "deep" explanation and justification for the Friedman/Friedman/Gecko POV.
Incidentally, I'd be perfectly happy with a social democratic state with good nat'l health, guranteed minimum wage that a body can live on, and a stiff progressive tax on income and capital gains. Those things don't transcend capital, but they go a long way to mitigating its ill effects. Getting beyond capitalism is the hard social problem for now and the foreseeable future. I don't think I'll see any progress beyond an ongoing battle for ameilorative policies in my lifetime.
i may be on LCC's side of this duel (work off our innate negroidity?). does that mean i'm a mouseketeer, musketeer or cardinalist?
ReplyDeleteAO 77 = BRITISH WHITE PAPER = INNATE NEGROIDITY.
AO 119 = WORK OFF OUR INNATE NEGROIDITY = A LADDER YOU THROW AWAY AFTER CLIMBING.
So For Derrida, Heidegger's "seeming" Nazism, the championing of a certain spirit of Nazism, was anti-Nazism in disguise - spiritualising nazism is battling "ideological" (concrete) Nazism, fighting Nazism, racism totalitarianism etc.. This helps us to understand the anti-Marxism of championing a certain spirit of Marx we find in Derrida, which is clearly modelled on this. Additionally we can note that the certain "spirit" of Nazism championed by Heidegger, according to Derrida, which he insists is no Nazism at all but anti-Nazism, and the certain "spirit" of Marx Derrida offers for allegiance, which is no Marxism at all but anti-Marxism, are identical - spirit the führer, "questioning", the will to know - just as, according to derrida, the substance, concrete Nazism, and concrete Marxism are the same, two names for "the Marxist blow".
ReplyDeleteIt's one thing to hold this last to be true. That's something one expects to see evidence brought forward in support of. But it's another to perform all this as "a certain spirit of Marx", in the name of Marx, and as self-declared true son and heirto Marx. If there's nothing in "a certain spirit of Marx" that is peculiar to Marx - nothing that can't be found in Heidegger's certain spirit of Nazism - then it is just a ploy. And it seems like that's what it is, unless you believe Marx had some kind of monopoly on the will as will to know, questioning, perpetual self critique. (I think even attributing that to Marx is a bit exaggerated, critique for the sake of critique; Marx was a zealous chamion of critique of course but not unduly or in that kind of genre and isolation Derrida favours.)
when someone writes that some ghostly form of exchange value is already there in any commodity, I don't see them as being very helpful--except to give a "deep" explanation and justification for the Friedman/Friedman/Gecko POV
ReplyDeleteWell, that's dogmatism all right. Either you affirm the hierarchies, or you're in league with the enemy (I mean, The Enemy).
AO 75 = FORCEFULLY ADVANCING = ISSUING MORAL WAIVERS = ME320 SARS: THERE IS A CURE! (AO-103 20855 ARIFAWAN (2000 VV27) & AO-104 20856 HAMZABARI (2000 VT28); AO-14 ARIF).
ReplyDeleteAO 103 = AND FORCEFUL MEN LAY HOLD OF IT = AND THE VIOLENT TAKE IT BY FORCE = THE DECISION TO INVADE IRAQ = THE PHANTOMS OF IDEOLOGY.
I should add - because this is all so Marxocentric - that the liberal case against Europ-ification in the early nineteenth century was beautifully put in Benjamin Constant's excellent essay "De l'esprit de conquête et l'usurpation (1813). Constant, after all, was exiled in Germany - and, against the notion that Napoleon was bringing civilisation to the Germans, which was Marx's view, in the 1840s, Constant observed the effect of the violation of the "forms" - of the legal structure, in order to create a new techno-scientific structure, an enlightened structure.
ReplyDeleteWhich is, to make the point again, an assumption shared by Stirner and Marx - this notion of the progress of the train of world history, which gets out at the European station.
And here we should bring in the Specter of Engels, who, much less than his famous pal, was a lot more sensitive to the sheer injustice encoded in taking the telos of the scientific-industrial system for granted. It is no accident that Engels is much more open to the new science of ethnography than Marx was.
Oops. This phrase makes no sense:
ReplyDelete"who, much less than his famous pal, was a lot more sensitive"
It should just be: Engels who, more than his pal Marx, was sensitive to...
Let's talk about that "negroidity" passage in Spectres. I don't know how you're reading it. It's the only mention, and extremely deceptive, of this principal argument of the Stirner text which Marx is subjecting to critique. It is a key term of Stirner's rehashed hegelian "philosophy of history". What do you make of Derrida's treatment of this term and "concept"? The other thing - you're objecting to my view of his use of the opposition "naivety" and "cynicism". Okay, but what do you make of that? You're not claiming this isn't there, that I have planted the words, this theme, in the texts, so, what's it all about then, as you see it? Nothing? Filler? Gibberish?
ReplyDelete"when someone writes that some ghostly form of exchange value is already there in any commodity, I don't see them as being very helpful--except to give a "deep" explanation and justification for the Friedman/Friedman/Gecko POV
ReplyDeleteWell, that's dogmatism all right. Either you affirm the hierarchies, or you're in league with the enemy (I mean, The Enemy)."
dominic, that's not dogmatism, he said, the assertion that "some ghostly form of exchange value is already there in any commodity", being untrue, doesn't do any good except for those people whose property it justifies. This is pretty straightforward; if you think it's false, what you wxould have to do to convince anyone who didn"t just shrivel up when somebody sucks their teeth and says "dogma!" is either show how the judgement about commodities is true or give an example of some purpose it could have, even if false, apart from the (obvious) justification of capitalist private property. Otherwise you've really just conceded - if this label and not very convincing lampoon is the only response you have to that assessment - that you really can't think of any reason to disagree with it, and just don't like it, rather than actually have some considered objection with grounds etc.
Hey there Colonel, thank you for honoring me with a response. Even if it is under the sign of utter condescension, for as you say "there is nothing for me to respond to here really". Then follows the Colonel's customary barrage. Funny how that works!
ReplyDeleteBut in all the thunder etc., you haven't really responded to the question I was trying to address in my little post which is trying to trace the history of "ideology" in Marx's text and its relation to history. To which you respond with this purple passage
"I agree Marx writes about ideology; there are three uses of the term, one is ruling class ideology, one is political ideology, which can be "revolutionary", another is hazy."
Could you unpack this for this foot soldier who has no idea what you are talking about here?
Amie
although I would say marx says a ghostly potential for exchange value is htere in any use value, that is, use values all have something in common, that they are human labour, externalised. but this is not what Derrida asserts, he asserts that exchange value, which Marx says is what human labour produces as well as use value in in conditions of generalised exchange (also produced by people) is the "fate" of things because of their iterability. That is, he removes the necessity of private property and propertyless people from commodification and simultaneously endows all things with it, ownability, as a instrinsic properties of things. If he's just saying something has to exist to be owned, it's a banality, assumed of course by Marx. But he is saying more - that use value is impure and therefore is not use value, that is, he is suggesting that use value ought to be "pure", that is, it ought to be celestial, but it is earthly, and from this he directly concludes, with stunning irrationality, that therefore capital can never be abolished. It's extremely bizarre and unconvincing, and additionally the text which conveys it is "dogmatic":
ReplyDeletecharacterized by or given to the expression of opinions very strongly or positively as if they were facts
"there is nothing for me to respond to here really"
ReplyDeleteI meant you didn't actually address anything I wrote; then you expressed disappointment at my non duellish response, so I responded to what you wrote, as best I could, though it was all I assume entirely predictable and ahd almost to do with derrida's text, the purported topic, that I can see.
"Could you unpack this for this foot soldier who has no idea what you are talking about here?"
Yes sure I can, Amie. Just as you can answer the questions I asked you, and say what you make of the echoes of Of Spirit in Spectres, even without being asked to "unpack".
Can you unpack this, amie: "that Derrida is a shorter Charles de Gaulle and an apologist for the Nazis"? I could.
ReplyDelete(I will not claim to have "no idea what you mean". Passive aggression is way to hard for me.)
ReplyDeleteLCC, aaaargh, you know I am fond of you! I honestly do not understand your above remark about "ideology". And I do not follow your take on Derrida either, who I also happen to be fond of.
