Lefebvre
This section is fantastic because it gives due
credit to a largely under-appreciated thinker who spans an even greater
period than Marcuse and Adorno. The explications of Lefebvre’s
contributions seem well done and it is no small task
to tease out this core of Lefebvre’s work given his prolific output.
The neglect of the production of space by capital is inexcusable in
Marxian thought, but insofar as the consideration of the working class
rarely left the workplace, it is not entirely shocking
(note that Engels’ writing on this, collected in the little booklet On The Housing Question, is line for line his most interesting and contemporary writing and not surpassed until Debord and Lefebvre.)
163
165
Is O’Kane dedicated to opposing the complementing
of Marx’s concepts with other concepts undertaken by Lukacs, Adorno and
Lefebvre (as well as Debord)?
167
“This
notion of fetishism as a concrete abstraction likewise stems from
Lefebvre’s interpretation of Marx’s relationship to Hegel. Following
from this contrast
between idealism and praxis, the ‘starting point’ for such a conception
of abstraction is not the mind but practical activity.’512
Thus social praxis, which consists of ‘social reality, i.e. interacting human individuals and groups’, constitutes
appearances
which are something more and else than mere illusions.’513
These ‘appearances are the modes in which human activities manifest themselves within the whole they constitute at any
given moment.’514
They are
therefore what Lefebvre terms ‘modalities of consciousness’, or
‘concrete abstractions’ because these forms are ‘abstract’ yet they are
also ‘concrete’515
since they
are constituted by social praxis. Consequently, these concrete
abstractions are ‘the very basis of the objectivity of the economic,
historical and social process which has led up to modern
capitalism.’”
The
contrast between idealism in Hegel and praxis in Marx is mistaken.
Hegel is also a philosopher of praxis, and it is not merely a praxis of
Mind. It might
be more correct to say that for Hegel the material or external world is
consciousness, is what is outside of self-consciousness, albeit not yet
consciousness of other, since “other” implies a consciousness of self.
Hegel’s idealism is an idealism of praxis.
For example, his contention that the diversity of spirit is not a
plurality , but a determinate diversity (PhG, para. 736) is because
diversity is not number, but more akin to measure in the Greek sense, a
passing from quantity to quality in an ethical sense
(to act to little or too much is to not act virtuously, whereas to act
in right measure is virtue.) Diversity is thus a diversity of
acts (hence determinate), not a plurality of things.
The distinction between
Hegel and Marx on this is rather about the nature of praxis. For Hegel
it is praxis in Spiritual Being, for Marx it is praxis in Social Being,
keeping in mind that for Hegel Spirit is
Social and that in Marx Social is Spirit. In a sense, the question is
where one puts the Infinite: in human social being or in God.
180
This idea of typology
has some oddly Weberian roots. Might be worth looking back at Gyorgy
Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence, first couple of
chapters.
The aspects of
determinacy and form seem to start coming apart at the wheels here. If
alienation is infinitely complex, it is also in forms that are
historically specific. For example, see Roswitha Scholz’s
value dissociation reading of gender or Chris Chen’s extension of it to
race.
How do they types
(everyday alienation, reification, political alienation, etc.) come to
be? What gives them their particular social form?
183-4
“On
the quantitative side stands Lefebvre’s revised diagnosis of alienated
sociality, which is exemplary of the typology proposed in volume two.579
In this society of forced bureaucratic consumption, alienation has become a ‘social practice’.580
Everyday life
is now the site where this social practice tries to integrate people
into the ‘[a]bstract, quantitative ‘pure formal space’ that defines the
world of terror[istic]581
forms which
is not the space of false consciousness but of true consciousness or of
the conscience of reality, isolated from possibility.’582
Such
terrorist forms are inclusive of commodified, pervasive and administered
society. They also reflect Lefebvre’s adaptation of structuralist
methodology and include exchange, maths, writing, linguistics,
contracts and practical-sensorial objects. Yet these terrorist forms
cannot reduce the ‘irreducible’ qualitative aspects of the lived.583
For while
these forms aspire to a concrete existence they are ultimately reliant
on human social actions that they cannot entirely determine. Since the
interrelation between these forms is not total,584
these forms
cannot determine content. Ultimately, these forms ‘simultaneously
organize’ everyday life and ‘are projected upon it, but their concerted
efforts cannot reduce it; residual and irreducible,
it eludes all attempts at institutionalization, it evades the grip of
forms.’”
