At the risk of being humiliatingly dense, where’s Marx in contemporary discussions? In his Preface to the Contributions of a Critique of Political Economy, Marx writes:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness… Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
We have Zizek who describes himself as a militant Marxist, but who only makes rather vague hand gestures to modes of production and material conditions, focusing instead on the Act and ideology (this, I think, should make us suspicious of his proposals as to what constitutes materialism in The Parallax View). We have Badiou, who also describes himself as a Marxist, yet who focuses on the event, truth-procedures, and decisions. Ranciere talks of counting that which is not counted and the aesthetic. Laclau talks about battles for the hegemonization of empty or void universals. Foucault, of course, power. With the exception of Foucault, aren’t these, to adopt the rhetoric, bourgeois inversions of how change takes place? Don’t these positions postulate that change proceeds via consciousness, rather than consciousness, thought, emerging from modes of production? Deleuze and Guattari seem alone in focusing on production and modes of production. Their talk of “deterritorialization”, so annoying to many, can be seen as a fancy way of talking about the leading edge of history or the history making element of history, i.e., the proletariat (though with lots of bells and whistles added). I’m sure I’m missing something here and someone will come along and give me the history of the problematic nature of the base-superstructure thesis and how it’s been complicated. Sure. But what’s interesting is that modes of production seemed to have disappeared almost entirely from the discussion. So what am I missing? Please go easy on me.
Larval Subjects . 
November 27, 2007 at 6:36 am
I think that this is very similar to asking after the whereabouts of Freud in contemporary discussions. Freud himself was primarily a clinician. His theories were both, ostensibly, derived from the clinical setting and to be applied in that setting. But where is Freud mostly today? He is in the humanities departments. He is a matter of textuality, interpretation.
It is possible to go further with this parallel, I think. Marx and Freud are both of course un-maskers of “false” consciousness and ideology. But because, in obvious ways, they cannot escape their own insights, the issue of the constitution of the subject and its attendant relations has become more complicated. It is no longer simple enough to say the the modes of production produce the structures of consciousness. And especially this is the case when one starts accounting for Freud!
The issue of causality between production and consciousness and consciousness and unconsciousness are no longer so simply schematizable. There has been an explosion of various interpretive measures in that regard.
What I really sense in this post is a nostalgia for a time in which such a schema remained un-infested by its own implications.
November 27, 2007 at 7:01 am
Perhaps, but it seems to me that Marx is notably absent from the humanities departments. That’s my point. We evoke his name, yet in the contexts I mentioned, very little is directly said about him. (This wouldn’t apply with Jameson, Negri and Hardt, the Adorno period Frankfurt theorists, etc). With Freud the situation is very different. We pour over Freud’s texts like medieval scholastics worked over Aristotle’s texts, developing all the latent aspects of his work. There’s a way in which the most basic principles of Marxist analysis, by contrast, have disappeared (again, in terms of the names I mentioned or predominantly French theory). I don’t think the issue here is one of nostalgia or a wish for a return to the early days of Marxist appropriations. Really what I find interesting is how discussions of economics and production seemed to have disappeared. I think this disappearance leads to some very poorly posed questions in the world of political theory… Especially those surrounding how change is possible.
November 27, 2007 at 8:38 am
I’m not sure I agree with your characterization of Marx having been neglected in a way that is any way essentially different from the neglect any other prominent thinker has been subject to. I do, however, agree that there has been a tendency to “de-economize” Marx in humanities circles. And my comparison to Freud was only that the same circles have tended to “de-clinicize” him in a similar way. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the humanities today are unthinkable without Marx, however non-economic that Marx might be.
I would ask you, without having an answer to this myself: What do you see might be the advantage in a re-installment of basic Marxist principles in questions of political theory? Especially, as you say, in those “surrounding how change is possible.”
I have always been rather frustrated in my readings of Marx as regards questions of change. There has always seemed to me a very deep tension in his theories between determinism and activism, one that I never found a way to resolve without the disposal of the very basic principles that you seem to wish re-engage.
November 27, 2007 at 8:49 am
Having approached and experienced Freud and Lacan primarily from a clinical background, I certainly agree with the de-clinicization of psychoanalysis in humanities departments. I’m still working through a number of issues myself, and sympathize with your worries about determinism. On the other hand, I suspect that if we don’t unfold these networks of relations and their organization, we risk asking the wrong sorts of questions and engaging in the wrong sorts of interventions. My view would be that political theory that doesn’t take seriously the concrete structure and organization of situations, their constellation, is doomed to tilt at windmills.
