A Stiegler Follow Up Post

Peter Gratton links to my review of Stiegler's For a New Critique of Political Economy and notes:

I would think Devin would question some of the Marxian categories he introduces–the task of some of his current work–but I think he brings them up not to say Stiegler is wrong because he’s fallen afoul of doctrinaire Marxism, but simply that if you’re going to critique Marx, you better get him right.

Discussing Marx--without becoming mired in the numerous debates over Marx and Marxist theory--in the forum of a book review can be challenging, especially in discussions of political economy, where it is quite easy to come off as dogmatic. Peter thankfully points out that this is not what I am doing. And yet, unfortunately, my recent work on Rancière and Marx has yet to see the light of day in published form, which means the reader sees the results of the work, and not the process of critique behind it. 

What I am trying to do, in the review of Stiegler, is discuss his work in relation to those aspects of Marx's thought that I think have (or should have) bearing on contemporary debates. If we're going to talk about political economy, then I think we have to talk about expropriation and class within capitalism, and if we're going to talk about neoliberalism, then--following David Harvey--I think it is necessary to discuss aspects of what he calls accumulation by dispossession. Especially if you're going to pay tribute the to the 150th anniversary of Marx's Contributions to a Critique of Political Economy (1859).

But I'm doing more in other parts of the review than using Marx as a heuristic device for criticizing Stiegler. So, when I bring up the distinction between objectification (Vergegenständlichung) and alienation or externalization (Entfremdung or Entäußerung) from the 1844 manuscripts, I'm taking the point very seriously. If you read Marx through French debates (post-Althusser or post-Foucault), the difference between objectification and alienation will not be on your map, as Althusser dismisses, as we all know, much of the early Marx as too humanist--not to mention that Marx's work was dismissed by Foucault as an anthropologizing discourse--think The Order of Things, the sand on the beach, etc. But I came to this problem through Lukacs, or I used to come at these problems after Althusser and Foucault, until Lukacs (and, since he doesn't get enough credit, Karl Korsch) convinced me otherwise.

That aside, I think one of the central problems of the Stiegler's and Agamben's of contemporary philosophy is to mistake the fact that humans produce things with alienation. That is, you make something, or, in Agamben's more extreme moments, use language, then you're already captured in an apparatus, and thus ultimately alienated. The distinction between objectification and alienation is to differentiate between humans mediating, through making things, their relations with each other and with nature, and a historically situated mode of production, capitalism, which expropriates so much of human activity. If you don't, you run the risk of bemoaning cellular phones as the worst and most ubiquitous of apparatuses.

But it's not just the Heideggerian approach that runs into trouble, there's a Sartrean version of the same problem, which causes trouble for Rancière: the question turns on what it means to activate and maintain egalitarian practices without them reifying into inegalitarian institutions. I'm still working this out, but I can say this question is the reason that the problem of objectification and alienation has become one of my concerns.

Hegel at 240

Since it's Hegel's birthday today (he was born 27 August 1770), we're going to spend today talking a bit about standing him on his feet. I've spent the last two days weeks writing a first draft account of Karl Korsch's and Lukács's criticisms of Social Democracy and the 2nd International,  working up an explanation as to why Hegelian dialectics re-emerge as a central methodological problem for Marxist theory in 1923. 

At the same time, I've been filling out the picture by reading up on other prominent figures in revolutionary struggle from 1900-1923, focusing on the various ways that Marx (I know that there's some anachronism here), Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg defend revolutionary struggle against reformism. Eduard Bernstein, who I've already briefly discussed here, is the paradigmatic figure of reformism, until the 'Pope of Orthodox Marxism' Kautsky falls on the wrong side of the critique of imperialism. Of Bernstein's 'method', Luxemburg writes:

Today he who wants to pass as a socialist, and at the same time declare war on Marxian doctrine, the most stupendous product of the human mind in the century, must begin with involuntary esteem for Marx. He must begin by acknowledging himself to be his disciple, by seeking in Marx’s own teachings the points of support for an attack on the latter, while he represents this attack as a further development of Marxian doctrine. 

This passage from Reform and Revolution is still spot on. How many times, since I've started working on Marx-Lukács-Benjamin for my next book, have I heard somebody mention that whatever thinker they work on 'admires Marx' or 'takes Marx seriously' and then proposes said thinker's critique as an advance of critical political thought, when said thinker knocks down a straw man version of Marxist theory (which, incidentally, was probably held by some prominent figure in the 2nd International)? If you don't believe me, go back and reread Heidegger's essay on humanism, or anything Schmitt wrote on Marx.