This
seems central to Lefebvre. The irreducible qualitative aspects of the
lived still seems fairly much a humanist sentiment. The incompleteness
of the interrelation
of these forms is crucial to his view. It also marks out a resistance
to the idea of “One-Dimensional Man”
pace Marcuse, but in fact within all of Frankfurt School theory.
There
is a vitalist sense, IMO, to his use of “everyday life”, that
Bergsonian and Nietzschean irreducibility. Whether or not this is a
problem is another
question.
There
is also a problem with the mere juxtaposition of form and content,
quantity and quality. It hypostatizes the opposition in a dualistic
manner, as opposed
to a more speculative framing.
188
It
is a shame to focus only on the abstract, while excluding discussion of
the representational and represented. In Hegelian terms,
representation is prior
to the Concept, is that which lacks conceptuality and Thought proper
(c.f. his discussion of Religion in paras. 770-776 of the PhG and also
the Introduction to the
Lectures on the History of Philosophy where he distinguishes
philosophy from religion.) To stop as representation and abstraction is
to never get to the Concept. It may be that this is where Lefebvre is
supplementing Hegel with Nietzsche.
189-90
I
could have put this not anywhere in the Lefebvre section I suppose, but
I think Lefebvre’s focus on space and spatiality is important in
beginning to think
through a more satisfactory way of addressing abstractions and their
ability to solidify, to be sustained even outside of a specific
practice.
One
of my criticisms of the excellent work of Nicole Pepperell is that she
has no real concept of abstraction. Vidar Thorsteinsson’s excellent
talk “The Social
Efficacy of Abstraction” takes up, without taking a side in the answer
per se, the problem of the idea that abstractions subsist beyond the
practice that generates them.
I
would suggest that Lefebvre’s discussion of space takes us in the
direction of answering this dilemma because the abstractions of value,
money, commodity,
capital, state, leave artefacts which are not only structured, but
structuring. That is, these artefacts cannot be treated as neutral any
more than labor in capitalist society can be treated as neutral. Living
labor leaves behind dead labor, but dead labor
designed to perpetuate the form of social relations that produced it in
the first place. So too does capital’s production of space engender
itself, reproduce its conditions of self-constitution. The relation is
materialized in the artefact and changing its
directionality is more difficult than Pepperell proposes. Little
changes in practice come up against the channeling force, the
canalization of variations by artefacts of prior practice, just as
living labor is canalized by its artefacts, by dead labor. Just
as in genetics, the artefacts have a certain robustness that cannot
simply be bypassed, but which must be overcome.
Lefebvre
suggests a manner in which the production of space and the artefacts
produced are incomplete. This follows on from his earlier discussion of
the refusal
of systematicity, of the inability of capital to close the loop
completely without a remainder and without gaps (the two are not
necessarily the same.)
191
Reading Hegel’s mocking of picture-thinking and numericity in the
Phenomenology of Spirit (paras. 773-6) as it applies to the
Trinity of Father, Son, Holy Ghost makes me wonder if Lefebvre’s claim
to surpass “the binary limits of Marx’s analysis” might miss the point.
First, that any splitting up into number is both
arbitrary and contingent. Capital is one and any splitting up that
hypostatizes its moments is no better than Christian picture thinking
that transforms God into pieces and images. As Hegel quips that one
might as well make the trinity a quaternary by adding
in the fall of Adam or a 5-in-1 with the fall of Lucifer, so we might
mock attempts to split capital up into a Trinity.
195
O’Kane
is correct to point out, even in Lukacs, Adorno, and Lefebvre, the use
of “vague and unsubstantiated terminology, such as praxis, social labour
or socio-economic
form which are treated as constitutive of theories of
social constitution.”
This is also interesting:
“even
when Lefebvre’s revises his classical humanist analysis, he does not
fundamentally re-evaluate these broad categories. Rather, he argues that
a typology
should be devised that might encompass them. Whilst these revisions do
add complexity, the fact that they are not accompanied by a revised
account of how they constitute or are constitutive of society as such
undermines the explication of Lefebvre’s theory.”
