Auntie Vulgar
I am having an interesting conversation “about Marxism” with my friend Auntie Vulgar, and I wanted to post it here for fun:
1. AV
The only two things of which we can be certain.
Praxis is essentially just one of those smarty-pants words for the process of doing, action, practice- practical application. It is something of an opposite to theory, or rather, it is the theory that theory must be applied if it is to ever carry much meaning. For example, anybody can theorize that a particular person is or was the child of god. However, it is not until enough people actually put this theory into practice, i.e. behave as if this person is god’s child, that the theory gains enough meaning to become ‘true’.
In some remarkable instances these truths are so widely held that they become those ‘inescapable’, seductively empirical and all too ‘natural facts of life’; they assume an existence outside and over us. What was made by humans comes to dominate humans so that in this instance a handful of creative subjects and generations of progeny enslaved themselves to, committed both acts of violence and compassion out of duty to the mass-figment of christ. Such inversions of subject and object, of society’s agents allowing ourselves to be determined by external (although human-made) structures, is what the smarty-pants call reification. Religion in general, and Christians in particular, are one of the easiest examples of this reification concept. And as far as examples go it is really not very compelling, but it is clear.
Political economics and economic ‘reality’, how a society organizes its reproduction, is a lot like religion. It is a system of ‘truths’ come ‘facts’ we accept so often in thought and action as the ‘natural’ order of things. To use a crude example, the cliche about the only two certainties of life being death and taxes is based upon a reified notion of the state. It presupposes a particular form of state as always and forever existing, like the inevitable sorrow of death. Of course, to see beyond the reified state does one little good, for the state, like the Spanish Inquisition, will come looking for both confession and cash.
Money and the roles we allow it to play, indeed the entire structure we call capitalism is a reification of far greater power, violence, longevity and reach than anything we know of which predates. How many question the money, the market and all their categories? Who questions how it is that things come to carry a price? And yet in the mind it seems there is not much that money can’t accomplish, and little some will not do to posess it in abundance. It becomes natural to conceive social reproduction only in terms of needing a ‘job’ and shopping for entertainment, services, or things (as though entertainment and services aren’t things!!), we allow ourselves to believe that only under a system of profiteers, exploiters of our work can society have pop-songs, pubs, ipods, cream cakes, and fruit smelling body scrubs.
It seldom occurs to us that money, ‘in-fact’, has no ‘real’ value at all, or when such a thought is entertained it is all too often finally and quickly silenced as unrealistic, wishful thinking. It is dangerous and subversive thinking, for to question the universal character of the money commodity is to jeapordize, on the one hand, what may be an otherwise materially comfortable existence as a skilled labor commodity, and on the other hand, to endanger the very mystifications which underpin the ‘reality’ of the system itself. To use a late example, as more people become aware of the rather arbitrary assignation of price to song; of culture as exploitable property, the ideological edifice of capitalism comes under tension. As people become use to a truly ‘free market’ (that is non-market- the negation of the market) of songs (to use only one example) it may be that they become more ready to accept free market education, free market housing, free market food, free market pubs, free market mediation channels, and a profusion of voluntary, edifying, and non-exploitative labor. In ‘reality’ such a restructuring is only a question of social norms, skill development, and methods and tools for the reorganization of social reproduction.
Economists and those in schools of business are the most extreme example of this reification of capital, for their entire discipline is dominated by a myriad of market functions. It forgets that their market is presupposed; taken as natural and given. Economics loses its transitory and historical character. It forgets that its object of study is entirely and utterly of human construction, and therefore potentially entirely and utterly subject to alteration by our collective will and hand. Economics does not study humans, it studies the creation that dominates humans and then presents it as that which makes us ‘free’.
‘As in religion one is governed by the products of their own brain, so in capitalist production they are governed by the products of their own hands’ (Marx in Fromm: 51).
The challenge for us as victims of this entire process is to figure out how to re-assert our governance so that the necessaries and luxuries we need and enjoy need not mean an indentured creative servitude in the workplace - a commercially colonized leisure for the lucky end of the global division of labor; any variety of mindless mechanical tasks for the less fortunate many; and of course endemic sickness and defeat for the non-elite rest. From the richest of board members to the poorest of urchins, all in this process have their humanity effaced, and there is no argument worthy of wearing humanist clothes that can justify the indefinite existence of such an economic mode; that cannot argue that we begin here and now to respond to this with praxis.
