Marxism as Vitalism?

Marx's comment in the Grundrisse that labour is the 'form-giving fire'; Dipesh Chakrabarty noting Marx's vitalist metaphorics of 'living labour'; Colletti noting Lukacs quasi-vitalist thematics in relation to alienation; Gramsci's use of Bergosonian thematics of will / action filtered through Sorel; Deleuze's re-coding of Marx in terms of Bergsonian problems; Negri's quasi-vitalism of singularities of excess / biopolitics; etc.

Now, I'm obviously not that happy with regarding Marxism as a vitalism, notably because of my suspicions of vitalism as a 'positive' ideological complement to capital (in fact ,its 'fit' to the value-form in implying an irreducible excess of labour always available for tapping). But it's true that there is no immediate reason to argue that Marxism isn't a form of vitalism. After all the excess of 'living labour' over any disciplining into 'abstract labour' seems to imply a vitalist thematic. The question here, I think, is one of immanence. If Marx is positing an immanent antagonism, which I think is correct, when that antagonism seems to lose effectivity then we may turn to an ontological or anthropological grounding.

Even more tricky is that Marx's arguments concerning capital's dependance on living labour for value production seems also to imply an anthropological / ontological 'surplus', in that living labour can never be fully captured. Of course, this implies an historically determined conception of the human, but, no doubt, it is not difficult to ask where this capacity comes from; is it a 'constant' or 'invariant' linked to human anthropological capacities or the 'nature of Being' (this question arose for me around Daily's Humiliation's remarks on Hallward's concept of will).

The other tendency, which I find more interesting, is what we might call an excess of the negative or an anthropology of refusal. Rather than defining the human / Being in terms of some quality of excess in and over any capitalist 'capture' here it is a matter of a strategy of refusal within the extraction / disciplining of labour. This is give a purely strategic form in Tronti, given the philosophical / ontological form of im-potentia by Agamben, and inflected anthropologically by Virno. We might call it the Bartleby option.

Again the question would be can this be given an immanent form in relation to the capital relation or does it require or imply anthropological / ontological commitments? I'm hoping the first, but the difficulty of evading the second, perhaps best thought out in Nina's generic equalitarian form of the 'human', is undeniable.

Notes on Historical and Speculative Materialism

I can highly recommend N. Pepperell's 'What's the Matter with Marx? Notes on Marx's Immanent Critique of Materialism', from the 'Immanence and Materialism' conference. With economy and elegance Pepperell established the essentially reflexive and historical nature of Marx's immanent critique of capital and indicates the explicit or residual Kantianism of existing critical Marxisms. The issue here is how Marx constructs, for example, a critique of labour not based on a transhistorical category of labour, but rather on capital's revelation of the form of labour as real abstraction that then allows a retrospective resignification of labour as a crucial form to social formations. The result is a 'presuppositionless' critique, which does not depend on transhistorical or transcendent 'material' categories, but on the analysis of abstractions that are created in practice and produced as social realities. Marx is concerned with 'how this specific kind of materiality [real abstraction] is actively produced by historically specific forms of interaction between humans and other objects'. We therefore don't have a constrast between real material categories and 'merely' socially-specific materiality, but rather the historical determination of social and material determinations.

Of course from the position of speculative materialism / realism all this may sound (or be) highly correlationist. The difficulty it raises, however, is how to be materialist (or realist) if one cannot grasp the 'reality' or 'materiality' of real abstractions, precisely as historically-generated forms that both undercut or 'deconstruct' the usual distinctions of material / immaterial or real / unreal, and which also play determining roles in our thinking of materiality or reality. In that sense Marx does privilege one form of 'materiality' or 'reality', because these real abstractions shape thought and practice itself under capital, not because they are always and everywhere (more) true or (more) real. Of course, as Pepperell notes, this not just to build a better theory, 'but rather to articulate theoretically, insights that arise from a practical process that makes available certain concepts and certain practical realities which have the ability to explode capitalism from the inside.'

To paraphrase Horkheimer, if one' wishes to speak of metaphysics or ontology, one must first speak of capital'.

i.m. Giovanni Arrighi

See here

Real Horrorshow

Thanks to Reza for bringing to attention the new download of Collapse IV; I second Reza's votes on what to read and include his piece (but not mine... don't bother).

Further Reading / Listening

A few things to note for those in search of summer reading and listening:

1. Filozofski Vestnik International Edition is online with downloadable PDFs; I'm currently going to be reading through the issue on 'Nothing' although I can also recommend the issue on 'Radical Philosophy?'.

2. 21st Century materialism MP3s from Zagreb - I've been slowly catching up on these, one of the ironies is that no one really seems to be a materialist...

3. Peter Hallward's article on the 'Will of the People' from RP, pdf here (thanks to Daily Humiliation for bringing this to my attention - I bought the issue (I'm not always cheap)).