ReplyDeleteAmie
I mean, I think anyone can see here that I am trying to discuss this text, and you are playing obnoxious games and performing your bafflement.i responded here becase you appear to address me in the form of a provocation which includes a lie couched in the guise of a cute bit of sarcasm. It's very exhausting, as you know, to have to say, "you know amie, I did not say he was an apologist for the nazis, I am making a very specific case, with plentiful textual evidence, about the "spirit of marx" and the spiritualisation of marx, constructed as a deliberate and very exact echo from Of Spirit..." Yur bad faith is on display in your refusal to respond even though I have responded to you at length, not with personal insults but with quotes from Derrida and trying to demonstrate my point. To this you have no reply except "barrage! how typical!" What barrage? You just produce these silly insults, insinuations, the tough and meek, syng almost nothing about the matter supposedly at hand, persist though I'm obviously not inclined to insult you back, and then having failed to get insulted in return, you pretend you have been. you insult yourself, ignorant footsoldier, dramatising yourself as condescended to when you have not been at all - I'm tryng to discuss this book with you, as anyone can see.
ReplyDeletePutting someone to work fending off feigned stupidity like "that Derrida is a shorter Charles de Gaulle and an apologist for the Nazis" and then complaining if they don't bit at first, I mean jeez. You know exactly what you are doing nd to respond to this post properly would require me to write a lengthy preamble just correcting your misrepresentations and rehashing what I have already written. I'd really rather discuss this even little seriously, but here I am now instead being oblged by you to explain that there was more than one Nazi? That derrida wrote a book about Heidegger, that it is legitimate to read derrida on ideology and spirit if you intend to make a case about his purported "rethinking" of ideology in Marx? If you can't assume that and move on to it, if instead you want me to write in this haloscan an exhaustive account of Marx' uses of the term ideology - you and I both know the texts - well, this may be fun for you, people do get off on that kind of manipulation, but it's a bore for me.
I'd honestly have preferred not to respond further than I did initially, which I sort of hesitated to do but didn't want to seem sniffy or soemthing - I have nothign interesting to say to this post; it desn't respond to me, and i actually have yet to decipher what it doesn't say but seems to insinuate about spectres of marx. I think it's assumptions are unfounded, but my name's at the top. So. But if asked twice, even in that already-youy-know-what-youy're-in-for way, "some duel!" I'll do my best, so I did. If you really want to consider yourself personally insulted and condescended to, because I disagree with you about Derrida and Marx, at least i think i do, you really don't say enough to judge, okay - I insult you. Fill in whatever form of it you wish, barrage, disdain. You can say I accused you of apologising for the Nazis if you like.
"Negroid only appears as innocent fun – mockery of Stirner’s own conception."
ReplyDeleteit's mockery but also he is using Stirner's definition of negroidity to show that it is Stirner projecting his own intellectual debilities onto imagnary "negroes", inventing negroes and negroidity to dump specific chraceristics on them he wishes to expell from himself, and here Marx is intuiting something about ideology that there is not really yet a way to discuss, but he is exposing it - how this ideology reproduces domination, arises from and produces domination in human relations, "reflect" (but not 'vulargaly one way') socially produced exploitation and domination, its real role in domination, not simply in "error", in just silly ideas. Silly ideas with a definite origin and definite convenience to certain interests. So in using "negroid" here Marx is not only exposing the racism as race making and hierarchising, frivolous puffing up of the caucasian causian as whicvh stirner identifies himself, but accounting for its origins -- it arises from the existing domination and justifies it in this complex way, to which the whole of idealism, of specific ideological concept manufacture, is necessary. It is like his choice of "fetishism" out of Hegel to describe the "religion" of "the most advanced", that is, he reverses Hegel's racist maneuvre, to undermine it, to undermine it's specific symbolic aggression against africans, but also to expose its logic and origins, its uses to capital.
"In Germany, there was a debate about being part or not part of Europe that was as overt as the debate in Russia."
ReplyDeleteits a debate about being part of Western Europe. Germany is "mitteleurope" throughout that period. It's never the east, which is is mapped by Russia and orthodoxy.
" Marx would never be guilty of thinking that the African religions were mere superstitions"
come on. you're not playing straight now. he thought all religions were superstitions, including the bourgeois secular religion of commodity fetishism. he didn't think african fetishes were any more despicable than london fetishes. They respond and correspond to a different life experience, they make sense of a different set of relations; no more and no less rational.
Ah, LCC, we've gone around on this before - in brief, I am unconvinced by Marx's " intuition" here - "ideology reproduces domination, arises from and produces domination in human relations, "reflect" (but not 'vulgarly one way') socially produced exploitation and domination, its real role in domination, not simply in "error", in just silly ideas. Silly ideas with a definite origin and definite convenience to certain interests." I think the idea that the dominated are a blank slate doesn't make sense to me, unless you are saying that the mysterious origin of these ideas could be anywhere. It certainly doesn't track any historic study, at least in the 1840s, so it would have to be an intuition indeed. As a conjectural history, it seems to be constructed in such a way that it can't find out if it is true or not - especially if every racist utterance is immediately attributed to this system of domination, so that one can't ask - does it function in some positive way among the class of people, the peasants, the artisans, who are uttering it? Does it form a kind of solidarity? Does it advantage them?
ReplyDeleteHowever, re the passage, I think that you are not taking into account, as Derrida does, what the text says and how it says it and the effect of saying it. I don't see this reversion to Stirner's historical tableau in terms of a mockery that would only make sense for a non-existent audience, say one that has gone through the 1960s. You are, I think, projecting Marx's presumed anti-racism into the remark, based on your intuition about Marx's intuition.
On the other hand, you are, I think, right to see Derrida projecting on his own intuition here. It is as if racism were unitary and ahistorical, instead of having a very distinct history. Myself, given the period and the context, I interpret it much more in terms of the struggle that pitted an erudite culture, one that is scientific above all things, vs. a popular culture, dragged down in the first stage of de-mystification by being so fascinated with that stage that it doesn't see how anachronistic it is - Germany being "behind", in the Marxist schema.
Circulation and exchange can take other forms besides those they take within a regime of commodification; they can take, for example, the form they take in gift exchange. But circulation and exchange in whatever form shift the object between value-schemes, detaching it from its value-in-use, and assigning to it a value-in-circulation (the value of the gift for example is not just that of the use it will find in the hands of the receiver, but something additional: the social, symbolic value of its being given). Iterability means that the object has no natural home in any one value-scheme, that it finds a home by circulating into place (so to speak).
ReplyDeleteDerrida is not asserting that the object is fated to become a commodity, being somehow cosmically already a commodity in its innermost being, but saying exactly what you would expect him to say about use value: that its conditions of possibility (the ability of the object to find a use, to be translated into the value-scheme of use value) are also its...oh, sod it, you can finish the sentence yourself.
In Marx there is an opposition: use-value vs exchange value. It's hierarchical: use-value comes first, exchange value is a subsequent modification, a translation of the object out of its rightful, original place into a regio dissimilitudinis. What Derrida says about this is a quite predictable variation on what he always says: that this translation would not be possible if the object were not iterable - that is (to shift jargons slightly), if it were not capable of appearing in more than one world. No-one but a dogmatic marxist (for whom all deviations were ultimately the same deviation) could possibly take this to mean that Derrida thinks that the object was destined from the outset to end up in the world of commodity exchange, as if the only way out of use-value was through the door marked "alienation".
"the slaves of Saint Domingue, if they were aware of their real interests, would stand with the proletariat in Paris"
ReplyDeletewhy do you think slaves were not aware of their real interests? I know you are interested in Boukman's thing about the king, but you know that wasn't the first revolt on Saint Domingue. The previous revolt wasn't to restore the king - the king was in place. People revolt when they are enslaved - from Spartacus to Auschwitz. Whether it is "really" in the interests of people not to revolt when enslaved is not something anyone can say - people do it. It's common; it's predictable. And slaveowners always fight back, too. Like clockwork. Maybe everybody's confused, century after century, in the same way, about what they really want or really don't like, but so what? It's a pattern, you can't ignore it. People enslaved rising up, people who own them repressing these revolts. Again and again, same story.