Praxis. It is through praxis that we organize our will and turn our hands toward change. The type of change we desire will not just happen, for we are its eventual agents. And it is with this in mind that I begin this here blog.
2. Pt
AV,
Here’s something for you to chew on in reference to another reification, namely, of the logos: that is, the question of the transcription of justice from ontology (or the just from the true). Here is Lyotard commenting on “the abyss between the denotative and the prescriptive” from _Just Gaming_ (Minnesota, 1985)
“[In] not only Plato but Marx as well, there is the deep conviction that there is a true being of society, and that society will be just if it is brought into conformity with this true being, and therefore one can draw prescriptions from a description that is true, in the sense of “correct”…
But this passage from the true to the just raises a problem, because if one were to ground it, it would mean that a prescriptive statement would constitute an obligation only if … the addressee of the statement is able to put himself in the position of the sender of the statement … in order to work out all over again the theoretical discourse that legitimates, in the eyes of this sender, the command that he is issuing.”Your friend,
Paul
3. AV
“Here is Lyotard commenting on “the abyss between the denotative and the prescriptive’ from _Just Gaming_(Minnesota, 1985).” [In] not only Plato but Marx as well, there is the deep conviction that there is a true being of society, and that society will be just if it is brought into conformity with this true being, and therefore one can draw prescriptions from a description that is true, in the sense of “correct”…. But this passage from the true to the just raises a problem, because if one were to ground it, it would mean that a prescriptive statement would constitute an obligation only if…the addressee of the statement is able to put himself in the position of the sender of the statement…in order to work out all over again the theoretical discourse that legitimates, in the eyes of this sender, the command that he is issuing.’”
I would like to begin with this ‘legitimization of commands’ and the agency of the receiver in meaning construction. To legitimize a particular structure is a choice, though often a passive or structurally coerced one. It is not only a ‘true being of society’ whose prescriptions must ‘bridge the abyss’ to legitimacy and receiver response, but the inherited society as well. People constantly legitimize certain prescriptions of action in favor of others, for the most part (and perhaps necessarily) unaware of the reasons save the most apparent. Society is a complex of de/legitimizing discourse. Something as simple as watching a particular commercial broadcast or purchasing a new pair of shoes is legitimizing discourse - in the former instance because you and I have our meaning making capacities and projected purchasing power sold to advertising agents, and in playing that role become complicit in current uses of monologic media channels; and in the latter case the purchase of shoes realizes the goal of a particular production process so that at the moment of exchange an entire complex of social structures are legitimized: the global division of labor, particular concepts of ownership and exchange, branding and a culture of self bound intimately with the commodity fetish - image as commodity, and of course the functionality creative and mechanical activity to which so much of our labor is devoted when sold. One could also suggest that a simple conversation with another person is a legitimizing discourse in that it will more or less adhere to certain learned, accepted, and anticipated patterns and norms of dialogic activity. All Lyotard observes here, it seems to me, is the jurisdiction the receiver of a message can claim in terms of meaning construction, and the extent to which they choose to permit the ‘abyss’ between the meaning constructed and the level of receptivity to the prescription for action if any there be. Inherited structures, inherited prescriptions, however, come with a bridge largely and already intact. Such prescriptions, which obviously vary in type and degree from person to person based on demographic and personal experience, can be and often are followed either automatically or out of compulsion.
Some automobile owners in the United States, for example, might opt not to own or regularly drive such a vehicle (for any number of reasons) were it but for their country’s largely auto-centric urban and interstate planning. The rationalization of automobile ownership in this case may be that I must work and enjoy particular forms of recreation and consumption, and that there is only one means of transport through which these are accessible. Or, I may truly believe, as the advertisements suggest, that automobile ownership endows me with greater freedom or prestige, or maybe I just really actually like driving a car. Or, and most likely, it is an over-determination, with any number of subjective, cultural, and political-economic factors - determined and determining ‘in one and the same movement’ (Swingewood: 189) a mass of individual legitimizations, i.e. the prescription of car ownership bridging the abyss.
This is dangerous ground, and if not careful I may not be as lucky as the car. Although both I and my example have talked along the lines of Althusser’s relatively autonomous levels of society combining to form the ’structural complexity’ of a social formation; thereby achieving an over-determined structural causality (Swingewood: 190), the remainder of my response to Lyotard’s statement runs less with Althusser and more along the lines of critical-theory, Gramsci, and Marxism as rooted in subjective and inter-subjective praxis. The essential difference is that while Althusser suggests there is no prescription other than the eventual unfolding of structurally over-determined events, Gramsci and school suggests humanity writes its own history both backward and forward in time.
