Today we have a post from Zen Dochterman, a student pursuing his PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA. Zen’s thoughts arose in response to my UCLA paper a couple of weeks ago.
I am going to try to pull together some of the threads about the relation between Marxism and object oriented ontology that you’ve outlined in your recent posts (here and here) to see if there might not be even more uncanny linkages between these two systems.
It seems that the talk of class as a hyperobject is on target — namely that class is something that exists outside of human subjectivity and therefore does not depend upon any recognition of it. Class should be thought of as a distribution of interactions between humans and objects — a constellation of machines, bodies, spaces, tools, money etc…Class, at the level of objects appears as a set of limitations on the possible combinations and interactions of objects — who can deal with them, how and why.
read on!
Thus any object-oriented Marxism would have to take as its starting point an analysis of private property as a discrete sort of hyper-object that organize an ever-expanding domain of object relations (between men and machines, steel and rust (those machine must get cleaned!), cash registers and oranges etc…). If we follow Timothy Morton when he says that “hyperobjects are viscous—they adhere to you no matter how hard to try to pull away, rendering ironic distance obsolete…hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space such that any particular (local) manifestation never reveals the totality of the hyperobject,” then we can know oranges or cars, but never private property itself. Just as “climate” as hyper-object is unknowable in its totality, yet gives rise to local weather phenomena — rainstorms, droughts, overcast skies — so too, the private property form of objects structures relations of labor, buying and selling, and all sorts of juridical protections. — one whose existence would shape a set of relations to other objects as well as organize classes themselves.
In this sense, class, while never transparent to those involved in it, is relational in the sense that an owning class (the bourgeoisie) has access to a set of objects and relations to objects that the working class is denied. The bourgeoisie may do what it pleases with its yachts and machines, its third and fourth homes — whether burn them to the ground or sell them. Those who work on yachts, with machines, in houses — have a much more limited set of relations with those objects, based around their upkeep, repair, and ultimately their ability to generate surplus value.
Private property would be the organizing hyper-object that would determine how other object relations could take place (between men and machines, rust and machines (when to clean, how to repair) and recedes from knowledge at the same time that it structures an entire economic and social field.
My dilemma is that I am not sure “where” in the object something like the commodity form can be located. That is, we understand that a red light means stop and somehow this “redness” conveys the need to put our foot on the brake. But the manner in which private property compels relations of buying and selling, protection, repair, individual rights, regardless of whether that commodity is an orange, a car or even an idea (intellectual property) seems much more mysterious. What is, from an object oriented perspective similar about an orange in a supermarket and a car parked on the street inasmuch as they both compel similar social relations? Is it simply analogous to the “red light = stop” equation, or is private property a sort of hyper-object that compels certain actions although it is nowhere manifest?
Tiqqun may have hit upon this problem in their statement that the commodity is “objectivized being-for-itself presented as something external to man” and therefore the social fetish resides not in “crystallized labor” but rather in “crystallized being-for-itself” (On the Economy Considered as Black Magic #34). At the same time that the commodity alone among objects appears as self-sufficient, singular in its being, it can enter into relations of absolute equivalence with all other commodities. The orange we see in the supermarket appears to be the self-sufficient orange — extracted from its past on the tree, from the hand that picked it, from the dirt on which it fell. The orange that falls on the ground is not — in strictly Marxist terms — the same orange that we look at in the supermarket.
In the first instance, the orange has no proper “being-for-itself,” (while it is still one object in OOO terms) as it exists in relation with other objects — the tree, the grass, the sunlight and water that nourished it. By the same token, an object given as gift or grown so as to feed people would not be a commodity and therefore have no being-for-itself, because it does not yet have an abstract character but is circulated in relation to concrete social needs.
The commodity becomes a commodity only when the sets of object relations that determine it are extracted from this level of “need” or direct human interaction — and become subsumed by its infinite exchangability with other objects. This is what paradoxically makes it appear as a being-for-itself at the very moment that it becomes one being that can be replaced by any other. For the commodity “it is only to realize its essence as a pure, immediate, and abstract presence that it must be made to look like a singularity,” meaning that its apparent phenomenological singularity is the after-effect of its infinite exhchangeability (ibid. 33). Yet the singularization of the object into a sort of phenomenolgical self-sufficiency and being-for-itself (which we can differentiate from its ontological individuation) covers over the abstract character as an exchange value.
Thus, private property ensures a deployment of apparently singular commodities, seemingly phenomenally self-sufficient and present, that deny their withdrawnness, while in fact their organization within the world depends upon the abstract formal nature of exchange. Private property might be said to be that hyper-object that attempts to negate the withdrawnness of the commodity, as object, by presenting it as phenomenologically self-sufficient and fully available, in its singularity to human need and human knowledge. A simple thing, divested of its social character. Could OOO think of commodity fetishism as the “hiddenness” of social relations within the commodity, as the crystallization of being-in-itself, apart from human existence? Or would this move us away from an object-oriented ontology?