Sure they quibble about particular parts of Marx's thought, but they won't follow Marx into the details of political economy. Heidegger dodges the bullet by pushing Marx (with Hegel no less) off to the 'history of metaphysics', and Schmitt goes all sovereign-fetishist crazy, but neither looks at so-called metaphysical or juridical problems as part of the totality of social organization. As Lukács argues, the capacity to present these problems as part of the totality of social organization is precisely the merit of Marx's historical materialism.

Eduard Bernstein, Revisionist

Over the weekend, I read Eduard Bernstein's Evolutionary Socialism (the original title is Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie-- The Premises of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy). The purpose was to get a better grasp on the debates of the Second International. If you don't already know, Bernstein, who published the book in 1899, is the central figure of revisionism, and is, along with the renegade Kautsky, constantly the target of the scorn and polemics of Lenin and Lukács. 

The reason I picked up Evolutionary Socialism was to find out if all the accusations are true.

And they are.*

Bernstein lists most of the typical objections to Marx's political thought: dismissing its method as Hegelian obfuscation, mistaking 'vulgar' materialism for historical materialism,  claiming its so-called predictions didn't come true, arguing against revolutionary violence without grasping the systemic violence of capitalism, and accusing his more radical opponents of utopianism.

It almost makes me think that Lukács revised "What is Orthodox Marxism?" for History and Class Consciousness with Bernstein's book in front of him.

But most importantly, Bernstein argues that the basis of social struggle was the capture of democracy for socialism. That is, even if democracy's history is that of bourgeois class advantage, it is the premise of socialism: "democracy is a condition of socialism to a much greater degree than is usually assumed, i.e., it is not only the means but also the substance” (page 166).** In large part, the Social Democrats accepted the idea that the means of production, and the democratic regime of rights, would gradually lead to more democratic organizations. But this required presupposing that history was a story of progress (which is why Bernstein-- who took a rather chauvinistic view on these matters-- couldn't grasp the problems of internationalism and colonialism). The problem with progress is that its proponents tended to wait; accelerating the process of social change through revolutionary struggle becomes, for somebody like Bernstein, more pernicious on principle than the systemic violence of capitalism.

The point of Marx, Lenin, Lukács, and Benjamin (just to name those I am reading lately) is that history is not a story of progress, it is a story of social struggle, with both advances and reversals. In addition, the emphasis on the progressive realization of rights ignores that capitalism is not defined by its juridical relations, but by the combined and uneven development of, and conflict between, social forms and capital accumulation.

Notes

* It doesn't help Bernstein's intellectual legacy that Sidney Hook, CIA cultural frontman and FBI informant, wrote the Introduction to the 1961 edition published by Schocken.

** 'Democracy as substance'...does this make Hardt and Negri Bernsteins with a 21st century twist?

"A Brief History of Neoliberalism", Chapter 7

Having cornered the ideological market via naked repression and the subtler re-organization of what Gramsci calls "common sense" (i.e. "the sense held in common"), neoliberalism has on the one hand effectively foreclosed mainstream debate "as to which of several divergent concepts of freedom might be appropriate to our times" [183-184]. Under neoliberalism, freedom is simply market freedom, and rights boil down to individual property rights; even FDR's Keynesian policies and wishy-washy "Obamanomics" sound like communist extremism given neoliberalism's ideological ambiance. On the other hand, through its history of accumulation by dispossession, social corrosion and natural despoliation, neoliberalism itself accounts for "the emergence of diverse oppositional cultures that from both within and without the market system either explicitly or tacitly reject the market ethic and the practices neoliberalism imposes" [185]. Harvey argues in Chapter 7 that although there are signs of growing discontent within policy circles as regards the performance of much-touted neoliberal solutions, true change has to come from "outside the frames of reference defined by this class power and market ethics while staying soberly anchored in the realities of our time and place" [188]. To leap over our shadow in this way is possible in any case because the neoliberal organization of consent has its limits as well as its unintended consequences, and because "these realities [of our time and place] point to the possibility of a major crisis within the heartland of the neoliberal order itself" [Ibid.].


