In my last post I mentioned that Joe Hughes, Jeff Bell and I are drawing up plans for a book on social and political philosophy and ontology. It seems to me that Sartre poses the nature of the question we’ll try to address. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre remarks that “…man [sic.] is mediated by things to the same extent as things are ‘mediated’ by man [sic.]” (79). In this regard, Sartre repeats, in his own way, Marx’s famous thesis that “men [sic.] make history, but not in conditions of their own making.” Sartre provides a gorgeous example of how things mediate humans to the same degree that humans mediate things later in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Is Sartre remarks,
In his excellent book, Mumford says: ‘Since the steam engine requires constant care on the part of the stoker and engineer, steam power was more efficient in large units than in small ones… Thus steam power fostered the tendency toward large industrial plants…” I do not wish to question the soundness of these observations, but simply to note the strange language– language which has been ours since Marx and which we have no difficulty in understanding –in which a single proposition links finality to necessity so indissolubly that it is impossible to tell any longer whether it is man or machine which is a practical project. (159 – 160)
Is it humans that define the telos of producing large industrial plants, or is it the specific properties of steam engines that generate the aim of producing large industrial plants? In a manner that will later be repeated by Stiegler in Time and Tecnics, Sartre will suggest that the technological realm takes on a teleology of its own.
In this connection, Sartre will set up a dialectic between praxis and antipraxis. Antipraxis refers to the inertia of the nonhuman realm and the manner in which it comes to structure human relationships and possibilities. One of Sartre’s questions, according to Joseph Catalano in A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles is the question of “…’the condition for the possibility’ of human relations” (22). Because Sartre advocates a metaphysical nominalism in which only individuals exist, he’s obligated to account for how social relations emerge. Among Sartre’s answers is the concept of antipraxis.
How is this to be understood? Through human praxis we create artifacts or products that come to condition subsequent human activity. Take the example of agriculture. Within a hunter-gatherer framework, it is likely that the growing of plants and the raising of livestock was not an aim in itself, but was a causal activity that supplemented what could be hunted and gathered. However, with time the products of agriculture (tilled land and domesticated animals) comes to take on a life of its own. Humans now find themselves existing in a field of inherited products of agriculture, new social relations begin to emerge. For example, people now begin to get tied to particular locations, rather than wandering all over the place, women no longer enjoy the egalitarian position they often enjoyed in agricultural society, paternity becomes important in determining labor and inheritance, time comes to be structured in a different way around the harvest and the rationing of grains over the year, and some form of military becomes necessary to defend against invasion and pillage. This is what Sartre refers to as the “practico-inert”, which consists of the products of human praxis that have now taken on a life of their own, structuring human relations in a particular way.
Those that engaged in agriculture did not intend these new social relations, but rather found themselves in a field– what I call a “regime of attraction” –that produced these new forms of relations. The situation is very much similar to a particular moment on a chess board. Occasionally one of your pieces end up in a position with respect to the other pieces where a particular moves is more or less necessitated by the positions of the other pieces. In Heideggerian terms, we find ourselves thrown into a world that is not of our own making and that structures our movements, ways of relating, even our very subjectivity and ways of feeling in a variety of different ways. Sartre raises questions, for example, as to whether we can univocally say that “primitive man” is anything like modern industrial humans, or whether they even belong to the same species or type. In this regard, he repeats the claims of Marx and Engels in the Manifesto.
The question that Sartre raises so admirably is that of how praxis is possible in a world where humans are mediated by things as much as things are mediated by humans. Put in terms of political thought, how are self-directing collectives or groups possible? Here I think that we should abandon the term subject within social and political theory and follow Deleuze and Guattari’s or Sartre’s advice of talking in terms of collectives or “subject-groups” because “subject” implies an individual or person, whereas the question of politics is always a question of collectives. Contemporary social and political theory is characterized by an opposition between what might be called, on the one hand, Spinozists, and on the other hand, Kantians. On the Spinozist side we have thinkers like Foucault, perhaps Deleuze and Guattari, Althusser, McLuhan, certain variants of Marx, and so on that emphasize the determination of collectives by impersonal forces that exceed the intentions of agents. On the Kantian side we have theorists such as Badiou, Ranciere, and Zizek that defend a sort of volunterism that subtracts itself from any sort of contextual determination.