Circulation and exchange can take other forms besides those they take within a regime of commodification; they can take, for example, the form they take in gift exchange.
ReplyDeleteAgreed.
But circulation and exchange in whatever form shift the object between value-schemes, detaching it from its value-in-use, and assigning to it a value-in-circulation (the value of the gift for example is not just that of the use it will find in the hands of the receiver, but something additional: the social, symbolic value of its being given).
Disagree. Circulation is particular to capitalism: an exchange mediated by a universal equivalent, i.e., money. It's ongoing, 24/7 and hides the process of accumulation that goes on in the sphere of production. Potlatch is a festival of giving where the accumulation is right up front, as is the social stature that comes from giving generously. Can the esteem that accrues to a big giver in potlatch be monetized, literally turned into currency? Nope.
Iterability means that the object has no natural home in any one value-scheme, that it finds a home by circulating into place (so to speak).
True, but the value scheme under which most of us--and which is doing its damnest to erode or displace others--is capitalism. And there's no opt out clause; it's fit in or fuck off.
So let me modify what I said above:
When someone writes that some ghostly form of exchange value is already there in any commodity, I don't see them as being very helpful to those of us interested in finding a way for everybody to opt out. And despite the best intentions of Derrida and others, such stuff can easily be used by people who want to dismiss any criticism of capitalism.
d write: "But whence comes the certainty concerning the previous phase, that of this supposed use-value, precisely, a use-value purified of everything that makes for exchange-value and the commodity-form"
ReplyDeleteWhat text could he be referring to? He's like an analfabeta. Marx says no less then three times in a very few pages that exchange value is "latent" in use value because use values all have something in common, and exchange value is the relations between these things, which arise in conditions of generalised exchange, by quantities of that something. You can't miss it. It's not string theory; really it's very simple. There is no "use value purified of everything that makes for exchange-value". It's Derrida's Heideggerian mishigas, he's really just imagining it, like a dog who knows only one trick. And because he does, he really can't even understand the text's straightforward content, which is not at all challenging or arcane actually. It's repetitive and explicit.
"In Marx there is an opposition: use-value vs exchange value. It's hierarchical: use-value comes first, exchange value is a subsequent modification, a translation of the object out of its rightful, original place into a regio dissimilitudinis."
Except this is not what marx says. He says human labour produces use values. In conditions where human relations have developed to generalised exchange, they also produce exchange values, relations between these use values regulated by what they have in common, considered abstractly and quantified. Neither is more "rightful". But derrida needs something to note is not pure, some philosophical insanity as straw man, so he invents this notion of the pure use value, the "rightful" use value, celestial self identity, (in wood!) It's just unaccountable.
All human society is man made, be it gifty to tradey, according to Marx. Derrida could dream of pure use value, with no "latent" exchange value, but there's no basis for attributing this to the text he is supposed to be reading, since that text is about use value with latent exchange value.
"Derrida thinks that the object was destined from the outset to end up in the world of commodity exchange,"
Actually he states it explicitly: "A culture began before culture - and humanity. Capitalization also. Which is as much to say that, for this very reason, it is destined to survive them."
This is a reading of a text by Marx. "Capitalisation" is not ambiguous.
But, let's say you're reading is better, and the "capitalisation" that "began" before humanity is a typo for something else. For in fact iterability. Iterability began before culture. Iterability also. Thus iterability is destined to survive humanity.
It is simply banal, no? And has nothing to add about commodification or capitalisation or anything. as you say, the same banality he says all the time, no matter what book he is supposedly reading. Technological determinist dogma, dogmatically asserted, no matter what the context or question. But it has the effect of replacing the issue - commodification, ideology - which is important to most people reading marx, with topics of interest only to philosophy producers.
as if the only way out of use-value was through the door marked "alienation".
ReplyDeleteokay, i have to do this once:
you're bluffing. that phrase doesn't mean anything to you.
LCC, I will apologize for the above comment mentioning "barrage". I should have taken a deep breath and walked around the block. The word wasn't meant as insult, for it sure felt like a barrage!
ReplyDeleteI will not accept, however, your saying my post does not respond to anything in your posts? Did you not begin your series of posts by bringing up ideology?
Amie
Ideology In The Age of Spectacle, a short film:
ReplyDeleteMarx: "The historical progress and extension of exchanges develops the contrast, latent in commodities, between use-value and value"
Derrida: ""But whence comes the certainty concerning the previous phase, that of this supposed use-value, precisely, a use-value purified of everything that makes for exchange-value and the commodity-form""
Dominic: "In Marx there is an opposition: use-value vs exchange value. It's hierarchical: use-value comes first, exchange value is a subsequent modification, a translation of the object out of its rightful, original place into a regio dissimilitudinis.""
World without end. Amen.
It doesn't strike me as unusually gnomic.
ReplyDeleteSay firstly that there are objects - products, whatever - and secondly that objects, lacking intrinsic value, "have value" when they appear within a value scheme which ascribes values to them. Use value would be one value scheme, exchange value another. The same object can appear in both, although it is valued differently (both for itself, and in relation to other objects) in each.
What Marxists call alienation could then be viewed as a transvaluation, a shift between value schemes. It requires the use of force, a history of violence, because it entails dissolving and suppressing one consensus, along with the relations and practices that support it, and imposing another. The Marxist promise/project aims at a second, corrective transvaluation - which will also, as it happens, require the use of force.
Now, I think it unlikely that the space of possible value schemas is cleanly partitioned into two - it's more likely that there are many possible shifts, and hence metaphorically many connecting passages (morphisms, transvaluations) between schemas. "The door marked 'alienation'" is just an impressionistic name for the connecting passage between the value schema of use value and the value schema of exchange value. It's a bit like saying you can only go from childhood to adulthood through the door marked "adolescence".
I don't imagine you'll consider any of this to be of the slightest use or ornament, but I hope I've at least demonstrated that my language isn't void of significance for me. Although that is, on the face of it, a remarkable thing to be required to demonstrate...
"Developing" that which was formerly only "latent" certainly sounds like a "subsequent modification" to me.
ReplyDeletewhat is achieved by this kind of thing derrida does - he's not the only one - with marx is create this obstacle, this stumbling block to a discussion of marx or use of marx. first now you have to have long arguments about what these texts say. and they are launched with an immense amount of garbage which needs clearing away. and for some people, can never be cleared away. for some people, once "use value" is the pure self identity of a tree, there's no chance of recovery. the images, the language, have invited the dalai lama in. it just sort of has an effect like flypaper on people's thoughts.
ReplyDelete"Say firstly that there are objects - products, whatever - and secondly that objects, lacking intrinsic value, "have value" when they appear within a value scheme which ascribes values to them. Use value would be one value scheme, exchange value another. The same object can appear in both, although it is valued differently (both for itself, and in relation to other objects) in each"
ReplyDeleteof course; this is very familiar: its neoliberal dogma. We hear it all the time.
but Marx doesn't agree. For Marx, use value is produced by human labour. Things don't float into it, circulate into place in it. start outside somewhere and drift in to use value. Its a process; the process is labour - production, not circulation, makes use value. In your head maybe the idea of a thing drifts into the concept of use value, but the distinction between that exercise and what marx is discussing have to be borne constantly in mind. Value, in contrast, exchange value, arises from circulation, but the specific chartacter of the commodity is that these market relations make these use values exchangeable regulated by the relative amount of the common thing in them - labour - considered abstractly, become an idea, needed to produce them. And this creates money, and capital, storage of this value that is dead labour. It's not like use value and exchange value are rival "systems of value"; like for signs or something, two computer languages giving different responses to a slash or x. That's liberalism and neoliberalism, and in another genre structuralism - one can discuss that view of course. Just it can't be legimately attributed to Marx. For Marx use value and exchange value are interrelated, intertwined aspects of human relations and of commodities in capitalism. Understanding the difference, and the relation, is necessary to understanding the creation of surplus and profit by exploitation, and also to understanding the power of labour to change this and create socialism.
AH, I have a big editing job, so, though I'm eager to stick my nose in here, I have to be brief.