November 27, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Hi L, you might find some spectres of Marx in the 2007 EPHEMERA, for example, “Notes Toward a Theory of Affect-Itself” at http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/7-1cloughetal.pdf or George Caffentzis’ “Crystals and Analytic Engines: Historical
and Conceptual Preliminaries to a New
Theory of Machines” in the same issue at http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/7-1caffentzis.pdf
November 28, 2007 at 11:11 am
The extension of Marx’s economic / political analysis can be found in people like Arrighi, Beverley Silver, or, in terms of the critique of political economy in Moishe Postone / Loren Goldner.
Certainly I think there is still the difficulty of linking up economic conceptualisations to partiuclar works, as Ray Brassier remarked to me ‘mediation’ doesn’t really cut the mustard. If I can refer to a friend’s book John Robert’s The Intangibilities of Form (Verso 2007) is fascinating on the dialectic of skill and deskilling / labour in relation to contemporary art.
In the UK the trend of the humanities generally is towards historicisation, ‘materiality’, and production but this, it seems to me, fails to pose the question of rupture. That’s I think one of the merits of Badiou.
November 28, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Thanks for the references. Why doesn’t mediation “cut mustard”? And why should one accept Badiou’s account of the event beyond “because he said so” (which is really somewhat what he ultimately say)? In the natural world, for instance, I readily recognize that there are ruptures where qualitatively different systems emerge– for instance the shift from a dead earth to one with a self-regulating atmosphere or the shift from purely physical processes to living things. However, I certainly wouldn’t claim that these are ruptures that are unmediated or that come from nowhere. Why would I follow Badiou and accept such a thing for social systems?
November 28, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Ben – I have the same general reaction to the specific way in which historicisation has been deployed in the recent “turn” toward a particular vision of “materiality”: that there is something in this specific deployment that seems to foreclose the possibility of rupture from the outset, by conceptualising historicisation in a very specific way.
I think the question then becomes whether this is the only form of historicisation available – and some of the works you cite, in fact, would suggest that it isn’t – that it is possible to come up with a different form of situated analysis, that doesn’t understand social life solely in terms of some sort of linear reproductive process.
It’s that particular kind of historicisation, to me, that seems to give the impression that we need some form of radical break in order to hold out some possibility for transformation: in other words, a particular kind of historicisation, and a particular orientation to radical breaks, function as a sort of antinomy – apparently opposed, but bound together underneath by a shared notion of our options, when we try to conceptualise social reproduction.
“Mediation” can, admittedly, sometimes be a hand-wavy category as deployed in some recent theory in particular – it can sometime cover spaces the theorists sort of haven’t yet managed to theorise… ;-) And I’m not overfond of the term myself for this reason (and also because it’s one of these terms – although it’s almost impossible to avoid this problem – that has a radically different intellectual history in different disciplinary traditions). My sense, though, is that Sinthome has a very different body of philosophical references in mind when he mentions the concept of “mediation” – and I suspect the term is a bit more robust and can do much more work in that context.
November 29, 2007 at 11:30 am
Perhaps the comment came across as more clumsy than I intended (or perhaps I am that clumsy). The point about mediation was the tendency to invoke it rather than a more precise sense of how mediations actually function. Although I dislike the tone and politics of Latour’s work I think some of his arguments about networks / actors suggest interesting possibilities for an ’empiricism’ that could track Marx’s Real Abstractions.
As for taking Badiou on faith, well I’m not sure I do but I haven’t written that much on him. I would suggest that the concept of ‘state of the situation’ and the more recent work on logic of worlds offers some tools (again) for tracking conjunctures and the possibilities of rupture – inexistents are elements of the situation. I can’t say I have a mastery of the mathematical theory behind these concepts so I probably can’t do them justice, but I wouldn’t say Badiou supposes ‘unmediated’ ruptures, hence his criticisms of ‘speculative leftism’ in Being and Event.
I’m certainly not against historicisation per se, but as N Pepperell says more the way it has become a kind of ‘master-signifier’ in a certain fashion – one that seems to me to lack purchase on discontinuities, ‘breaks’, or ‘ruptures’, all of which have to be tracked, I agree, ‘against’ or ‘with’ historical conjunctural situations. Although I accept the point that perhaps I have been provoked by that kind of historicisation into ‘bending the stick’ too far.
What interests me as well, and I don’t know what you think, is the problem of political agency in regard to Marx/Marxism? I sometimes wonder if some of these effects, including some occlusion of Marx, relate to a (seeming) lack of forms of agency. Again though perhaps it is my own difficulty in properly ‘seeing’ them
November 29, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Ben, could you say a bit more about the the difficulties with Marx’s real abstractions?