The Kantians correctly pose the question by asking how self-directing praxis of collectives are possible, but too often end up completely underdetermining context or situations, showing little or no interest in their organization and how they overdetermine action in a variety of ways. As a result, they’re too often left with any nuanced or well developed analysis of what needs to be addressed in situations. Their position remains abstract. The Spinozists correctly pose the question by emphasizing how regimes of attraction structure our possibilities of action and engagement, transforming us into puppets beyond our control, but too often leave unaddressed the question of how any sort of agency or self-direction is possible within a field where we are products of these fields. I am not suggesting that Sartre has the answer, but that he has properly posed the question by asking how self-directing collectives can emerge within a field of antipraxis governed by its own intentionality. This is the squaring of the circle that needs to be worked out: one that is capable of doing justice to the structuration of the contextual or regimes of attraction, while theorizing the emergence of subject-groups capable of acting on situations rather than simply being puppets of forces beyond their intentions. How can we simultaneously think humans making history but not in conditions of their own making?
Larval Subjects . 
November 13, 2010 at 5:24 am
How do you think abstractions relate to the practico-inert? Marx in his Critique of Political Economy and Althusser in On The Materialist Dialectic write about the notion of pre-existing determining abstractions and the dialectic between them and the concrete. Althusser has this whole hilarious passage about the proper dialectical materialist way to regard the abstraction of “fruit” – not as the product of any subject’s praxis (he uses the term specifically), but a pre-existing overdetermined concept. I wonder how this squares with your post on hyperobjects, if concepts are “things” as well, are they practico-inert? Is there a split on the Spinozist side when it comes to abstractions?
November 13, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Levi: It’s really fascinating to see what you’re doing with Sartre here. There have been a few attempts to restart Sartre, as it were, that seem to have almost got there but haven’t quite pulled it off: it ends up being more like a re-translation of Sartre into the insights of other philosophers to establish a compatibility. And the large part of why Sartre’s stocks are so low in our moment is that he just isn’t in tune with the Althusserian turn in Marxism and continental philosophy. That isn’t to say Althusserian Marxism is a bad thing – ideological state apparatuses seem more important than ever at this moment, for instance, what with the end of neoliberalism through the saving of the markets by the state – but turning Sartre into Althusser ends up making a mash of both. The reason I bring up the A-man specifically is that I think the introduction of the subject as the site of intense examination in Marxism owes much to his work on interpellation and the questions that arose around on how to forge through the firewalls of the subject to establish collectives, first in the ‘golden years’ of the Keynesian corporatist-bureaucratic-welfare consensus, then, more especially, in the wake of ’68. All this is a long road to a short question: when you speak of a self-directing collectivity, could this self-direction be called a subjectivity? Which is to say, is the self-direction itself an additional object added, for, in OOO, a subject falls under the rubric of an object too, right? Or is subject analogous to the idea of the world for you, so that there is no subject? On this count, I’m especially intrigued by the language of ‘a life of its own’ that you confer on the practico-inert. In what way, I’m wondering, does praxis and anti-praxis come alive? What life does it take on? If praxis exhibits self-direction, I suppose antipraxis might exhibit something like self-determinism, which could be an interesting riff on the much-oversentimentalized and often quite violent idea of self-determination, something of an indispensable pillar of liberal-capital theories as well as race-nationalism and ethnocracies. I really love too the reintroduction of telos in terms of the course that other objects in arrangements insist upon things. It’s actually quite an astounding insight as it casts a whole new light on Marx’s rather sweeping intuition in the Manifesto: “What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes in character in proportion as material production is changed?” If we read out here material to mean antipraxis and intellectual to mean praxis, while still highly deterministic, I think we get a highly relevant provocative thesis, not a long debunked idea we’ve long believede we’ve moved past. What do you think?
November 13, 2010 at 2:22 pm
“…Sartre will suggest that the technological realm takes on a teleology of its own.”
HUGO: I—I killed him because I opened that door. That’s all I know. If I hadn’t opened that door—He was there, he held Jessica in his arms, he had lipstick on his chin. It was all so trivial. But I had been living for so long in tragedy. It was to save the tragedy that I fired.
OLGA: But you weren’t jealous?
HUGO: Jealous? Perhaps. But not about Jessica.
OLGA: Look at me and answer me frankly, for what I am going to ask now I very important. Are you proud of your deed? Do you claim it as your own? Would you do it again if necessary?
HUGO: Did I even do it? It wasn’t I who killed—it was chance. If I had opened the door two minutes sooner or two minutes later, I wouldn’t have surprised them in each other’s arms, and I wouldn’t have fired. [A pause.] I was coming to tell him that I would let him help me.
OLGA: Yes.
HUGO: Chance fired three shots, just as in cheap detective stories. Chance lets you do a lot of “iffing:” IF I had stayed a bit longer by the chestnut trees, IF I had walked to the end of the garden, IF I had gone back into the summerhouse…” But me? ME? Where does that put me in the thing? It was an assassination without an assassin.”
–ACT VII, Les Mains sales
“How can we simultaneously think humans making history but not in conditions of their own making?”
A question of life and death for Sarte, he hints/gropes toward an answer in the rich etymological fodder of the French verb salver.