“These
accounts of concrete abstraction are potentially illuminating in some
cases, such as when Lefebvre describes how cities or space participate
in abstraction.
In other cases, the treatment of these forms as analogous to fetishism
is questionable, such as when he talks of the terrorist forms of
mathematics. In either case, the genesis of such forms and the
corresponding accounts of why these forms possess fetishistic
properties are often hard to decipher. It is not enough to simply posit
that they interact with the logic of the commodity world, when the
function of such a logic is not accounted for. Yet, Lefebvre’s theory
too often relies on positing such interrelations.”
In
the first two sentences, I don’t see O’Kane’s reason for acceding that
cities and space might be terroristic, but not mathematics. If
anything, mathematics
is the highest form of fetishization. This is a fairly consistent
theme in the debate on biology and evolution by figures such as Richard
Lewontin, Richard Levin, and Stephen Jay Gould. It is also akin to
Helmut Reichelt’s critique of economics, which replaces
having an actual object with arcane mathematical formulations that
appear self-justifying by dint of their arcane quality. If
post-modernism speaks in a language that is incomprehensible, denying
the validity of the very object of its language, modern science
and mathematics often seem no less involved in a mathematical language
game, with as little substance.
196
“Whilst
on one hand this opposition does have the virtue of positing some form
of social life that has not been subsumed or determined by the commodity
form,
the manner in which it does so is reductive and questionable. This is
because
it seems that Lefebvre treats any form of quantification or abstraction
as dominating or dehumanising, and any type of qualitative behaviour as
resistant
and humane. Such an opposition leads Lefebvre to bundle together
disparate phenomena due to this reductive assessment of whether they are
quantitative or qualitative. This leads Lefebvre’s account of
quantitative phenomena to include a disparate array of elements
such as rationality, mathematics, and types of homogeneity, which are
treated as equivalent to abstractions that compel human behaviour.”
This
is an excellent point, and one which applies to many thinkers in the
“humanist” reading of Marx. Simply counterpoising quantitative and
abstract as “bad”
and qualitative and concrete as “good” hits an important issue.
198
“…Marx’s
theory of fetishism provides an apt description of the current
socio-economic crisis in which collectively constituted economic
entities have acted
like subjects beyond indivduals’ control compelling rafts of cuts,
debt, rising unemployment and misery…”
199
“Rather
than an account that examined fetishism in the context of alienation or
reification this comparative study focused on how fetishism was used as
a theory
to articulate the collective constitution of social phenomena that
possess autonomous and inverted properties that structure, compel and
maim individuals. While the term ‘social domination’ was intended to
convey that there is an integral link between how
these thinkers conceive of the way a society is structured and of these
fetishistic types of domination that are held to be characteristic of
this society.”
“…theories of reifcation provide a theory of domination that is too pervasive and inadequately grounded. So I hold that
disentangling
fetishism from reification provides sufficient theoretical grounding
for a critical theory that is more nuanced and better articulated than
theories
of reification.”
“…this
disentanglement can be seen in (2) the separation of the interpretation
of what I termed ‘fetishism as reification’ – which attributes
domination to
the transformation of processes into things and the thingification of
humans - from accounts of fetishism which emphasise the autonomous
function of things and the manner in which they compel individuals’
actions…”
200
“The
inherent tension that exists in conceiving that social relations
underlie forms of domination without furnishing an adequate account of
how these social
relations constitute these forms of domination. Furthermore, while I
believe this use of fetishism has some traction, I also think it does
little to distinguish itself from other accounts of social
constructivism, undermining its critical potential.”
Excellent point.
201
The goal:
“…a
contemporary critical theory that provides an account of the genesis,
pervasiveness and the reproductive logic of fetish- characteristics of
social domination.”
202
There is a limit to
conceiving of capitalism solely in terms of a “class-based form of
labour allocation”. This limit is that it can’t grasp other moments
necessary to the reproduction of capital, namely domestic
or household labor which is a gender-based form of labour allocation,
and unfree labour, which I would argue forms the ground of a
racially-based labour allocation. I admit, I’m not sure if labour
allocation is the right way to think of this, but in the total
cycle of capital, the complete circuit, the reproduction of
labor power by household labor is missing and so is the permanent
presence of unfree labor (slave labor, peonage, sharecropping, and also
the denial of the possibility of being any kind of
labor which typically results in genocide related to massive land and
resource grabs), a labor allocation that increasingly became associated
with and which defined specific groups as racial groups.