I think this is what I’m getting at. As I read Badiou he is suggesting that Events are unmediated. For Badiou, these events evade all of the operations of the situation presiding over the count of the situation. I wasn’t attempting to be dismissive of Badiou when I mentioned faith– he resurrects the notion of faith himself –only to underline that one of the key components of Badiou’s concept of the event is that it can never be proven or demonstrated (since it evades all mediation) to have taken place, and only ever sustains itself in the declaration of the subject that it has taken place. As Badiou says, events are self-referential (thereby violating the constraints governing ontology, i.e., they are what is other than being). It is this self-referentiality of the event that subtracts it from the situation and allows it to escape the mediations of the structure.
Perhaps this could be expressed by saying that while all events belong to a situation, they do not arise from situations. This concerns me because I believe that it fosters a form of practice and theory that falls into abstraction or ignoring the real textures, organizations, constellations — what have you –of situations. Because situations are seen as being other than being and situations, we can ignore situations and focus on events and the truth-procedures that follow from them alone. My worry, then, is that 1) such a theoretical frame can lead us to ignore or miss real potentialities inhabiting situations (by virtue of turning us away from situations), and 2) that it can end up reproducing the very mechanisms of the situation by ignoring the way in which it itself is mediated by the situation.
I think you’re absolutely right about the problem of agency in Marx. Here I think the key issue is one of constitution; or rather how an agency can be constituted within a mediated space. I think Badiou has developed a number of provocative and insightful elements of what such an account would look like, while too starkly separating subjects from situations.
November 29, 2007 at 8:21 pm
There’s a funny historical moment captured in this conversation: not too long ago, Marx would have been read, either as arguing that agency was “taken care of” (because an artefact of the movement of history), or as being a theorist of the agency of the working classes. At the moment, there are at least some tendencies to read him as positing a much more complex argument about the situatedness of agency – about the specific ways in which, at present, we make history, but not under conditions of our own choosing.
I’ve written something recently on the chapter on the working day in Capital that was an attempt to play with some of these questions. As I read it, this chapter makes several interesting steps – I won’t go into all this here. First, it tries to explain why people might be tempted to narrativise a particular historical development in terms of class conflict. In other words, Marx doesn’t presuppose that class conflict exists, but asks something more like: “why does a particular historical development present itself to us in the form of class conflict?”
He then offers an explanation for why this might happen, which itself might or might not be considered adequate, but what is interesting about that explanation is that it does not argue that the concept of a “social class” arises because there are these empirical social groups called classes, and the category of “class” arises from these already existing empirical groups. It argues, instead, that the category of social class comes from a different dimension of social practice altogether (in Marx’s argument, from the structure of the wage relation, in which labourers are positioned as owners of the “commodity” labour power – again, I’m not interested here in whether this argument is adequate or persuasive, but in the structure of the argument).
This other dimension of social practice generates forms of everyday experience that can be narrativised in terms of a conflict between “equal rights” – the rights of commodity sellers and buyers – that are irreconcilable so long as the conflict is considered solely from the perspective of the realm of social practice within which the conflict is posited to arise. Marx uses this point to open up a discussion in Capital of the ways in which, in spite of appearances, capitalism cannot be reduced to market relations, but must be understood to involve a particular form of state, a journalistic public sphere, etc.
In any event, various things are interesting about this chapter – but one of the interesting bits relates to the possibility opened up for particular kinds of agency, once the category of class conflict becomes available. The notion of the working class may not arise, within Marx’s argument, because there is this empirical group that constitutes itself as a working class. Nevertheless, once the concept of a “working class” arises, it becomes more likely that this concept will become one of concepts mobilised in agentive practice: what is positioned initially in the text as a real abstraction, carries with it the potential for the generation of empirical social groups mobilised in particular ways.
This potential, however, is ambivalent: on the one hand, you can get a particular kind of agency. On the other hand, this agency can continue to be bound to the terms of the real abstraction that suggested its possibility: working classes might assert themselves around their identity as the sellers of the commodity labour power, thus seeking to realise themselves as a working class (via, e.g., “right to work” movements, for example). This form of “agency”, while it has genuine transformative impact on the ground, remains within the ambit of the reproduction of capitalism, etc. This “reproductive” agency, however, isn’t positioned the only option – as a path into which agency would necessarily flow – but more as a sort of plausible, understandable risk – a risk that can, to some degree at least, be countered by examining other sorts of possibilities for other sorts of agency, that are generated in different dimensions of a complex context.
I won’t drag the thread into a more detailed discussion of this sort of argument – I have my own spaces to meander on about Marx. My main point was, in thinking about Ben’s comments about “empiricism” above, that it can be interesting to think about the complex potential registers for the “empirical” in our contemporary moment – possibilities for forms of subjectivity, embodiment, and practice may be grounded “empirically”, but not in the normal ways of seeing these things as arising necessarily in something that currently constitutes itself as a collective social agent – more, perhaps, in terms of an analysis of latent or potential collective agents that have not yet constituted themselves as empirical groups, but whose potentials are nevertheless “empirically” available within the present situation, while potentially pointing beyond it.
