Sharpen the Contradictions

This new post by Steven Shaviro speaks closely both to the conjuncture and my concerns in my ongoing book project The Persistence of the Negative. I share his scepticism concerning the symmetry between absolute pessimism and voluntarism / subjectivism, although, as I'll hopefully be elaborating at length, I would argue for a negativity that precisely acts on the ontological fabric of capitalism qua real abstractions. Such a negativity would not cultivate the subject or restore it as spectacle, in fact I'm not sure negativity can be entirely correlated with the subject at all (this is a speculative, not to say unsubstantiable, argument...).

It is worth reading Shaviro's post alongside Gregory Elliott's remarkable (although also very expensive) Ends in Sight (2008). Elliott too makes the point that Marx's success as analyst of capitalism means little when cut off from possible agency to destroy it. Contrary his earlier more sceptical discussion of Perry Anderson (in The Merciless Laboratory of History) now Elliott comes around to Andersonian pessimism. As he puts it in his conclusion, regarding the alter-globalisation movement, 'The cruces of an alternative - agency, organisation, strategy, goal - that could command the loyalties and energies of the requisite untold millions await anything approaching resolution.' (p.111)

This pessimism feeds into a query prompted by the fascinating paper by Nick Gray and Rob Lucas: "Formal and Real Subsumption - Logical or Historical Categories?" at the Marxism and Philosophy day. They quoted Jacques Camatte's argument that real subsumption absolishes formal mediations (unions, the welfare state, the parties of the third international; all 'positive' conceptions of the proletariat) and so leads to a sharpening of antagonism. What, however, if its doesn't? Perhaps this situation accounts for the oscillation noted above: in the absence of the mediating instances (no matter how flawed) and without the sharpening of antagonism oscillation between voluntarism and pessimism become 'structural' features. Badiou's work of the 1970s, soon to be issued by re.press, is relevant here as he traces the symmetry between Althusserian structuralism and the voluntarism of Gauche Prolétarienne.

Correlationism Ha Ha Ha

By materialism we understand above all acknowledgement of the priority of nature over 'mind', or if you like, of the physical level over the biological level, and of the biological level over the socio-economic and cultural level; both in the sense of chronological priority (the very long time which supervened before life appeared on earth, and between the origin of life and the origin of man), and in the sense of the conditioning which nature still exercises on man and will continue to exercise at least for the foreseeable future. Cognitively, therefore, the materialist maintains that experience cannot be reduced either to a production of reality by a subject (however such production is conceived) or to a reciprocal implication of subject and object. We cannot, in other words, deny or evade the element of passivity in experience: the external situation which we do not create but which imposes itself on us. Nor can we in any way reabsorb this external datum by making it a mere negative moment in the activity of the subject, or by making both the subject and the object mere moments, distinguishable only in abstraction, of a single effective reality constituted by experience.

Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (1975), p.34

This is not to simply make a rather vacuous point of intellectual priority, and neither is it to deny the way in which Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude offers a devastating 'internal' ruination of correlationism. It is, however, to signal a certain number of anxieties I have concerning his work and its take up.

1. The anxiety that renaming his speculative materialism as speculative realism is a sign (admittedly minor) of de-politicisation. This is reinforced by the tendency to dissociate Meillassoux from Badiou.
2. The uninhibited lumping in of all Marxism with correlationism. This was the point of my fortunately tiny intervention in the debate on Speculative Realism recorded in Collapse III. While Timpanaro was fighting against Hegelian and Platonic interpretations of Marxism, and his work is a minor and not unproblematic current (I especially have my doubts concerning his critique of Freud), he at the minimum signals difficulties with this maneuver.
3. Certainly so-called materialisms can merely amount to inverted idealisms - erecting one type of matter above all others in the function of an ideal. This point was made long ago by Bataille and commented on here. When Graham Harman re-insists on the point it seems to me to veer dangerously close to excluding Marxist forms of materialism for problems which haunt many (even all?) materialisms.
4. Meillassoux's article 'Spectral Dilemma' in Collapse IV compounds these issues. On a cursory reading, which I realise is not philosophically acceptable, the article seems to me to use his radicalised reading of contingency to rehabilitate ethics and theology ('inexistent God' yes, but...) towards a new irrationalism. Robin was kind enough to position my very poor article as a critical response despite it being written without awareness of Meillassoux's piece.
5. To choose just one example from those lumped in as correlationists - the most deeply unfashionable - isn't Derrida's quasi-concept of the 'trace' resistant to simple characterisation as correlated to the human subject?