ReplyDeleteChabert, you said something interesting when you compared "people reading marx, with topics of interest only to philosophy producers." Indeed they are small and shrinking sets, pretty much intermixed. Marxism doesn't even dominate economic departments in supposedly communist China. Marx could be on his way to becoming another 19th century philosopher, of scholarly interest, but that is all.
Which is why I disagree with the spirit of your reply to Amie's post. That post, after all, presents the historic context in which Marx tried to comprehend using varying definitions of ideology. By eliminating that experience and saying, oh, Marx had three uses for the term, one demotes him to the status of Lotze. Students, write an essay comparing Lotze's idea on interest with the three uses of ideology. It isn't even a film. It is a class test.
Indeed, very much a class test. I like Amie's schema, but I am interested in particular about the use of ideology to mean "the ideas of the dominant class" which turns up in the German Ideology. I like the way Marx propounds a principle with absolutely no empirical research behind him. I think, perhaps, that Marx began to understand that this use of ideology is a non-starter. For one thing, you hardly ever find the dominant ideas in a society being propounded by the dominant class - usually they are codified by subordinates, outliers. Professors at a backwater university in Edinburgh, for instance. For another thing, it totally lacks mediation. To hold to that view gets us to Stirner's notion of representative men - the Stoics "represent" the ancients, and so on. Here, I think it is very useful to view Marx locally. The mediation he is missing is some robust idea of institutions. While in Prussia one could say something about the relationship between the dominant class and the subordinates, because it was institutionally visible, you couldn't say the same for institutions that took on more complexity. It doesn't project onto, say, the United States. If Marx was going to use ideology to understand social processes, he'd have to rethink it.
Now, this narrative does not say, oh, Marx meant x by y, and now he means a by b, and we are all getting along swimmingly in knowing what Marx meant. It doesn't take Marx as a monolith. And that, I think, is what is living in Marx, and what is applicable to our current world system. Which is why I think, far from emitting garbage about Marx, Derrida's interpretation of Marx's metaphoric brings us back to the issues Marx faced, which still exist, of course. Otherwise, one is left with a thinker who has been defined to death, and who is of antiquarian interest - rather like using a map of New Spain to travel through Mexico.
That doesn't mean I agree with everything Derrida says in Specters of Marx. I think he is distinctly weaker, moving on to the metaphoric in Das Kapital, for exactly the reason I like Amie's post - he juxtaposes, he takes the time out of the text. And that time comes in the form of intertextuality - obviously, when Marx is using use and exchange value, he is picking these things up from the classical economists. He's very up front about that. The larger question is about the scope of economics - that merger of conjectural histories with synchronic models. Which I think Derrida fumbles, but which is still a viable question - so viable that Marx himself is concerned with it.
Ach - every time I want to contribute something to this debate, I find it's moved on... so forgive me if I respond to stuff that happened way back when...
ReplyDelete1) On Eurocentrism: I definitely feel that Derrida is Eurocentric. Brutally quickly: Philosophy (Derrida says) is Eurocentric; Derrida critiques this Eurocentrism. But his critique is internal; he turns Eurocentric philosophy against itself; and Derrida does seem to believe that philosophy is an inherently European phenomenon. (Or 'Western' philosophy. But where in Derrida do we find discussion of a non-'western' philosophy?) The Western nature of Western philosophy is undermined through Western philosophy... but I don't think we thereby move outside a certain phantasised idea of the 'West'...
2) I can't say much about negroiditiy - I need to look again at these pages of 'Specters'. But worth remembering, I think, that the only work of Marx that Stirner refers to is (I believe) 'On the Jewish Question'. [And that the postscript to the first part of Stirner's book is a response to a piece by Bauer that in turn responded to that essay...] So certainly the early Marx wasn't free of this Hegelian spiritualised racism... [goes without saying that there's massive discontinuity between these early Marx writings and his later work.]
3) In some other thread, Roger, you said that you think the conflict between materialism and idealism is futile. In a broad sense, maybe. But in terms of the debate over 'Specters' and Marx, surely not... I still think Derrida's key move is his belief that Marx's idea of use value 'ontologises' use value... the associations of 'ontologisation', for Derrida, are quite specific: he thinks that use value is the thing in itself, and can therefore be assimilated to the terms of Husserlian phenomenology. This is made clear in his stuff about hule and use value being abolished in an instant by thought (exchange value performs a phenomenological reduction on use value). But Marx can't be understood in these terms; therefore Derrida's critique flounders. Clearly this needs to be expanded; but not in a speedy comment...
4) The last thing this debate needs is a flame war about Palestine. So forgive me if I mention something that no one else has yet: For my money, the most troubling aspect of 'Specters' is its discussion of the neo-cons in the Middle East - this stuff about a 'battle for the meaning of Jerusalem'. What's troubling here, IMO, is the way 'Specters' dispenses with Marx's 'materialist' analysis [however we understand 'materialism'], and reinterprets contemporary political conflicts in terms of a battle over meaning - as if meaning were the real terrain, the real territory. Derrida's analysis here seems troublingly close to the 'clash of civilisations' nonsense he's apparently opposing. And here, too, Derrida seems to be closer to the Hegelians Marx attacks than to Marx himself...
5) Chabert - I keep meaning to respond to what you said about the parallel between Derrida and Nabokov. I think this parallel is incredibly strong - right up to the double-investment of the Spectre (both trauma and resurrection). But, again, this requires thousands of words of unpacking. In brief - I agree; but I think you may underestimate the political relevance of this insistence on trauma, or mourning.
6) Mean Joe - you suggest "a straight-forward, it's just-what's-there-on-the-goddamn page reading" of 'Capital'. Which... okay... but what's there on the goddamn page is goddamn baffling. Read 'straight', Marx seems to be just incoherent. I don't think he is at all - but I think some fairly heavy duty exegesis is required to make sense of what he's saying.
7) & let me say again what a wonderful post this is, above.
All this my underinformed two cents. Also, I'm drunk.
Mean Joe - you suggest "a straight-forward, it's just-what's-there-on-the-goddamn page reading" of 'Capital'. Which... okay... but what's there on the goddamn page is goddamn baffling. Read 'straight', Marx seems to be just incoherent. I don't think he is at all - but I think some fairly heavy duty exegesis is required to make sense of what he's saying.
ReplyDeleteHere's my paraphrase. I'll use my own vocabular in the hope of making things clear, although that will probably make everybody confused:
• (α) Items have uses which depend on their physical properties;
• (β) In modern society, items are produced not for their desirable physical properties—although either (a) the uses of particular items made are well established or (b) somebody will find a use for it, e.g., the chia pet—but for what they will bring at sale;
• (γ) Given that production is directed by the salability of items rather than their desirable properties, people have hitherto tried to figure out a relationship between the two;
• (δ) The relation that makes sense is the replacement of materials and labor required to produce more of the item, which are not part of the item itself (we're talking coming up with MOAR stuff and MOAR labor to do the same thing, hence replacement);
• (δ') but people act as though the salable price of an item were a property of the item itself;
• (ε) In a world where everything is treated as a salable item, labor sure as hell looks like a salable item;
• (ζ) and in a world where everybody acts as though salable items have their sale prices as intrinsic properties, people take it for granted that labor is compensated for what it's worth;
• (η) but in fact, labor is either (a) compensated below its replacement costs or (b) has no say in how the realized sale price of its, er, labor is divided between them that do and them that own or (c) both (a) and (b)
• (θ) the inequity immediately above is how capital is accumulated.
Plain (δ) is the Labor Theory of Value or LTV (and the way I put it shows I wish I knew more about replacement cost economics, because I think that'll be the return of the LTV) and (δ') is commodity fetishism, the mystification that enables (η) and (θ) to happen (exploitation and valorization, respectively)
Anyway, my take for what's on the page, plain and simple. To my mind, it explains a lot. In particular, successful people in business speak, act, and (I reckon) think much more like LTV people than marginalist—"there's only price, no such thing as value"—economists. They also act as though their role is historically contingent, because they fight tooth and nail for their rights as owners of capital to divide the social product. Then there's the Benjamin Graham/Warren Buffet business about value investing...