Next post will try to cover the negation of this commodity form from an object oriented Marxist perspective…
Larval Subjects . 
December 18, 2010 at 4:45 am
Zen:
You ask:
This question, and your entire post, is disturbingly frank — in the best sense — as it gets to some real core questions as to the relationship and confrontation of Marx and triple-o.
I don’t have immediate answers to these questions, and I look forward to your thoughts on this in the future. Though, my spontaneous sense of where we would look to an answer would be to rigorously apply an object-oriented ontography to the idea of commodity. This is difficult as it seems to me that — and I say this not as a Marxist scholar, but as an interested amateur — that much of Marx’s discussion of commodity is deeply relational, or relationist. My question is, how can we think of a commodity as an object within other objects, and all that implies: autonomy from relation, intrinsic unity, etc? There are so many things to think here. Abstractions abound, that is, distortions or reductions, caused by relations — use-value is already an abstraction of the objects it uses, and so is exchange-value. Exchange-value seems to be a kind of capitalist vorhandenheit. But, it might also be an object itself — if every relation is itself a new (composite) object. So we have many layers, here — the orange qua fruit, but also the orange qua commodity is a new relation just as surely as orange qua use-value, isn’t it? But this new relation is itself a unity over and above its parts, and hence able, itself, to enter into new relations, etc. It seems that we have to be able to talk about components or parts of a commodity, because, otherwise, what would the commodity absorb or identify with — doesn’t it need to take some particular form, whether it is physical, material, intellectual, spiritual, emotional, etc? How could it do this without having some essential qualities in itself? Or, perhaps commodities as such are some kind of pseudo-objects, and the real object — both an intrinsic unity and composed of pieces — lies elsewhere in capitalism…?
It seems to me that when Marx talks about commodities in Capital, he discusses how they distinguish themselves from use-value, such that use-value becomes irrelevant — but use-value is already an abstraction itself, so commodification is akin to that. The difference is that in Marx, he need to consider this or that aspect, and so he can’t talk about everything at once. Surely the orange as a commodity is many things at once. Does it really lose its ability to nourish us, or entice our senses, or weigh down a branch, or inspire poets or be used in religious symbolism by becoming a component in a commodity? The orange has enough reality and more for all of these relations, it seems. Perhaps discussing the ability for commodity exchange is only problematic when it assumes a more correlationist or idealist stance — that the commodity exchange reaches into the very heart of objects to annul them…or create them. I think we can talk about the abstractness of exchange without it meaning that it erases the being of what it exchanges.
This is all very fascinating and I’d be interested in what others have to say, as I may not be getting at the issue. To repeat, it seems that it depends how and where we identify the commodity and whether it’s an object or not. Many implications will follow as to whether it is or not, I think.
December 18, 2010 at 5:07 am
Ah, my thinking above is very sloppy. Marx talks about both the use-value and exchange-value of the commodity itself (though it seems the emphasis of his investigation is in its exchange-value).
December 18, 2010 at 5:16 am
I don’t know that I’d describe it as sloppy, Joseph. There are use-values in other systems of production without there being exchange-values. The emergence of exchange-value is thus the emergence of something new. For me the relational nature of exchange-value doesn’t really pose a problem. Rather, exchange-value is the way one object (the hyperobject of capitalism) “metabolizes” (a term Marx uses constantly in Capital another object. In other words, it would pertain to the endo-structure of this particular hyperobject. OOO, I think, works rather nicely here. One of the interesting features of exchange-value is that objects withdraw when related to in terms of exchange-value. In the first chapter of Capital Marx is constantly emphasizing how exchange-value erases qualitative differences between objects by comprehending them in terms of numerical exchangability. Because a numerical criteria is now set up for exchange, all objects, in their own way– up to and including labor –become interchangeable. At any rate, it seems to me that in Marx there can be objects that have use-values but no exchange-values and then there can be objects known as commodities that only exist for the hyperobject of capitalism as what Graham calls sensual objects that have both use-values and exchange-values. Finally, within capital there might very well be objects that are only exchange-values, without having any use-value. This second sort of commodity strikes me as being highly relevant to our contemporary condition and to refer to what’s at stake with respect to finance capital.
December 18, 2010 at 6:15 am
Levi:
You write:
Yes, this is a very nice, very elegant solution, especially the point about pure exchange-values as sensual objects, making them almost hallucinations within the hyperobject of capital. I’m very interested in what direction Zen will take his next post.
December 18, 2010 at 6:41 am
I really enjoyed reading this and will have to delve into it a little more to address it properly. For now, I’m glad to see it–I’ve been thinking of capitalism as a hyperobject tout court recently (seems to work with my Braudelian way of thinking about it).