This is not to say that Capital
does not gives us the basis of comprehending class, but that class
is not the only form of labor allocation structured by capital. Gender
and race are also related to labor allocation, so that class, gender and
race are moments of the same dynamic of capital.
Roswitha Scholz refers to the mutual determinacy of class and gender as
value-dissociation, as opposed to mere value-form which relates
strictly speaking only to the value-producing moment of capital
associated with wage-labor. I am suggesting that race forms
the third moment, even though it finds itself in production in the same
place as wage-labor.
There is an ontologization of labor here IMO.
“Marx: (a) uses his
critical-genetic method to account for the social constitution of
capital by deriving it from the dynamic and contradictory process in
which social labour appears and hides itself in the socially
specific forms of value, (b) conceives of Capital as constitutive of
sensible-suprasensible alienated and inverted forms of abstract
domination that are collectively constituted and reproduced by the
socially specific type of social labour that appears in
these forms of value.”
Still, this is pretty good:
“(1)
Marx’s theory of fetishism provides an account of the social
constitution of forms of value that integrates his form-analytic
critique of political economy
with the reified social relations and the personification of things.
(2) What I termed ‘fetish-characteristic forms’ describes the autonomous
and personified constituent properties of these forms of value that
invert to dominate and compel individuals’ action.
(3) Marx’s account of these fetishcharacteristic forms and their
constituent domination proceeds from the commodity through money and
capital - where these forms become more autonomous at the same time as
their dominating properties become more concrete and
socially embedded - and culminates in Marx’s account of the Trinity
Formula which provides an account of the constitution, the constituents
and of the reproduction of the enchanted, perverted topsy-turvy world of
capital.”
There is a lot of redundancy in 202-3. The same thing is said 3 times, specifically this idea:
“Marx’s
theory of ‘fetish characteristic forms’ explains how reified social
relations constitute personified things that function autonomously to
invert and
compel individual behaviour.”
203
“Instead his theory of fetishism proceeded to articulate
the constitution and constituent fetish characteristic properties of
more autonomous forms of value alongside a more complex and concrete
account of their dominating properties.” [Italics mine – CDW]
I think this is a
really, really important point because it implicitly states that the
later categories in Capital remain forms of value. I’m not sure if the
right way to speak of it as an “account of their
dominating properties”, so much as a more complex and concrete account
of their determinations. Properties are too empiricist and would be
subject to Hegel’s critique of empiricism in chapter 2 of the
Phenomenology of Spirit, “Perception”. This may seem like
nitpicking, but properties belong to a thing and a more complex
accounting of the properties of a thing is an infinite task and also not
the development of categories with their own specific
effects appropriate to the level of analysis at which they are
relevant. Determinations on the other hand brings into play a
constellation (to borrow from Benjamin and Adorno) of moments through
which the concept passes, each dissolving as soon as it comes
to be, in a process of preserving the concept. (Here I have in mind
Hegel’s discussion in para. 781 of the
Phenomenology of Spirit.
207
“The inconsistencies stem from the object of
Capital,
which as a study of capitalism as its ‘ideal average,’ renders its
relationship with a theoretical account of society
and empirical reality problematic. This means that despite the fact
that Marx offers the most sophisticated account of fetishism in relation
to the social constitution and the constituent properties of social
domination, it is significant that not only Marx’s
theory remained
unfinished but that it also leaves out of consideration a significant amount of social phenomena.”
Insofar as Marx’s critique is a critique of
capital and not capitalism, this idea is a conceptual
mistake of the worst sort, and one that goes a long way towards
indicating the limits of this dissertation. There is not study of the
ideal average in
Capital, but of the fundamental categories of capital through a
critique of the categories of political economy. It is both a logic and
a phenomenology, a simultaneously theoretical and metatheoretical work,
but it is not a criticism of empirical reality.