That a ‘deep conviction of a true being of society’ is in Marxism is very much the case. Marxism implies a cache of normative views on power relations in society. In essence, Marxism advocates that the present mode of social reproduction is unjust and exploitative, and suggests that human kind can and must struggle to achieve alternative social norms of the ‘just’. In some instances these views do take on an almost messianic character, at which point the Marxist ‘logos’, if you will, is reified; moves from critical-theory to a ‘quasi-religious system’ (Swingewood: 113). Such occurrences are unfortunate since the essential concern of Marxism as a critical theory is the extent to which particular structures and Weltanschauungs, specifically those of capitalism, ossify, reign hegemonic and assume an existence seemingly outside the realm of human influence or choice. What Kirkpatrick and crew call ‘an alienated society’ (Kirkpatrick et al: 2). It practically goes without saying that Marxism as a closed discourse, as a set of particular theories to be accepted or rejected ad hominem, assumes the status of an ideology, very much in the Althusserian sense of the term, and in so doing negates itself as a theory of the practice of emancipation. This is the problem of orthodoxy and dogma.
However, this relationship between orthodoxy and Marxism should not be over-stated, nor made into a behavior singular to the Marxist approach. The purpose of the above discussion on legitimacy and structure was to demonstrate that a given mode of reproduction can only survive so long as the correct demographics continue to act in a legitimizing manner in accord with a particular rubric of ideologies and norms relatively non-threatening to the status quo, or as Gramsci would say, in ‘active acquiescence’ in the persistence of bourgeois society (Swingewood: 118). In our particular situation capitalism continues to persist in part because the bourgeois Weltanschauung’, its particular iteration of truth and its particular movement from the true to the just, (”the rule of law”, “liberal representative democracy”, “an honest day’s work”, “the free market”), successfully bridged, and unless actively challenged, will continue to monopolize the bridge between the denotative and prescriptive. So, while Marxism runs risk of orthodoxy, the bourgeois Weltanschauung is for us and many other people orthodoxy a priori.
While I agree with Lyotard, on a purely functional level, that there is an endemic problem, for whatever reasons, of Marxism’s ability to actually cross the abyss, to actually move more active agents into a different theoretical and practical frame that challenges capitalism’s ‘truths’; question notions of social reality limited in scope to the realm of the ‘objective’ and empirical. However, I would strongly disagree with any implication that the problem is Marxism’s attempt as such. The greatest strength of the Marxist discourse has been promoting an understanding that truth lies not in the facts of the given reality, but in the negation or transcendence of those facts…in our attempt to change the world, in our critique of the established reality’ (Kirkpatrick et al: 2). Marxism, at its best, is not merely an attempt to change the ‘facts’ of world capitalism, but a perspective which asks always “what is a fact?” (Kirkpatrick et al: 2). Truth is inter-subjectively constructed, and as such Gramsci’s immediate ancestors, Labriola and Sorel, are right to suggest “there is no truth waiting to be discovered only a truth which must be made.” (Swingewood: 115). The use of the indefinite article, ‘a truth’, very much implies the subjective, mutable, and fluid conceptualization of ‘truth’ in the tradition of critical theory. The ‘true being of society’ is not, in this iteration of Marx, one particular structruration of society, but rather it is any number of possibilities, imminent realities, for which humanity must actively struggle to make real. “Reality is not a given datum but created through human activity; the goal of socialism is not lying in wait in some distant future but results from praxis.” What is the goal of socialism? An inalienable society, a society actively determined by its agents in a democratic and non-exploitative manner. How do we arrive at this? By “making the critique of alienation speak for popular needs and lead to concrete actions against the capitalist commodity relationships within historical possibilities” (Kirkpatrick et al: 3 my emphasis).