December 18, 2010 at 5:52 pm
I don’t have the time to figure out how to speak in your special Marxist language, but I guarantee that Baudrillard might be able to tease some of these issues out: http://bit.ly/ft2nkq
December 18, 2010 at 6:19 pm
Baudrillard’s System of Objects is among my favorite books, but I also don’t think it’s really about objects. Rather, I think System of Objects is about the symbolic-value of objects. Analyzing the symbolic value of objects is very different than taking into account the role that technologies, climate, resources, geography, infrastructure, etc., play in the formation of various human groupings.
December 18, 2010 at 6:37 pm
Copy that on the Baudrillard Levi. Sometimes Graham writes somewhat in favor of a re-reading. Maybe someday I shall go back to him but he’s one of those guys I could never stomach…
December 18, 2010 at 6:39 pm
I don’t see how class can exist beyond human subjectivity though as long as goods and objects are amenable to resource allocation. The number of orange trees in my backyard are not a coincidence.
December 18, 2010 at 7:49 pm
But talking about the system of objects is exactly where the OOO of Baudrillard becomes insightful. He argues that the system is kick started by preferencing one side of a binary opposition. This preferencing historically was premised upon useful/useless. But in a world where the proliferation of signs has emasculated this binary and obfuscated its traditional and historic roots, the sign is , in a sense liberated from its signified. We can only sense this when we look at objects. We see their manifestations, but these very manifestations are contoured by ideological behests of the system, the dance of capital. Baudrillard says (In For a Critique of the political Economy of the Sign) that a system premised on excess and waste controls rather than liberates us. So, the manifestation of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken also comes with an ‘encoded blueprint’ for consumption that transmits this ideological request of the system. It is food, but it is food plus x. We can only theorize this x (a la Zizek) but for Baudrillard x is more pernicious and ultimately and seductively fatal. The exploration between the establishment of the binary relation of the subject to the manifestation of the real object becomes the task at hand.
Russell
December 18, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Said,
The claim is that class is not dependent on human subjectivity. It is a pattern of organization that isn’t dependent on us recognizing it, identifying with it, being for or against it, etc. This is precisely why class is so invisible to many of us and why it is a genuine discovery when the existence of class is articulated. Think about it in terms of autopoietic theory. Autopoietic theory argues that each system is operationally closed, such that it relates only to its on functions and processes. The cells of your body “know” nothing of the other cells of your body. They are perturbed by chemical emissions from the other cells of your body, translate those perturbations into information, and then produce further events within themselves. Their existence is solipsistic and self-enclosed. A liver cell knows nothing of being a part of the liver. The liver is one autopoietic system, the liver cell is another autopoietic system. The liver cell does its thing, the liver does its thing. The liver is emergent from the liver cells but irreducible to them (it has its own organization and structural functioning). The case is similar with class. Individual persons are one thing. Class is another thing. Individual persons do their thing, class does its thing. The claim that class is an entity distinct from human subjectivity is merely the claim that class has a functioning that isn’t dependent on what people think about class, whether they’re aware of it, whether they know it, whether or not they identify with it, etc. Would class be destroyed if all humans were destroyed? Sure. That doesn’t entail that class is those individual people. This is precisely why class is alienating.
December 18, 2010 at 8:07 pm
Russell,
My point isn’t that Baudrillard is not insightful, nor that we should examine that proliferation of signs. My point is that his analysis is restricted to one particular type of object (signs) and not objects in general. When Baudrillard talks about objects he’s not really talking about objects qua objects, but rather about objects co-opted by another type of object (signs). This is all great and important, yet it’s also important that we recognize that he’s talking about how objects are co-opted by a particular type of object and not about objects qua objects.
December 19, 2010 at 12:05 am
Yes, very true.
But there is more to Baudrillard that may be useful and it is what keeps me fascinated with the OOO vanguard. I am thinking through Baudrillard’s notion of Seduction and its relationship to OOO’s ‘withdrawal.’ In Baudrillardian withdrawal might allow a system to establish or reveal itself. For example, the (in)famous cane toad’s introduction is talked about in terms of the amphibians negative impact on the natural environment. In attempt to eradicate the toad, hundreds of other frog species have been accidentally killed, some threatened species diminished by enthusiastic but ill-informed toad hunters. So the seduction here, is in the attempt to preserve a system (native ecological system) actually ends up harming it. In this case the attempt to reveal the actual relationship between the toad and the environment created a new system; that of killing amphibious randomly. The actual relationship, more difficult to discern, between the toad and the Australian eco-system receded and seduced one important agent in the system, the human agent into reacting in an entirely different way. We can never fully name the relationship between the toad and the environment, only simulate an explanation.
Russell
From Melbourne where there are no toads
December 20, 2010 at 2:30 am
This seems a promising line of thought. But I have trouble with the definition of the hyperobject in capitalism as “private property.” Property in capitalism is not what determines the specific form objects take — value is. What’s unique to capitalism, and what imbues commodities with “metaphysical subtleties and theological whims” is capitalist *value* — self-valorizing value; in other words capital. If we look at things in terms of property, we only see a distribution of objects according to their bearers/owners, not a dynamic, self-undermining and self-stabilizing system of bodies and things in motion.