Neoliberalism is rife with economic and political contradictions. These can be contained through locally damaging but globally manageable financial crises, but only at the cost of practices departing significantly from neoliberal theory [Ibid.]. This suggests that despite its continuing hegemony in the ideological arena, neoliberalism is "in trouble if if not actually dead as a viable theoretical guide to ensuring the future of capital accumulation" [Ibid.]. Moreover, the contradictions of neoliberalism cannot rule out an Argentina-2001-type situation even in US, which would have catastrophic consequences for local as well as global capitalism [189]. This is of course a doomsday scenario, but as Harvey argues (and backs up with a painstaking reconstruction and expansion of Marx in his stellar The Limits to Capital), "there is a limit to which this system can progress" [190].


That there's a limit means not only that it is increasingly difficult for American capital to be realized (in Marx's precise sense), but that in simple terms, it's running out of frontier. Rosa Luxemburg (in The Accumulation of Capital) famously argued that capitalism needs a non-capitalist outside to survive (for example: a crisis of over-accumulation in the centers of global capitalism can be mitigated by forcing open "primitive" or "under-developed" foreign markets through economic pressure or open imperialism). This theoretical insight has been critiqued, refined and expanded by subsequent theorists, but at bottom it means that capitalism survives via periodic cycles of primitive accumulation or, as Harvey prefers to term it, "accumulation by dispossession". At the most general level, a look at recent history appears to bear this insight out. What we are witnessing now in the US, especially as regards the housing bubble and the ruination of vast swaths of the population through consumer debt, is a truly cannibalistic form of capitalism: American capital, effectively, is visiting accumulation by dispossession on American citizens.


An unworkable, cannibalistic neoliberal order will either fall on account of its own contradictions, in particular the class struggle it perpetuates and exacerbates, or it will consolidate its class rule by more and more open neoconservative authoritarianism (neoconservatism being a natural rather than monstrous or unaccountable offspring of neoliberalism). As Harvey states, "regimes of accumulation rarely if ever dissolve peacefully" [189]. Neoliberalism will not go gentle into that good night for the very reason that it is about class power, and not about economic efficiency and material abundance for the many. We can expect that the struggles surrounding the G20 coordinated austerity plan and so on will only sharpen as things develop. We can also expect increasingly open class warfare on the part of the rich to the extent that their economic "solutions" reveal themselves for what they are: accumulation by dispossession visited on the general public, with a view to further enriching the upper class. If class warfare on the part of the dispossessed is also inevitable, to the extent that this category embraces an increasingly large portion of the general population, the field is ripening for insurrection and - this is our hope in any case - for revolution.


This opens the question of the particular characteristics, direction(s) and prospects of the emergent resistance to the neoliberal order. If the recent G20 convergence in Toronto has taught us anything, it's that parliamentary politicians and the traditional organized or "official" Left continue to play the same game as their neoliberal masters. A Black Bloc of a few hundred smashing corporate storefronts caused a mass moral panic among a Left that could not even conceive of the moral rightness of property damage against the order that it professes to oppose. The official Left did the conservative government and mainstream media's job admirably in quickly denouncing militant comrades as terrorists, criminals, or agents-provocateurs. This is an exemplary case of what Lukacs long ago identified as the fetishization of legalism; apparently the mainstream Canadian Left is incapable of imaging cases where tactics may be illegal, but also morally right and pragmatically called for. Evidently, it has not even done the necessary prerequisite work of untangling the questions of legality, morality, and tactical soundness.


Harvey himself speculates on the shape of the resistance to come, taking shots at Hardt-and-Negri style abstractions as well as principled narrowly-focused local activism. There must be a global analysis to guide the resistance, but he allows that an expanded account of the local will continue to be a vital point of leverage in future struggles. Essentially, demands, agendas and tactics must be locally tailored and appropriate, but they must also be revolutionary - and this, precisely, entails a view to unity and an emergent form of activist organization. Neoliberalism's self-serving, empty and formally negative rights discourse must also be opposed by a more robust and positive vision of human rights, namely in terms of a right to economic security and prosperity.