Looking back on all this, I betcha in say five to ten years, there'll be an article in REASON magazine where some young gal or guy, straight outta one of the top ranked universities who took numerous courses, that'll identify Derrida as a "good classical liberal" (i.e., laissez faire capitalist) who wanted to remind us of civic virtues in the name of Marx (hence the Spectres) while at the same time showing up all the problems with those weird economic ideas that the man came up with.
I'd put money on it, in fact.
"who took numerous courses" should be "who took numerous courses in continental philosophy along with her/his econ major classes" Sorry, it's late for me, and I'm out of booze.
ReplyDeleteMean Joe: briliant summary - sounds right to me. Thank you. Your prediction also sounds depressingly plausible. (I'm pretty sure there's a paper out there somewhere [haven't read it] called 'Derrida's Debt to Friedman'...)
ReplyDeleteThe Negroid state is conceived as “the child” because Hegel says on page 89 of his Philosophie der Geschichte:
ReplyDelete“Africa is the country of the childhood of history.” “in defining the African” (Negroid) “spirit we must entirety discard the category of universality” (p. 90) — i.e., although the child or the Negro has ideas, he still does not have the idea. “Among the Negroes consciousness has not yet reached a firm objective existence, as for example God, law, in which man would have the perception of his essence” ... “thanks to which, knowledge of an absolute being is totally absent. The Negro represents natural man in all his lack of restraint” (p. 90). “Although they must be conscious of their dependence on the natural” (on things, as “Stirner” says), “this, however, does not lead them to the consciousness of something higher” (p. 91).
Here we meet again all Stirner’s determinations of the child and the Negro — dependence on things, independence of ideas and especially of “the idea”, “the essence”, “the absolute” (holy) “being”, etc.
so Marx says, Stirner thinks this because he read it in a book. For no other reason. It makes no sense. It's stupid. But he read it in a book. The idea is there; its convenient to himself; it flatters him, it serves his interests. Ideology.
Derrida suppresses the appearance of Negroid in Stirenr's text, suggesting Marx introduced it. He says he introduced it because it evokes "blackness", the night in which all cows are black. Obscurity. From this he gets superstition. He has transformed the question of ideology into one of conceptuality, of blackness, as concept, and then metaphor, cleansed of the entire critique Marx is making of "negroid" as imperialist ideology, operating as ideology, finding its way to Stirner as ideology, accepted because it serves his interests. Derrida's manoeuvre is not only dishonest, it is designed precisely to avoid the question of ideology and to steer himself back to the reiteration of the technological determinism that for him "explains" all concepts, and is all that's interesting, and it vacates both Stirner and Marx of political content, of the specific element of the concepts produced by consciousness and their social and political function, and their historicity, which Marx calls "ideology".
Praxis, thanks for the comments and for the nice words about my post. I'd like to respond to your comments but I already have things I want to try and catch up in this. I was quite under the weather yesterday, so I apologize to all for not contributing much here and being in bad spirits.
ReplyDeleteLCC, thanks for responding. Quite obviously, we disagree about a number of things here. I'll try to get to some of them. But, can I just say something about the "spirit" of my post. I would be truly sorry if you or anyone else thinks it is to be insulting. I would have thought you of all people would have recognized the theater of it, as you are very good at it yourself. And as I have told you in the past, I appreciate your writing even if at times I don't agree with it. This still holds true.
Amie
..but roger i should emphasise this is not to accuse derrida of racism of any kind; its really clearly expelling racism in the strict sense from the justification of europe's ownership of all creativity and progress, even though it takes up a model that was created through and with race and racism; there is clearly no racial component to his idea of europeanness and europe; its purely cultural. and its not even cultural racism, but rather a form of neoliberal speciesism; his superbeings are not people at all but sort of positions of ownership; his europe is close to capital, it is capital of a kind; it's not the white race, or any race at all; its a certain kind of proprietary subjectivity, which any person anywhere can adopt.
ReplyDelete"but I think you may underestimate the political relevance of this insistence on trauma, or mourning.
ReplyDelete"
Probably; someone who writes very compellingly about this is Dominick LaCapra, about the Holocaust largely but not exclusively; Representing the Holocaust, History in Transit and Writing History, Writng Trauma, and some other books, very thoughtful -perhaps you have read them, if not, I'd recommend. I don't wholeheartedly buy everything but it's very sincere and serious approach to this, and he's a very sensitive reader of both literature and non fiction. His critiques of Agamben and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah are especially courageous and observant I think.
derrida also - writing against the US; yes of course europe, the eu, is a political entity; it has a referent; the citizenry is threatened by US imperialism; they/we need to defnd themselves/ourselves. Absolutely. Enlightenment has nothing to do with it. But Derrida puts this in the language of the "civilising mission". Not only have the european citizenry to defend themselves against the US, we have to civilise th world, bring enlightenment to the arab world and china, etc. The fact is, the citizenry of europe have two enemies, US capital (imperialist) and EUROPEAN capital, domestically assaulting the citizenry. To distract from this, Derrida gives europeans an oriental enemy who is also to be patronised and enlightened. Thus "Europe" is defending itself not for its own good but for the commonweal. Thus this "Europe" is not the citizenry but european capital. But he grants capital the role of championing he citizenry against external threats and also grants capital property in the citizenry's creativity and virtues and because of that european capital also acquires the duty to civilise the barbarians.
ReplyDeleteIdeology.
Amie, you and I overlapped.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you quoted that exergue, since this discussion does have a tendency to devolve into a match between teams -although who is on what team is in question. I tend to think that Derrida's instinct in interpreting Marx is, in fact, in the tradition of Marx at his best - a tradition that faces up to failures not as periods in which one re-commits oneself to the fundamental doctrine to march on with ever fewer followers, but as periods of testing in which one sees how assumptions, attitudes, hidden motifs all contributed to the failure, were complicit with it, have to be put into relief and criticized with the tools one has at hand.
last thing - what Stirner defines as "negroid" is what Marx repeats in his reference to "the negroid form". He makes no mention of black or obscure - he literally quotes Stirner's definition of "negroid" as a childish relation to objects. He is saying "these appear in - what Stirner calls - negroid form" in other words, it is Stirner himself who possesses these qualities he attributes "to negroes". It has nothing to do with real negroes. He thinks he knows someting because he read hegel, who thought he knew something because he'd read somebody else.
ReplyDelete"I think the idea that the dominated are a blank slate doesn't make sense to me, unless you are saying that the mysterious origin of these ideas could be anywhere."
There's no mystery to the origin of these ideas. Their producers produced them. Obviously. The people signed their names. Hegel. Hegel is the origin of Hegel's book. Stirner is the origin of stirner's. Neither of these peopel considered themselves negroes.
Are you claiming that "negroes" secretly wrote those books?
(quoting self)
In The Ego And His Own, Max Stirner writes:
The Hierarchy...
The history of the world, whose shaping properly belongs altogether to the Caucasian race, seems till now to have run through two Caucasian ages, in the first of which we had to work out and work off our innate negroidity; this was followed in the second by Mongoloidity (Chineseness), which must likewise be terribly made an end of. Negroidity represents antiquity, the time of dependence on things (on cocks' eating, birds' flight, on sneezing, on thunder and lightning, on the rustling of sacred trees, etc.); Mongoloidity the time of dependence on thoughts, the Christian time. Reserved for the future are the words, "I am the owner of the world of things, I am the owner of the world of mind."
To this, in the German Ideology, Marx replied:
"This is a hierarchy of nonsense."
Stirner says:
“The Negroid character represents antiquity, dependence on things”
repeating Hegel:
and "Although they must be conscious of their dependence on the natural” (on things, as “Stirner” says), “this, however, does not lead them to the consciousness of something higher"
So Marx says: ""These general concepts appear here first of all in the Negroid form as objective spirits having for people the character of objects, and at this level are called spectres or - apparitions! [Spuk!]""
The objectivity, without "The Idea" is "the Negroid form" as Stirner defines negroidity.
But it is STIRNER who is the "negro"; it is his own reification, his own fetishism dealing with his "objects" that he conceals, fantasising a "negro" and a "child" to project it onto.