November 30, 2007 at 1:31 am
You don’t think Zizek talks about Marx or about economic analysis in The Parallax View?
November 30, 2007 at 1:46 am
No, I don’t. Zizek refers to economics and discusses a parallax between economics and politics, but he certainly doesn’t engage in anything like an economic analysis of anything.
November 30, 2007 at 1:53 am
In many respects, I think this is really interesting in Zizek. Zizek, for Marx, would be the perfect example of an idealist thinker or a bourgeois thinker insofar as he seems to hold that it is ideas that drive history, not production that drives ideas. Hence his focus on ideology in his earlier works and view that a critique of ideology could change political organizations; also his focus on jouissance, the real, etc., without nary a peep about economics until more recently. Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not claiming that Marx is right here and that Zizek is wrong, or vice versa. However, I do think it would be useful and interesting to work out the precise nature of this relationship and determine whether or not, in fact, Zizek is really consistent with Marxist thought, and if so how and within what limits, or whether he is something new and outside that orbit altogether.
November 30, 2007 at 9:59 am
I suppose I’m thinking of the difficulty of ‘hooking’ real abstractions (say the operations of fictional capital in the current world economy (see Robin Blackburn in the NLR or Loren Goldner’s blog Break Their Haughty Ppower)) to particular situations and art works; as my day job is teaching Eng Lit, we could say literary works. So, while I think Jameson’s thinking of form is fascinating some of his actual readings seem to me rather reductive – although perhaps matters are that reductive and I am resisting the insights of Marx(ism)! I found this also with Warren Montag’s book on Althusser, where the readings of literature didn’t seem to me to really operate at a particular complex level.
As for Badiou I don’t think I’m the person to really defend him but I would refer to the analysis of the Paris Commune in Polemics (Verso 2006), which will also be included in Logics of World. It seems to me to suppose an inexistent element, the working class, ‘in’ the situation by virtue of its absence that then come forward, constitutes itself?, and gains consistency as the maximal singularity – an event. Even the earlier analysis in BE presupposes the void as having a localisable point in a situation marked by lack and excess. Alberto Toscano’s recent essay – online at Cosmos and History – ‘applies’ the Logics of World analysis to Islamism, although Alberto had also previously raised the problem of Badiou’s (lack of) analysis of capital.
I’ll read the Pepperell piece (sorry I don’t know your first name). Quickly, I recognise the issue about constituting agency. The transformation of the ’empirical’ working class into the proletariat. I feel though attempts to identify particular forms of potential agency often aren’t that convincing to me (of course I want that agency to exist). Also the ‘constitution’ question perhaps runs through the current debates about the return of strategy and dual power.
I’ll have to think more carefully, now off to the wage labour of teaching.
November 30, 2007 at 4:14 pm
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December 1, 2007 at 7:34 pm
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December 1, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Isn’t the very first essay in Sublime Object an analysis of commodity fetishism? Which is, in turn, the subject of the very beginning of Capital?
December 1, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Zizek certainly references commodity fetishism to make certain points about the nature of the unconscious, desire, and its relation to ideology, but I don’t see how it has much to do with what Marx is talking about under commodity fetishism, or with what Marx is up to when giving an economic analysis. Most importantly, I think, there’s nothing remotely approaching historical specificity in Zizek’s analyses. That is, for Zizek, the claims made about ideology could just as easily apply as an interpretive tool to Plato as Kafka.
December 3, 2007 at 5:30 pm
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December 6, 2007 at 2:58 pm
hi Synth,
Sorry for showing up late to the party. I got into a bit of a disagreement with some folk where I work for teaching v1 of Capital to first year students. We spent about 4 weeks close reading sections of the book, read about 1/5 of it total. I don’t want to be the pedant you alluded to in your post who comes along and tells you etc, but … I am pretty committed to the complicated/complicating view of the base-superstructure relation you mention and there used to be good work on this by Marxist historians (Thompson and Gutman to name a few). Of recent Marxist historians who are quite good, Roediger springs to mind, along with Rediker and Linebaugh, all of whom are also part of troubling the base/superstructure thing. There also appears to be a return to Marx in recent (say, past 8 years) scholarship in the history of U.S. slavery. I don’t know how this compares to the quantity of prior marxism, but it’s relatively high quality stuff. History is kind of a weird place though I think, between humanities and social science. I don’t anything about the latter but other than history my experience in the latter is like yours and it’s definitely frustrating.
take care,
Nate
December 6, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Hi Nate,
I can’t give a detailed response as I’m about to head off for the airport, but I’m all for the complication of the base/superstructure model. Right now I’m navigating all these things and trying to think them through, so I really don’t have words or concepts yet for what I would like to develop.