N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has written a very nice post on materialism and critical subjectivity responding to some of my recent scribblings. N.P. writes,
A critical theoretic approach would require that Marx ground his own critical standpoint – that he account for the forms of critical subjectivity manifest in his own critique – using the same categories and the same analytical strategies he directs at the society he criticises. We would presumably agree that Marx understood himself to be presenting a materialist theory – and that materialism functions as a normative ideal within his approach, as a standard against which Marx criticises the mystifications underlying other approaches. Yet what could be more “materialist” than this perception of wheat in terms of its immediate physical properties – this image of objects shorn of their embeddedness in social relationships and moral valences, open for examination by our senses, either directly or as amplified by technology? This issue becomes confused by the more recent flattening of the concept of “materialism” as though it pertains to something specifically economic – and therefore somehow should naturally direct our thoughts to social relations of production. In Marx, I would suggest, the concept still carries both a mixture of this later meaning, and its earlier sense of “secular” and “scientific” thinking – and would thus be somewhat aligned with the tendency to explore the “material” world, understood as a “demystified” and “rationalised” world, shorn of anthropomorphic projections.
Marx’s materialism suggests that things might not be as simple as Deleuze and Guattari imply. If Marx were to point to an object like wheat, and note that social relations cannot be deduced from it, perhaps there is a more complex sense in which such an observation might figure in Marx’s work: perhaps he might also be asking how he can justify the use of “materialist” concepts, within his own self-reflexive and immanent approach. Perhaps he might be seeking to meet the criteria of self-reflexivity (and of immanence or materialism itself) by posing the problem of how it came to pass that we exist in a society that can perceive and think in materialist terms, a society for which notions like sense perception might be appear to be the most basic, the most “natural”, way of perceiving the world – a society whose inhabitants can observe wheat and not immediately think things like: “Yes of course: I recognise this substance: it may only be lawfully consumed by persons of this caste, when prepared in this way, and at this time. It may only be produced by persons of that sort, using these traditional techniques, and with the proper ritual performances.”
I confess that I strongly disagree with her take on Deleuze and Guattari, as I think the two develop a careful analysis of just why such illusions emerge and the conditions under which a critical subjectivity is possible. Indeed, this is one of the central themes of my study of Deleuze’s thought, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, where I 1) strive to show why Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is not a return to dogmatic metaphysics, 2) give an account of why the illusions of transcendence and representation emerge, and 3) provide an immanent account of the emergence of critical subjectivity. Despite these reservations– reservations she herself expresses –the post does an excellent job laying out questions revolving around critical subjectivity, immanence, and materialism.
March 12, 2007 at 7:32 pm
Thanks for this. Just a quick note, in case there’s confusion, that I’m about as far from having a take on Deleuze and Guattari as it would be possible for a person to be :-) I was picking up only on the couple of isolated sentences highlighted in your earlier post, because they initiated the chain of associations that led to my writing, but I don’t intend to suggest that these sentences even mean what, in isolation, they reminded me of, let alone that they have any overhanging relevance for Deleuze and Guattari’s work. I am, though, quite happy to be taken to task for having pivoted the post off the quotation, particularly if this would open up a discussion of other strategies for approaching the underlying problematic.
My ongoing concern has been how we pose these sorts of questions – how we understand how what seems given and immediate, comes to seem that way – in a context in which the qualitative characteristics of the “immediate” are not perceived the same way in all times and places. The historical character of the object of analysis requires, I think, a fundamental historicisation of the categories of analysis – the theory needs to be adequate to its object – and so what I’m struggling for is an approach that doesn’t bring history in from the outside, where at the deepest level our analytical categories incorporate this historical dimension and are intrinsically the categories of their time. I’m completely open to the idea that Deleuze might offer such an approach – the core issue, to me, isn’t the theorist, but the problem. And I want to learn about any theorist who speaks to the problem in a fundamental way.
March 14, 2007 at 4:17 am
[…] at Larval Subjects has written a couple of responses to my recent post on real abstractions. My current response to the most recent is, I suspect, […]