OLGA: At midnight Louis and Charles will return to kill you. But I won’t let them in. I’ll tell them you are salvageable.
HUGO: [laughs] Salvageable! What an odd word! That’s a word you use for scrap, isn’t it?
The very last word in the play, to be delivered shouting and kicking down the door according to Sartre’s written stage directions in the text, is: “Unsalvageable!”
November 13, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Levi,
I too am excited by what you are doing with Sartre here.
I actually think that you can do a Guerilla reading of Being and Nothingness along these lines too. I think that Sartre thinks it’s just kind of obvious that one can also engage in a kind of bad faith by denying facticity as well (the standard examples involve denying transcendence). People confuse Sartre’s ego with his conception of the self. While the ego is the realm of the transcendent, the self is constituted also by a factical realm of other objects (in the general sense that we speak of objects). Thus, the standard critique of Sartre that a lot of people rehearse in presentations of Levinas and/or Derrida is really fantastically unfair. The gaze of the other already played a role in essentially constituting the self for Sartre. To present Sartre as a hyper Cartesian when he always had this kind of Hegelian/early Marist view of the self (it even crops up in “No Exit”) is just dishonest.
Anyhow, I think by your take the Critique of Dialectical Reason is a further development of what is already there in Being and Nothingness. Which is really cool, as it suggests a fairly radical OOP rehabilitation of Sartre’s whole corpus that is quite distinct from recent attempts.
[One sad, weird note: in the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Sartre, he was too ill to read and then write responses to the articles. So an interviewer described the articles to him. Sartre’s verbal response to questions about the Critique of Dialectical Reason is that he was taking way too much speed when he wrote the book. As a result of the way in which it was produced, Sartre wasn’t sure that the interpretive issue that had been raised had an answer.]
November 13, 2010 at 7:24 pm
‘The new aesthetic paradigm’ chapter in Guattari’s Chaosomosis is relevant to humans things and politics. Of course the whole bk is relevant….
November 15, 2010 at 4:48 pm
I have never read Sartre being used in this way. Very interesting.
I wonder if in talking about our being thrown into the “practico-inert”, and having to make our way within, and its effects on our capacities, we would be able to link it explicitly to McLuhan’s ideas on the ‘extensions of man’ and his notion of the augmentation of human subjectivities in terms ratios of experience?
As you suggest, human-becomings take place within contexts of inherited modes of the “practico-inert” which facilitate interests and provide affordances for, among other things, variable experience and subject-formation. As we ‘extend’ into new life-ways we adjust and ‘intend’ in novel ways.
My professional and philosophical interests are closely aligned here in that I think it is paramount to explore whatever potentials exists within any particular social matrix – or what you call “regime of attraction” – for human flourishing. What is involved in collective generations of open and adaptive ‘forms of life’, or what kind of assemblages and relations are requisite for eudemonic
expressions of human life?
November 15, 2010 at 5:33 pm
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2010/11/levi-on-sarte.html
November 16, 2010 at 2:38 pm
This quote from Sartre’s The Psychology of the Imagination seems apropos:
“In the world of perception every ‘thing’ has an infinite number of relationships to other things. And what is more, it is this infinity of relationships – as well as the infinite number of relationships between the elements of the thing – which constitute the very essence of a thing. From this there arises something of the ‘overflowing’ in the world of ‘things’: there is always, at each and every moment, infinitely more than we see; to exhaust the wealth of my actual perception would require infinite time. Let us not deceive ourselves: this manner of ‘brimming over’ is of the very nature of objects. When we say that no object can exist without having a definite individuality we mean ‘withough maintaining an infinity of determined relationships with the infinity of other objects’.”
Although this quote comes from what is generally considered his ‘Husserlian’ period, it seems quite evident that there is a consistency in his thought, a streamline if you will that merely gets modified as it shines through different theoretical prisms. Interestingly enough, I tend to think that his early thoughts on ‘consciousness’ and the ‘imagination’ (particularly the latter of the two) hold significant keys to unlocking his later project – and in many ways his later work serves to illumine his early work too!
Thanks for your thoughts!
November 16, 2010 at 6:43 pm
A fascinating post and a neat Mumfordism.
We can shoehorn any detailed philosophical account of the subject into our accounts of technological assemblages without affecting the big picture overly. For a theory of big self-augmenting technical system the notion of ‘subject’ is functional. It refers to the parts of those systems or assemblages that do roughly what intentional systems (in Dennett’s sense) do. Implementation details may vary from case to case.
Once we have agents whose interests depend on the inherited technical complex and can intelligently address the problems that it throws up, then, given the modern historical conditions which free technique from determination by specific cultural contexts, you have a recipe for a technical hypertrophy without finality or teleology. We can call this ‘collective intentionality’ if we want, naturally.