While it is clear that Marxists cannot afford the naïve assumption that their messages are constructed by those who receive them in such a manner as to engender and encourage a new Weltanschauung … and the elitism in Bolshevism or otherwise will certainly not do. However, it is also naïve to suggest that society is either so utterly fragmented and subjective or structurally determined (objectified) that any attempt at change via ‘human will organized into collective forms’ is doomed forever to lurk in the abyss. In the first instance, the relativist thread in post-modern thinking can be seen very much as a positive development, as it does encourage a mode of thought conducive to identifying and questioning reified forms, even if that questioning is not, strictly speaking, Marxist. In the second instance, structures evolve as agents work through them. The observation of the Frankfurt School, that “capitalist societies are closed systems with monologic modes of social communication as a simple one-way process of cultural indoctrination” (Swingewood: 132-3), could start to ring less true. The monologic structure of the culture industry has the potential for further significant change; the diffuse nature, interactive and productive potential of the new tools of cultural production make praxis in general, and Gramsci in particular, more relevant than ever before:
“All revolutions are preceded … by an intense work of cultural penetration’ as the rising class aims to subjugate allied and subordinate strata to its ideas. A dominant class is…defined as one which saturates civil society with the spirit of its morality, customs, religious and political practices: ‘The foundation of a ruling class is equivalent to the creation of a Weltanschauung.’ If the working class is to constitute a dominant class it must establish a culture that commands the support of other strata; its world view, Marxism, is thus not a class ideology as such, but the expression of the immanent structural trends of history. Cultural hegemony prior to the act of revolution is created through collective action” (Swingewood: 118).
The ‘historical possibilities’ have seldom been potentially more conducive to the cultural penetration by ‘ordinary people’ into the culture industry; a growing awareness of these possibilities is reflected in the growing activity and discourse surrounding ‘new media’: “There is a battle for the soul of the internet, and if a greater democracy is to claim this soul it will only do so through the work of ‘ordinary people’, entering, shaping, and governing these new means of production, these new communication means,” (Coleman 2005a: 280). Given the quite real and very vulnerable nature of these new opportunities for cultural penetration, to reject collective action a priori is a futile and worthless act. Relativism is preparing collective actions of its own. Making symmetrical the power relationships in narrative production is critical praxis; a grand narrative of subjective experiences, a great many voices communicating the local as globally shared - a de-localization and democratizing of cultural production, of message and construction - potentially. Already the bourgeois Weltanschauung takes root. “Technologies are never neutral: they are designed, shaped and socially modified in accordance with discourses that are often profoundly political and hegemonic” (Lessig in Coleman 2005b: 185). Already some give up: “the internet will be ‘free’ only where this serves the purposes of commercial development” (McQuail: 140). Unless we can claim it.
4. Pt
AV,
Let me respond to your response first by making what I believe to be an absolutely critical point. I cannot underestimate the importance of this: the calling into question the possibility of translation between two modes of discourse is not tantamount to espousing some kind of ethico-political relativism. This is an accusation regularly and wrongly levied against writers often grouped under the heading of “post-modernism.” The process of de-centering the diagnostic or prescriptive ability of a certain range of discourse should not, but seems to in some circles, imply a belief in a generalized political inefficacy and a subsequent disinterest in civic or social responsibility. The epithet of one who “reject[s] collective action a priori,” certainly does not refer to Lyotard - furthermore, we can all agree that such a position is almost tautologically “futile and worthless”. So let’s do that.
“…it is also naïve to suggest that society is either so utterly fragmented and subjective or structurally determined (objectified) that any attempt at change via ‘human will organized into collective forms’ is doomed forever to lurk in the abyss”: I also can’t think of anyone who would disagree with that. It seems that the referent of this message is not Lyotard in particular but a sort of caricature of the prevailing misinterpretations of the more infamous “post-moderns”, I am thinking here of both Lyotard and Derrida, each of whom are occasionally misinterpreted as rejecting in principle “any attempt at [political] change” because of their resistance to a pre-packaged ethos vis à vis the mode of change. (Lyotard started his career as a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.)
On the prescription for the struggle: What I see at stake is the question of whether or not there exists a kind of writing that would be, again as you suggest, a “theory of the practice of emancipation.” Can the practice of emancipation /be theorized/? Or are we already in an incompatible register of discourse entirely? Does Marx or anyone else ever “build a [semiotic] bridge”, or is there, as Lyotard suggests, an abyss (an abyss, unbridgeable)? The question is not how an element or which one inside a mode of speech or writing (to use the Wittgensteinian parlance, a “language game”) allows for the successful bridging of the abyss between the denotative and the prescriptive - for Lyotard, it is decided in advance that these two modes of writing are already always passing each other over, that is to say, they must continue to “miss” one another, precisely because in each game one of the poles of address is fundamentally obscure: translation is impossible /first/. Which is to suggest, as a second-order consequence, that the “a priori” is not some given or particular mode of theorizing the political (tacitly or expressly, as you correctly note) but instead the belief in the possibility of theorizing the political as such.