4. Staff texts from CRMEP at Middlesex.

5. Texts from the QMU Immanence and Materialism conference. I've read Matteo Mandarini's, which I thought was excellent - a model of economy and style (why can't I write / give papers like that?).

6. Parallax Ranciere texts now available here, thanks to prologus for bringing this to my attention.

The Parallax View

Further to my piece below, Nina Power has a new piece in the latest issue of Parallax on Ranciere / Feuerbach / and equality. Anyone want to post me the pdf of the issue please do, as we don't get it and I'm too cheap to pay for it... I'd also be interested to read the piece by Bram Ieven (a friend), and Ranciere's reply (does he get all Zizek on them? Probably not).

[Thanks to Michael and Bram for the PDFs - Ranciere does not 'do a Zizek', but instead writes about himself in the third person - he puts a lot of stress on the fact that he is not a philosopher / theorists and that his works are 'mere' interventions. I'm not sure that quite cuts it.]

Marxism as a Culture, or Towards a New Reformation

Gillian Rose's excellent Hegel Contra Sociology (1981 / 2009) has just been re-issued by Verso, unfortunately minus the hilariously niggardly back cover comment on the Athlone original by (I think) Giddens, which (from memory) read something like 'this book is suitable for postgraduates or highly-advanced undergraduates'. It is a truly difficult book, at least for me, which I unequivocally recommend.

I want to reflect on her final conclusions and the link they make to a number of contemporary projects (not speculative realist). This is no attempt to create a 'movement' or 'group' (and no mention of Freud's 'you say this isn't my mother, so' thanks), but rather to articulate a shared problem or problematic.

In her conclusion 'The Culture and Fate of Marxism' Rose chides Marx for reproducing the antinomies (especially theory / practice) he claims to be transcending, thereby remaining Kantian or Fichtean. It is only when Marx isn't trying to be self-conscious that he approaches a more speculative grasping of Hegelian actuality / spirit. This lacuna means that Marx does not develop a true understanding of subjectivity; leaving subjects as mere 'bearers' of relations, and reducing them to these defining functions. Marx is too literal and reductive, missing the Hegelian lesson that religion and art re-present relations, including a lack of identity.

The attraction of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism is that it is closest to the truly speculative position: 'It comes nearest to demonstrating in the historically-specific case of commodity producing society how substance is ((mis)-represented as) subject, how necessary illusion arises out of productive activity.' (Rose 232) A true phenomenology of such relations would articulate an educative and cultural function of re-forming consciousness. 'Missing from Marx's oeuvre is any concept of culture, of formation and re-formation (Bildung).' (Rose 233) Marxism itself inhabits this aporia - trying to supply the lacking 'culture', and instantiating it, but without having an idea of it. Rather than Marxism being a simply deviation from the verities, we could therefore argue it constantly struggle with this absence.

Perhaps in ways that Rose would not agree with I would argue that a number of contemporary theoretical projects try to articulate this lack in Marxism as culture, especially the lack of a thinking of subjectivity as re-formation of its determinations. This would include Alberto Toscano's work on fanaticism as site of political (and anti-political) subjectivation, Nina Power's work on a post-Beckettian / Badiouian / Feuerbachian philosophical anthropology of the generic / infinite (pdf), Peter Hallward's re-formulation of 'will' as a political category (pdf), Evan Calder William's articulation of non-dialectical dialectical negativity, Owen Hatherley's new proletkult, and even my own efforts on a rehabilitation of a non-dialectical negativity.

In each case (I think) the absence of the articulation of subjectivity by Marx (or perhaps better put the limits of that articulation) are crucial. Here lies the importance of Badiou as a vector (less so obviously for Owen and Evan, but true enough for the rest). What Badiou provides is a thinking of subjectivity not attached to finitude / decay / et al. This I think animates IT's point, which we can butress with this quote from Badiou (always worth repeating):

artists, the “creative” people of our day – choreographers, painters, video-makers – track the self-evidence of bodies, of the desiring and machinic life of bodies, of their intimacy, their nudity, their entwinings and ordeals. They all adapt the inhibited, quartered and soiled body to the domain of fantasies and dreams.

The necessity of Badiou is precisely his rupture with the ideological coordinates of capitalist subjectivity, a la Lukacs, through a rationalist hostility to all neo-vitalisms. I regard Badiou's work as (partly) an askesis of capitalist subjectivity.

The counter limit of Badiou's thinking, to be brief, is the inability to articulate this subjectivity truly as a culture (again an over-statement, cf. The Century - his most Hegelian work I would be tempted to argue (the indebtedness to The Phenomenology of Spirit saturates this work)).

Here is where the question of real abstraction enters as the culture of capital, and the fact that each of these projects endeavours to articulate subjectivity within and through this real determination of consciousness, while arguing the necessity of tracking its de-formations and possibility of re-formation: 'a presentation of the contradictory relations between Capital and culture is the only way to link the analysis of the economy to comprehension of the conditions for revolutionary practice.' (Rose 235)