His use of England as the “ideal average” relates to how he uses
England as an example to elucidate his points, which in a less developed
context might be less clear and complete. It is a critique of the
fundamentally contradictory and irrational nature of
capital and it points to the idea that any attempt to write a rational
theory of capital as one might conceive of a theory of light as a
particle and wave misconstrues the very nature of the object itself.
For a work so fixated on reification, this treatment
of Marx’s project as dealing with an ‘ideal average’ is a tremendous
act of reification.
This does not mean that Capital
was complete. In fact, it could not be complete insofar as certain
elements even I Volume 1 must be subject to change insofar as they are
phenomenal forms that express,
that are more concrete determinations of, value in practice. That is,
even if the essential core of
Capital remains the same (and this is why people fight over the
first few chapters because how one reads the entire rest of the 3
volumes revolves around this reading), everything from chapter 7 forward
is subject to revision and development based on
the development of news forms of appearance, such as changes in the
kinds of production (the transformation of production did not end with
the movement from cottage to manufacture to industry, and in fact one
would have to retitle “industry” as “mechanical
industry” and then account for “chemical industry” and
“microelectronics” and maybe more. Further, we know the second and
third volume were incomplete in a variety of ways and the 4th
volume was never really begun, so that the state and the world
market were never written and have largely been approach inadequately
by Marxism since Marx (Werner Bonefeld’s recent book offers from very
suggestive ideas on where book 4 would have gone and where we should
go.)
ASIDE:
I really think that the idea of Marx viewing
Capital as such as a treatment of an ideal average doesn’t
even do justice to his statement in Vol. 3 in context 9and leaving
aside that this is from an unpublished, incomplete manuscript):
“In
our description of how production relations are converted into entities
and rendered independent in relation to the agents of production,
we leave aside the manner in which the interrelations, due to the
world-market, its conjunctures, movements of market-prices, periods of
credit, industrial and commercial cycles, alternations of prosperity and
crisis, appear to them as overwhelming natural
laws that irresistibly enforce their will over them, and confront them
as blind necessity. We leave this aside because the actual movement of
competition belongs beyond our scope, and we need present only the inner
organisation of the capitalist mode of production,
in its ideal average, as it were.”
We can read this sentence as “In our description of how production relations are
converted into entities and rendered independent in relation to the agents of production, we leave aside the manner in which the interrelations…
appear to them as overwhelming natural laws that irresistibly
enforce their will over them, and confront them as blind necessity. We
leave this aside because
the actual movement of competition belongs beyond our scope, and we need only present the inner organization of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average, as it were.”
Marx is here certainly abstracting from something, but from what? From the
actual movement of competition, which would be a history of how
production relations are reified and turned into independent entities
that dominate us. What matters here is that we need only present “the
inner organization… its ideal average”, which
at this level of determination has led is much, much further along than
Volume 1 in our engagement with empirical phenomena, but not to its
completion. Given that Marx here says he has not yet entered into the
world market, this statement would seem to be
specific to this moment in the work, and not a general statement of method.
“Furthermore,
in their more excessive passages in which their theories of social
domination are premised in order to articulate the dialectical
characteristics
of capitalist totality, each thinker might be said to have fallen prey
to Marx’s criticism of using dialectics as an ‘abstract, ready-made
system of logic’618
as their basis for ‘vague presentiments’619
about the composition and the characteristics of social domination.”
This is a good point
and further it is the basis for people rejecting dialectic as such (and
the point made by Gillian Rose in her last works that none of the
post-Marx things had really grasped the speculative,
which, whatever his pot-shots at the speculative in the Young Hegelians
and Hegel, Marx completely absorbed into his own work.
208
“The
first is the result of his [Lukacs’] conception of fetishism resting on
objectification rather than on an account of the autonomous
personification of
things… This is reflected in his second problem which consists in his
deficient account of social constitution that never provides a
sufficient articulation of how the class relation constitutes the
pervasive properties of reified totality. Both of these factors
lead to the third problem – it is unclear how and why reification is so
pervasive and by what means it produces and reproduces itself.”
Very good.
“Adorno’s
theory of the fetishism-form of the exchange abstraction… was
insufficiently theorised, lacking a developed account of: (a) how it was
constituted
and (b) how and why it was constituent of so many pervasive forms of
social domination. As I also showed, this account was contradicted and
undermined by other aspects of Adorno’s theory which held that an
objective theory of society was not possible or
speculated that the origin of these problems were tied to his mythical account of anthropology.”