Let’s also take a moment and try to stake out some ground with reference to the registers of “the true” and “the just”. Your motion to recognize a multiplicity of truths is in keeping with the spirit of “the post-moderns”, but may provide an unexpected consequence for the ability for intercourse between modes of dialogue in general. All concerns aside with regard to the supposed coextension of truth and facticity, the proposed abyss of the political and the ontological comes down to a question of duration and of the ability of a certain “class” of statements to properly address the variable dimensions of duration. To focus for the moment on Lyotard’s argument, let’s get back to the question of the poles of a mode of discourse. I think your quote from Kirkpatrick etc. most succinctly illustrates the point I am going to try to briefly make: “truth lies not in the facts of the given reality, but in the negation or transcendence of those facts…in our attempt to change the world, in our critique of the established reality.” Now, we immediately recognize this as a form of political dialectics, aka. that an attempt to change the world is partially constituted by a series of denotative or critical statements viz. “the established reality”, and the notion that the truth lies “in the negation or transcendence” of the set of prescriptions that constitute a given social or political “reality”. Negation, transcendence: What could be more properly ontological (Hegelian)?
There is the law and then there is the law. In the (”religious”) prescriptive register, there is a law, called the law of being but it as its first fact relies on a mode of communication forgotten from our understanding of discourse (in which we concern ourselves with a message as primarily from somewhere) insofar as it is a law sent from an incomprehensible (transcendent) source and its addressee is all of us here. This is a Jewish (or, more properly, Levinasian) mode of discourse: the sender is obfuscated, permanently, and whatever is left for our intercourse with the law it is understood that “it is not known who obligates…/it cannot be brought over to the narrative pole of the referent/.” (71, my italics) The bush burns, amen amen. As to the register of political discourse, Lyotard correctly cautions against a sense that, “one can draw prescriptions from a description that is…correct” precisely because in this paradigm, the “correct” (or “true” in the sense that you used it above) description of society serves as a grounding discursive praxis for the obligation married to the prescriptive mode of discourse. The notion to which Lyotard refers in my first quotation, that which he finds carries through from Plato to Marx, is that there is some sensible distribution model for society that is based on the true, that is, the way things are - in other words that some occulted subject (the spectre of Marx, Plato, god) has provided a moment of relay from the descriptive register (the register of knowledge of being) to the prescriptive one. Because of a certain theoria, then, philosophers have historically put themselves in the position of political advisors, “as if a good theoretical description of the problem is what a prince needs to be able to produce correct commands.” (24) This is what is under question, not the “correctness” of any philosophico-political assessment in general and especially not of Marx’s in particular.
This belief, and not its particular content, is what I personally perceive as dangerous. The supposed register of discourse under which this translation is possible is violent to begin with and allows groups of “philosophers” or descriptive agents (say, The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, The Project for the New American Century, or the group of Straussians in the White House right now) to use a grounding ontological or theoretical discourse - one in which the sender of the transmission necessarily leaves no return address - to subject this register of language to a violent translation into one in which “reality is not a given datum,” (which is to say a discourse in which the /referent/ is occulted and which is, by the very nature of the relay, received en masse in the second person). In short, one must “dissociate the true from the just so that the just not be subject to the critique that you have leveled at the true.” (Thébaud, in JG, 24)
I think this fits nicely in line with your point that “making symmetrical the power relationships in narrative production is critical praxis” which is, in a certain way, exactly my point. The reification of the logos that is absolutely contaminated with philosophico-political writing provides exactly the same enabling situation for Marx, Leo Strauss, and Pat Robertson, and the fundamental belief that the prescriptive can be drawn forth from the descriptive is what remains to be addressed first. The “leap of faith” which is required to imagine a bridge between these registers of discourse (the transubstantiation of the reasonable or true into the just), in my mind, bears rethinking. Consider this, only as an example: That one might think of justice on the model of prayers or requests, and not on the model of the Idea in the Platonic sense…”Requests are not, and cannot be, obtained, either through deduction or implication, from denotative statements, nor calculated by means of propositional functors.” (25)
Your friend,
Paul