The main lesson to take away from Harvey, in any case, is the following: "if it looks like class struggle and acts like class war then we have to name it unashamedly for what it is. The mass of the population has either to resign itself to the historical and geographical trajectory defined by overwhelming and ever-increasing upper-class power, or respond to it in class terms" [202]. In practical terms this means a subject-position cleansed of a neoliberal "common sense" that would have over seventy percent of Canadian citizens cheerfully condoning the repressive actions of a police force hired to ensure that dispossession of public assets could go unimpeded. As regards the general content of this subject-position, the Industrial Workers of the World put it best perhaps, in the preamble to their constitution: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common."

On Wilhelm Meister, Schelling, and Lukács

Lukács's Theory of the Novel might be one of the more unrewarding books that I have recently read, for two reasons. First, it is written before his turn to Marxism from the sociological school around Weber, which might not be so bad if not for 2) his penchant for renunciation. Lukács, as is well-known, had a persistent tendency to renounce previous works for not being (party-line) Marxist enough, which is often easy enough to ignore. But with the Theory of the Novel, which he is quite correct in describing as relying on a sometimes uncritical typology of novels, one is confronted with a tradition that is not as interesting as that of Marxism. The flaws of The Theory of the Novel, and its often romantic tone, outweigh his general insight that "the problems of the novel form are here the mirror-image of a world gone out of joint."

Why? Because Schelling anticipated this conclusion, and several others,* by a century in his lectures later published as the Philosophy of Art (1802-1804); and Schelling's absolute idealism from this period of his thought is much more theoretically interesting than Lukács's post-Kantian sociology (sometime I might discuss Lukács's polemic against Schelling in the Destruction of Reason, but it's beyond our concerns here).

Nevertheless, I discovered that my own opinion of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, which I've also recently read, falls somewhere between the estimations of the young Lukács and Schelling's Philosophy of Art.

For Schelling, a novel's protagonist is only a fragment, and thus imperfection and irony become especially powerful devices. So, the limited perspective of the characters presents in an ironic and unconscious manner the objective situation of the novel. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister is Schelling’s exemplar:

The protagonist promises much and many things; he appears destined to be an artist, but he loses this false conception, since through the four volumes he appears or is treated continually not as a master, as his name implies, but as a pupil. He remains a likeable, gregarious character who makes contacts easily and is always attractive. To that extent he is a fortunate center for the whole and constitutes an enticing foreground. The background reveals itself toward the end and displays an infinite perspective on all the wisdom of life behind a kind of illusory game, for the secret society is actually nothing other than this, and it dissolves itself at just the moment it becomes visible. Only the mystery of the apprenticeship itself articulates this wisdom: namely, only he who has recognized his own destiny is a master (Philosophy of Art, 235-236/5: 681).

However, despite the play of irony Goethe cannot but elevate the nobility to the level of substantiality. Wilhelm's failure to become and artist, and his eventual break from the social marginalization of the theatre troupe, prevents him from renouncing his class; instead he is elevated from his initial bourgeois position to the nobility:

Within this class, although confined to a small circle of its members, a universal and all-embracing cultural flowering is supposed to occur, capable of absorbing the most varied individual destinies. In other words, the world ths confined within a single class–the nobility–and based upon it, partakes of the problem-free radiance of the epic (Theory of the Novel, 141).

The elevation of the nobility may have been less jarring had it not occurred through the element of the secret society. The first five books have a remarkable clarity and unity, which might only be able to move forward by the introduction of fantastic elements (including the foregrounding work done by the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul...). In introducing the Tower, Goethe utilized Romantic "methods in order to give sensuous significance and gravity to the ending of the novel, although he tried to rob them of their epic quality by using them lightly and ironically." And yet "he could not prevent it from introducing a disrupting dissonance into the total unity of the whole" (Theory of the Novel, 141-142).

Notwithstanding these criticisms, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is probably the Bildungsroman because it mirrors the open questions that haunted the German world of letters at the end of the 18th century (when the Ghost could still be Hamlet's, and not the spectre of communism?). Most of the thinkers we now identify with a kind of romantic idealism were influenced by Goethe, and their own philosophical 'apprenticesphips,' working through the thought of Kant, Fichte and Spinoza, are reflected in a much more playful manner in Wilhelm Meister's.

*So, for instance, Lukács's argument that Dante's Divine Comedy is the "historico-philosophical transition from the pure epic to the novel" is anticipated by Schelling's argument that the Divine Comedy "is prophetic and prototypical for the entirety of modern poesy" (1989: 247/V, 163).