Marx doesn't have to suppose a "liberal audience who doesn't exist" - there was a liberal audience of course, liberalism existed then, but his audience was mainly socialists, among them "negroes". Frederick Dougalass was speaking in London while M and E were writing the GI. He wasn't writing for the aristocracy! To suppose that Stirner's hideous racial nonsense, or Gobineau's, which Marx also read, was representative of the entire range of possible thought about "race" is profoundly ahistorical and wrong. Which should be obvious, as Marx was also writing, as was Douglass and many others who did not share this ideology...
"the negroid" is defined BY STIRNER are a relation to objects as objects, without abstraction.
ReplyDeleteSo marx says look, Stirner relates to the concoctions of his own brain as objects. Thus, Stirner relates to his abstractions in a way that Stirner calls "negroidity".
That's what the sentence says. Then it ends in a joke - spuk! saying look, Stirner's "theory of negroidity" is nothing but a stupid bigoted slur. It is he himself, not "the negro", who relates to bits of ideology as if they were given objects.
All that stff Derrida suggests, that "negroid form" is Marx' own personal way of signalling darkness, benightedness, superstition, because Marx associates these things with black people, is misconstruction of the grossest kind. And only possibly with the deception about the origin of the word, how it comes to appear in GI because it is a major theme and pillar concept, of EAIO which Marx is criticising. The sentence is one of many in GI on this "negroidity" and its relation to Stirner's idealism and (not yet named) fetishism. It is Marx himself noticing that this is what Stirner is doing with his "theory of negroidity", and furthermore, that this particular ideology of race - the childish primitive benighted superstitious negro, who is a projection of Stirner himself, of all about himself nd his own consciousness he must conceal and expell - is wholly intertwined with his idealism in general, with his Hegelian ideology of history and of "Man".
" So he must absolutely believe everything Hegel ever wrote, every jot and tittle."
ReplyDeletethat doesn't sound like a very reasonable conclusion to assertions that they obviously share the same definition of europe, taking its contours from something both call "western metaphysics", and both devote themselves to critiquing, which has for both an identical bibliography and identical defining features, giving rise to an identical problem, which derrida however confronts in a different, though closely related, way.
LI, the above comment of yours is quite something, and now I am glad I wrote this piece, and thanks for letting me post it here.
ReplyDeleteI seem to recall a poll several years back on the World's Greatest Philosopher, and the overwhelming choice was none other than Karl Marx.
There is a passage in the German Ideology which goes to your point re Germany and Europe as well as to your point re the relation between ideas and materiality. The passage concerns "writing history":
"the “history of humanity” must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange. But it is also clear how in Germany it is impossible to write this sort of history, because the Germans lack not only the necessary power of comprehension and the material but also the “evidence of their senses,” for across the Rhine you cannot have any experience of these things since history has stopped happening."
Amie
Mr. Green
ReplyDeletePlease, I'm not an athlete! It's Mean Joe Spleen.
"It was an attack on the meaning of their lives. "
ReplyDeleteIs this how you take Marx' attack on commodity fetishism and capital? An attack on the meaning of your life?
Marx didn't laugh at "the opium of the people", he laughed at the self-serving, ersatz faith and vanity of bourgeois philosophers. He didn't laugh at African fetishes; he laughed at the arrogance of Hegel laughing at African fetishes while his own were so squalid and pompous. He didn't laugh at the old wives' and their tales, he laughed at Stirner trying to pass off old wives tales about "negroidity" as science and the evidence of a superior intelligence deserving superior status.
"Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."
Mr. Spleen, you have a great knuckle sandwich of a name. I can't believe I fucked it up! My hunblest apologies.
ReplyDeleteLI, it is sort of mind-numbing, to see that quote above about "ideological product" from the GI and how it is all about the "ruling classes" when precisely Marx has to change his take on such and not simply because of theory. Did I not try to raise this question in my post? Who am I, but one might want to read Marx on this, and its contexts and time and conflicts, and there one will find as did Marx that ideology is not simply of the "ruling class". In fact to do so, is to not to step out of it, but to succumb to it.
ReplyDeleteAmie
Well, though we are all bound to have our views of Marx, Derrida, and whatever, as is abundantly clear from this comment thread - which I've enjoyed and learned from, even if I, along with everybody else, seem stubbornly to hold my positions - after all, I only really know what those positions are after wrangling. I hope that this comment thread does show how provocative your post is, Amie. I only hope that you use it in a more ... well, status bearing place than LI. It would make a good essay for Angelika or Radical Philosophy or any number of publications you probably know better than I.
ReplyDeleteI mean, Derrida completely misrepresents the sense of the remark he quotes:
ReplyDeletethe remark is: "These general concepts appear here first of all in the Negroid form as objective spirits having for people the character of objects"
in context it is clear, it means "these general concepts appear here first in what Stirner calls the negroid form, that is, as objective spirits having for people the character of objects."
that is the sense. It is perfectly clear in the text. Derrida uses snippets first, then finally the sentence, and treats it as if the "negroid" form is not specificied by "having for people the character of objects". He treats it as if "negroid" is Marx' contribution and means "obscure, dark, superstitious", as if with "negroid" marx is commenting, himself, metaphorically, giving his view of what Stirner calls "spectres", instead of quoting. As if these are two seperate qualities - "having for people the character of objects" and "negroid" - when it is pergfectly unmistakeable that "having for people the character of objects" is a clarification of the meaning Stirner has given to the term "Negroid" which Marx is quoting. It's an outright manipulatin of the text for the purposes of misrepresentation and to obscure the content of the text which is provoking this response.
You say, why didn't Marx just say "the text is vile". Let me ask you: Why didn't Derrida just say that? Why did he instead say it was original, audacious and worth reading? (not racist, vile and stupid)? Marx clearly thought the text was dreadful and pernicious and wrong about people. False. Serviceble to imperialism. Derrida on the other hand does not see the text as wrong, false, pernicious and serviceable to imperialism.
"negroidity" comes up and Marx attacks it. It is Derrida who choses not to, who choses to implicitly apologise for it in Stirner, to treat it as acceptable in Stirner, and to obscure the racism in it's use, the whole of the racist argument, the racist argument in the theory of history, prefering to minimise it, see it as a "perfidious" but trivial outburst of Marx, a tasteless metaphor he makes use of, unrelated to anything else but Marx' personal desire to smear Stirner as supersititous and beighted. It's a gross misreading - Marx thinks Stirner is superstitious and benighted precisely because of his idealism, not his lack thereof, which is the quality Hegel and Stirner define as "negroid". So it misinterprets on every level. For an obvious polemical purpose - it is the kind of thing verging on propaganda. Reading Stirner, who is audacious, priginal, not racist, we glimpse the seamy racist unconscious of Marx in his metaphors. It's of a piece with the entire book, its consistent misreading, misrpresentation, misparaphrase and its determination to make Marx the father of Nazism. Thus to Marx is attributed that horrible nostalgia for "pure use value" that is actually found in heidegger and could not be more alien to Marx' text, phantasies about "Negroidity" and its dark superstitions are transferred from Stirner to Marx, etc etc. Derrida is purging his own dynasty of all this odiousness; he is dumping it all on Marx, and then declaring the "spiritualisation of Marx" as "messiancity" free of "ideology" and "the ideological", to which he proclaims himself heir.
I mean, derrida's prime example, in his oeuvre, of an anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-Nazi, anti-totalitarian text is Heidegger's Rectorship Address.
ReplyDeleteMarx wrote sardonically. All the time. You have to catch the tone. I suppose Derrida could read his letter to his son in law informing him in all seriousness that grampa Karl has just been brought to understand by a very learned man that his son in law and grandchild are racial inferiors, and conclude that Marx believed this to be true. Or you could have half a brain and understand that this is sarcasm, assuming an audience that will understand it as such, sharing in the contempt and more importantly recognising the references. It always amazes me how people read snippets of Marx and Engels where they mockingly quote Gobineau and the racist press and conclude - look, they were maniacal racists. Perhaps it is because nobody reads Gobineau and Stirner anymore, so they just don't recognise this stuff, its been cleansed from our ideas of the context; but its as if someone a hundred years from now watched buffy the vampire slayer, and when she says something like "its a dessert toping, and a floorwax" takes that literally, not knowing it is an echo, a sarcastic reference to something well known which only has sense as a quotation.