Clear and concise. Of course, I wonder then if monetary theory of value milieu is not guilty of the same thing.
209
“While
Marx provides the most sophisticated explication of the constitution
and of the constituent properties of social domination, his theory is
still problematic
in that it is marked by instances of ambiguity, contradiction and
incompleteness.”
It’s not that I don’t
there might be problems with Marx’s formulations at times, but I think
this entire way of thinking about it misses Marx’s development of the
categories in a phenomenological fashion, in
which each step along the way has to develop out of ambiguity,
contradictoriness, and incompleteness of the previous categories. In
that sense, it is not merely a logic which is supposed to follow a clean
path from one category to the next. Each categorical
move has to develop out and transcend the inadequacies of the prior
moment, only to find that it will be subject to the same treatment in
the next moment.
“Furthermore,
it does not account for important social phenomena such as the state or
provide much of an account of how domination is socially and culturally
embodied.”
This is partially
true. Marx already has the beginning of an account of the state (his
formulation of the double freedom of the worker, for example, already
hints at it), but it is not formulated independently
because the predicate of something like the state or the world market
would mean having completed all three volumes prior to it, a world of
many capitals, a world of many M-C-M’ circuits. Further, there is a
kind of implicit treatment of gender and maybe
even race in terms of forms of unwaged, non-commodity labor and
unwaged, unfree labor, but it is not clear Marx would even have been
aware of these elements or developed them.
“On the other hand, Lukács’, Adorno’s and Lefebvre's attempts to fill these gaps
via different accounts of social domination that rely on methods of analogical generalisation of fetishism to Hegelian-Marxian
conceptions of society as dialectical totalities, do not provide coherent accounts of
how
these social phenomena are derived or related to commodity fetishism.
As a consequence it seems that despite many instances where these
descriptions of
fetishistic domination are compelling and seem to accurately describe
the function of aspects of society taken individually, they are not
based on a coherent theory that provides an explication for how these
fetishistic forms are socially constituted, and
as a result fail to articulate how they are constitutive of social
domination.”
A problem we all confront, but neatly summarized.
209-210
“However, in order to differentiate itself from the fatuous uses of fetishism or indeed other theories of social construction -
which by treating everything as socially constructed they threaten to
undermine the specific pernicious forms of social construction
fetishism identifies [Italics mine – CDW] - such a theory of fetishism and of critical social theory needs to rely on
a more coherent account of how these social phenomena are constituted and how they function in particular societies.”
This is a very good point.
210-11
“In the second place such a theory should try to accord with the historic particularity of the society it is theorising about.”
I have a bit of a
problem with this. How does a theory know that it is according with the
historic particularity of the society it is theorizing about? Further,
is it theorizing about society in the sense intended
by historicists? I don’t even think that Gerstenberger’s point relates
to Marx, as that would continue to entail the error put forth in seeing
Marx as dealing with “ideal average”.
211
“…it would instead be wise to endevour towards the type of historically rooted theory provided by Jairus Banaj,621
in which
various types of social relations are integrated into the movement of
the ‘laws of motion’ of the world capitalist system.”
Wow, that italicized
part sounds awful. Unless one is an academic historian trying to make a
career out of writing better histories or a Marxist political economist
trying to do a better economics. I mean,
to be less catty, it misses the point that in Capital the motion
of capital is the constitution of its social relations. There is no
need for “integration” unless one fails to grasp the concept
adequately. This eviscerates Marx’s work as a critique
of both bourgeois science and bourgeois ideology and reinstates the
need for a Marxist science.
211
“I
would also argue that such a periodisation could point out that the
tenor of criticism should no longer be aimed at pointing out that
culture and society
are commodified. This is no longer open to debate. Rather it is now a
question of demonstrating the genesis and pernicious consequences of
this process in contrast to those who advocate the social benefits of
commodified culture.”
Periodisation is a philosophical mistake that Marx doesn’t make. All of his categories, even the ones in
Capital that seem the most sequential, are in fact logical
distinctions that are not easily bound into temporal periods, including,
absolute and relative value, kinds of production processes, etc. Simon
Clark is quite right to challenge such schemes
in his essay in Open Marxism, Vol. 1.
Is the point to move
from a critique of commodification to the critique of the consequences
of commodification? I don’t think so because the critique of the
consequences of commodification without a critique
of commodification as such, reifies the completeness of the process of
commodification. It should be evident that commodification is always
reproduced and as such is open to contestation in its reproduction.
This is akin to Werner Bonefeld’s point that originary
accumulation is not a periodization that came and went, but that the
subject becomes the predicate, that the separation of the producers from
the means of production is never completed but a constant process at
the very heart of accumulation.
212
“In
the third place I think it is safe to say that whilst less expansive
than theories of ‘fetishism as reification’, Lukács, Adorno and Lefebvre
used the notion
of fetishism in a too extensive manner aiming to account for too many
social phenomena.
This is particularly the case for the strand of fetishism this study bypassed
[Italics mine – CDW] - mystification and ideology - which I hold grants
too much emphasis to the demystifying properties of the dialectic,
especially when such demystifying
properties are based on a theoretical account of dialectics that, as I
have shown, is in itself lacking. At the same time this type of
fetishism also tends to rely on too reductive an account of other
people’s consciousness, on assumptions of what everybody’s
consciousness consists in and on reductive accounts of other
disciplines under the rubric of generalisations such as ‘positivism’.”
This feels like an
undeveloped parting shot since that strand of fetishism was “bypassed.”
I’m not saying that dialectic is demystifying, but I feel like this
work and every other that makes a fetish of Marx’s
statement below, misses the incredible importance of presentation.
It is a distinction between different notions of dialectic and the
former is not a method at all. It is only the mastery of the material
that allows for a dialectic presentation, that
is, a presentation that is adequate to the object itself. The idea
held in this book that Marx has “a method” is a continuing mis-reading
of Marx as the purveyor if a
geltungslogik of the neo-Kantian sort. In fact, the book lacks
any real consideration of what this mysterious “method” might be other
than a mixture of critical-genetic account and penetration.
This fundamental philosophical error on pp. 46-7 dogs the entire piece.
“[I]t
is one thing for a critique to take a science to the point at which it
admits of a dialectical presentation, and quite another to apply an
abstract, ready-made
system of logic to vague presentiments of just such a system.” (Marx)
212-216
In coming to the end, I
find it hard to grasp why the monetary theory of value reading of Marx
plus the Trinity Formula provides a more “general model of how fetishism
is constitutive of a society that has become
so pervasively commodified.” It isn’t that the ride getting here
hasn’t been interesting, but as a positive counter-formulation, the
value of the monetary theory of value continues to escape me. For
example, I don’t see how it “offer(s)
a more concrete explication of social domination than Moishe Postone’s
account which relies on self-reflexivity and the seemingly
all-encompassing negativity of abstract labour” or help us “account for
the function of the state by way of Bonefeld’s626,
Roberts’627, Piccioto’s628
and Gerstenberger’s629
work”.
Is it because supposedly
“…the
monetary theory of value, [which] unifies production and circulation,
as embedded in the Trinity Formula. Instead such a model could be said
to be amenable
to integrating these contemporary forms of production and consumption
and by doing so also to integrate elements of Lukács’, Adorno’s and
Lefebvre’s accounts.”??
If anything, it feels
like the monetary theory of value hypostatizes exchange and eschews
labor as domination on the one hand and the entire circuit of capital at
the other, in favor of a reading of the Trinity
Formula that returns to personified, direct relations of domination (“(3)
These perverted forms of revenue account for the constitution and
reproduction of the Trinity Formula, the personification of capitalists
and of landowners and the misery of the proletariat”) while giving the
proletariat a pass in terms of personification.
I also just can’t stand
the idea of a model. In the name of moving away from a pre-given logic
replacing “science” on pages 46-7, we return to an instrumental logic
here with a fierceness, generating models
we can apply to various scenarios.
“Thus
Marx’s account of the Trinity Formula could be used to provide a
concrete model of how labour is apportioned according to autonomous
requirements of capitalist
valorisation.”
The appeal of this also continues to escape me. What is so important about “how labour is
apportioned”? This just seems like some fixation of professional economics in a Marxian guise.