Which is not to say Marx was free of the ideology of race; i doubt anyone is; not Derrida or anyone else, not I, not you. That Derrida fails to see racism in Heidegger and Stirner says a lot about his way of thinking, but that's no reason to give the Marx the "not as bad as nazis award". Still, Marx' participation in or "subjection to" the dominant ideas of the dominant class, despite his extensive critique of them, his substantial but not total liberation from them, is no excuse for Derrida's perfectly dishonest and distorting "reading" of The German Ideology.
I mean, you are saying the dominated "arent a blank slate" so these ideas in hegel stirner and derrida are really based on perceptions of those people, for hegel africans, for striner negroes, for derrida noneuropeans and presocratics; they really are like this and this is where hegel and stirner get their ideas. What Marx is tryinbg to show is that these ideas have nothing to do with africans and negroes; they arise from their authors, from germans, in german situations; they are IDEOLOGY, they come out of experience operated on by interest. The empirical question - proving "all men are equal" - is not really relevant and it is liberal individualist anyhow, not what marx is after. Marx believes consciousness is determined by being; he believes people in different conditions think differently; stirner is not making the explicitly biologist argument of a gobineau, but the culturalist one of a heidegger; he is does not explicitly suggest that a "negro" in a physical sense cannot be a "caucasian caucasian" - its another kind of spectre, out of Hegel, who comes before Darwin. Marx is trying to show how this ideology, the German ideology, arises from the German condition. It is this that Derrida rejects and I guess you are rejecting, assuling there really is something, some real people, some observable something, who give rise to these theories of history. Marx is getting at the more important issue here in this text. Not all racism is biologism; not all ideology of domination hinges on some notion of genetic determination. Heidegger's racism did not, and was just as dangerous - it is this, ideology, which is not simply "mistakes", debunkable by empirical evidence, that Marx is trying to explain and account for. How "africans" nd "negroes" are ideas, elements of ideology, which are formed for the convenience of class domination, out of the experience of the producers of these ideas, out of their perspectives and their interests. Not simply erroneous misperceptions objective rational minds may have of real people which can be cured simply by better and more acquaintance, more facts, more scientific knowledge.
ReplyDeleteMarx was a bit Rousseuian. He saw people as having lost important things through civilisation; lost liberty and leisure. On the other hand, he saw the "development of the forces of production" which this allowed as a very big gain, that would really liberate people from the greatest necessity - want and scarcity, which cause competition and war and violence. So he saw the narrative of "progress", material development, as a mixed bag; but its a given, history is a given, a fact, and he thought now was possible to regain lost liberty and leisure - that it, abolish exploitation of the mass of people by a minority of appropriators - in circumstances that could make this rally ghood, people really really free, with no need to compete, because scarcity had been conquered with machinic technology and organisation, the socialisation of production. But this faint rousseauism also means in Marx a view of decadence of certain ways of thinking that is "the German ideology"; this secularised christianity. Its adherents put it forward as an advance, as the culmination of a progress, as improvement, a better way of thinking than materialism, which they caricature and then degrade with association with dominated people who are objects of contempt in an existing and developing discourse of race. This whole thing, the whole complex of assumptions, not just the racism, is rejected by Marx. And he sees it as a constellation, a clutch of ideas, as coherent ideology. And he is attackng it as such a complex.
I guess we must ask who (or what) does Marx betray by quoting Stirner's text as he reads and criticises it? Against whom is the perfidy committed when Marx uses Stirner's own terminology to describe his ideological fetishes? With whom did Marx break faith here? What loyalty was defiled? A loyalty he owes his fellow German, bourgeois, philosopher, young hegelian, a causcasian caucasian, author of an "audacious original" racist screed worth reading "against" Marx, with whom he must have solidarity? Or is it Europe, civilisation, the greco-european adventure that Marx betrays? His own "spirit", spirit the führer, spirit as the will as the will to know as perpetual self-critique that Derrida gives the name of Europe? Which must preserve itself, its unique enlightenment, democracy, etc, against negroidity and mongoloidity, against China and Arab/Muslim despotism, etc?
ReplyDeleteOr what? It can' be negro people, since Marx makes very plain there are no negro people concerned here, that Stirner's "negroes" are fictional characters, the fictional "africans" he's copying from Hegel, not anybody Stirner, or Hegel, ever met, and not only that they are internchangeable with "the child", which is not to say Stirner seriously believes he was a "negro" when he himself was a child, or that all children are negroes, or that all negroes are children, but that "Man" when a child is a negro, in other words, what Marx says: "nonsense", that is to say these are all fictions, ideological images concocted to embody concepts ("materialism", "custom") and give them a veneer of something else, "world-embracing names".
So saying "all men are equal" is about as useful here as pointing out that "Negroes" also go through puberty, and "Mongols" age past adolescence as well. Since Stirner is not suggesting that "Negros" and "Mongols" as individuals do not reach biological adulthood, the critique of this "audacious and original" argument about their perpetual childhood and perpetual adolescence has to approach it as Marx does, revealing its thingification, its logic, premises etc.
but contructing plato as european, and making a case for a "european universalism" stemming from plato - what could be more eurocentric? its about what you favour, its how you represent things. how you build and define europe, what is means. for derrida and hedeidegger it's the same thing; attitudes toward it are personal and nobody cares - these guys aren't anybody's priests, nobody cares what they like or recommend. their influence arises from their ideology not their political commitments, from how they frame and portray reality. plato was unknown in europe until the renaissance, and is scarcely known today. the neoplatonism that has had influence on european culture, christianity, is Palestinian in origin. And might there be a connection between Derrida's determination that platonism be european, exclusively, that ancient greece be european, connected to his inability, as praxis notes, to bring his famous concern for justice to bear on an understanding of what is going on in Palestine? perhaps there's no connection between expelling Palestine from the land o' Plato and Derrida's idea that the violence of the colonised in an asymetric conflct is "archaic", but there could be.
ReplyDeletei'm not saying derrida's readings of idealist philosophy have no interesting things to say; for me its half observant, half blind; but to deconstruct "european universalism" one has first to construct it, and it survives it "deconstruction" stronger than it would survive an ideological historical critique. it would be better to stop rebuilding it, perhaps; to let it just go away. I disagree with your view that Marx is concerned with the same spiritual europe as heidegger and derrida, but if that were the case, then one can only say, just because marx jumped off the empire state building doesn't mean derrida has to...
This ruse of deconstructing European Reason, the greco-european adventure, is much like the interviewee who confesses to the terrible fault of workaholism.
"What is bifid"
ReplyDeletealso, probably, bifide - i don't have the french text - just "forked" like the tongue of a snake, following "perfidious", double-edged...there is some treachery here, Marx is disloyal, but to whom? what interests?
"What concerns him is not the racism, it is the lack of materialism"
okay; but these are one and the same. Because without idealism you cannot have "race" at all - it is ideal, it has no material content. It is not a conceptual abstraction, like "forces of production", it is a fiction, like "the devil." Derrida's inability to distinguish between different types of concepts, between fictions like "negroidity" or "european reason" and conceptual abstractions like "centre", "value" or "exploitation" - here we ought have a sense of the distinction in marx between ideology and consciousness which derrida and many later marxists discard - would be a handicap if his intent were really to pursue the critique of ideology marx and engels began, and which was followed by gramsci, lukacs, benjamin, adorno, horkheimer etc..
roger, why do you like "Amie's schema"? why is it so appealing?
ReplyDeletere: entering the texts by a back way ("entering the labyrinth whose architect Derrida is"?): might work as computer metaphor (yes), but racism &c (no). back of the bus, servant's entrance, the voiding "back door" &c&c&c. btw, it amazes me that (at some point) "Europe... did not contain Germany". but, this gives me the idea of Germany finding a "back door" to Europe (that Yoko Ono thingy).
re: the notion that Derrida is some kind of Eurocentric guy + LCC's "caught between US hegemony and the rising power of China" -- someone calls this Derrida "refashioning Europe into a fetish" (& other comments there support, i think, LCC's pointing out Derrida's "greco-european adventure").
LCC, i think Amie directly lands at the negroidity address space: "It would then be a matter of demystifying the mechanisms of illusion and of "autonomization" by which a "fantastic" world replaces – substitutes for – reality. The matter is of course not so simple or reassuring. For one thing, as we shall see, the process of demystification, the reduction of the "fantastic" world and the access to historical reality for Marx is only possible through historical change – revolution. But in such a reading of ideology one can at least rest secure and be (re)assured that in the realm of real life and the realm of production there is no ideology. Nor, of course, any ghosts."
everyone's problem (as you state), including the production of racism, is "demystifying the mechanisms of illusion". if BIFID/BIFIDE means "forked" it's a great crossroads metaphor. is the MARX BIFIDE (per roger) Marx dancing around his own "germanic-european adventure"?
i think this comment of LCC's seems to sum up the DERRIDA BEFIDE (correct me if i'm wrong): "Derrida does not acknowledge exploitation at all, and his idea of domination is mystifying, a general oppression by modernity, by telecom technology, by financial technology, (he's pluralise all these) and his concern is not property relations in capitalism, but the attitudes of the bourgeoisie toward culture products. Marx' project was to overthrow bourgeois rule and put an end to exploitation, Derrida's is to justify it and reform the private ethics of the lower level of participants. So showing how insightful Marx was about ideology, and the importance he gave it to his analysis and the importance he thought it had for the maintenance of ruling classes and the reproduction of exploitative class societies, does not in itself prove or suggest that Derrida must be just as he says continuing what he terms the interminable self-critique that is the true "spirit" of Marx."
roger, you may be interested in (1848 stuff echoing many themes in here), Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne And The Antemosaic Cosmic Man Race, Class And The Crisis Of Bourgeois Ideology In An American Renaissance Writer (see note #301).
ReplyDeletethanks north hanger:
ReplyDelete"is the MARX BIFIDE (per roger) Marx dancing around his own "germanic-european adventure"?"
there's surely something like that there - it could not be otherwise - but its really cracked open and disrupted constantly by critical thinking. About British imperialism in China, for exmple, Marx says the attack will change the course of Chinese history and how the Chinese react will change the course of European history. He sees it always two way; national struggle and global class struggle.
LI, i would like to take up one of your suggestions, and briefly extend something from the post. I wrote that Capital - the text - can also be read as a response to 1848. By which I mean, that it is also a work of mourning for 1848, for the revolution and for the proletariat. It is also a text haunted by the revolution and the proletariat. In previous texts, the proletariat is "ever present". In Capital, remarkably enough, the name and the word proletariat almost disappears. Marx instead utilizes Arbeiterklasse (working class). What to make of this quasi-absence of the name and of the proletariat from Capital? As if they had become ghosts?
ReplyDeleteOne other comment. I was looking at LCC's latest instance of what LCC calls a careful reading of Specters of Marx, and notice that it starts off thusly:
"Spectres of Marx opens with an exordium, and the appearance of a spirit. A ghost. It is not a ghost of Marx, but of the arch anti-communist, Nietzsche..."
Well, I'm not going to argue the point, but will anyone be surprised in reading the exordium (exorde) to find that Nietzsche is nowhere named in that section though Kant is. But maybe Kant is not enough of an "anti-communist".
My problem with this statement is a little different. Spectres of Marx does not open as LCC asserts with an exordium but with a "dedication". And in that dedication is named a "figure", the very first proper name to occur in Spectres of Marx. It is that of Chris Hani.
What to make of an assertion and a gesture that blatantly and violently effaces and erases Chris Hani's name from Spectres of Marx? So this is close reading? And it is Derrida who stands accused of cynicism?
Allow me to quote from the opening dedication:
"But one should never speak of the assassination of a man as a figure, not even as exemplary figure in the logic of an emblem, a rhetoric of the flag or of martyrdom. A man's life, as unique as his death, will always be more than a paradigm and something other than a symbol. And this is precisely what a proper name should always name.
And yet. And yet, keeping this in mind and having recourse to a common noun, I recall that it is a communist as such, a communist as communist, whom a Polish emigrant and his accomplices, all the assassins of Chris Hani, put to death a few days ago, April 10th. The assassins themselves declared that they were out to get a communist. They were trying to interrupt negotiations and sabotage an ongoing democratization. This popular hero of the resistance against Apartheid became dangerous and suddenly intolerable, it seems, at the moment in which, having decided to devote himself once again to a minority Communist Party riddled with contradictions, he gave up important responsibilities in the ANC and perhaps any official political or even governmental role he might one day have held in a country freed of Apartheid.
Allow me salute the memory of Chris Hani and to dedicate this lecture to him."
-JD
the italics are in the text.
Amie
oops, the italics disappeared as i posted this. It is communist which is in italics in the line "...a communist as such, a communist as communist..."
ReplyDeleteAmie
Here is the above text in French:
ReplyDeleteMais on ne devrait jamais parler de l'assissinat d'un homme comme d'une figure, pas même une figure exemplaire dans une logique de l'emblème, une rhetorique du drapeau ou du martyre. La vie d'un homme, unique autant que sa mort, sera toujours plus qu'un paradigme et autre chose qu'un symbole. Et c'est cela même que devrait toujours nommer un nom propre.
Et pourtant. Et pourtant, gardant cela en mémoire, et recourant à un certain nom commun, qui n'est pas n'importe quel nom commun, je rappelle que c'est un communiste comme tel, un communiste comme communiste, qu'un émigré polonais et ses complices, tous les assassins de Chris Hani, ont mis à mort il y a quelques jours, le 10 avril. Les assassins ont déclaré eux-mêmes qu'ils s'en prenaient à un communiste. Ils essayaient alors de interrompre des négociations et de saboter une démocratisation en cours. Ce héros populaire de la résistance contre l'Apartheid a paru dangerereux, semble-t-il, et tout à coup intolérable au moment précis où, décidant de se consacrer à nouveau à un parti communiste minoritaire et traversé de contradictions, il renonçait à de hautes responsabilités dans l'ANC et peut-être à jouer un rôle politique officiel, voire gouvernemental, dans un pays délivré de l'Apartheid.
Permettez-moi de saluer la mémoire de Chris Hani et de lui dédier cette conférence.
-JD
Amie
thanks Amie (have to get out my dave matthews band cds now).
ReplyDeleteBerlin Wall falls 09-Nov-1989. 94 days later, Nelson Mandela released from prison 11-Feb-1990 (our march to freedom is irreversible).
Chris Hani, dead communist, could not say what he thought of Derrida's project to "spiritualise" Marx and "annihilate" that which attaches it to "the body" of "Marxist doctrine", to parties, to the analysis of class, to a revolutionary struggle, etc.. Hani indeed can be identified as a Marxist in one of the spirits to be annihilated. That Derrida chose to dedicate the speeches to him does not authorise us to assume his consent to the role assigned him as dedicatee or agreement with the content of that which is dedicated; we can't assume his patronage of the content of the text. Is there anything in this text dedicated to Hani, as a dead communist, (and not to any of his living comrades, those who carry on the collective project to which he devoted himself), that pertains to his ideas, actions, commitments, struggle except to reject them and denounce them as criminal and embryos of "totalitarian monstrosity"? Isn't Derrida's choice of communist for honouring with this gift of his lectures in keeping with the anti-communist tradition and its preference for dead communists?
ReplyDelete"But one should never speak of the assassination of a man as a figure, not even as exemplary figure in the logic of an emblem, a rhetoric of the flag or of martyrdom. A man's life, as unique as his death, will always be more than a paradigm and something other than a symbol. And this is precisely what a proper name should always name.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet. "
and yet that's just what derrida's going to do. chris hani, an emblem. Chosen to be celebrated not for anything he did - for what he did and believed is reviled at length in the text - but for what was done to him: he was assassinated. the text is dedicated to him as victim of assassination. a mute communist evoked as convenient interlocutor; an illusion of his consent to the text, a repudiation of all he believed and did and struggled for, easily compelled. he can't resist, like a ghost at a quack seance, he must come when called.