The Eternal Return of Crisis

Peter Osborne's article 'A Sudden Topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the Politics of Crisis', in the new Radical Philosophy 160 is a provocative and fascinating read. Not least because it makes a connection I was interested in by using Benjamin's reading of the eternal recurrence as the temporality of capital (someone should also read this against the temporalities proposed in 'On the Concept of History'). Summarising violently Osborne, suggests the functionality of crisis, its detachment from politicisation, and what I've taken to calling the capitalist real subsumption of the new. In a way, and I'd tend to agree, crisis does not guarantee politicisation, and Osborne explores this through a deeper conceptualisation of the effect of crisis on the very concept of change - something I'm also interested in and I'll need to read over more carefully.

This and his related work on negation, which has yet to my knowledge appear in print, makes Osborne's work a rather uncanny shadow to what I've been trying to develop (or vice versa).

Apocalypse Now or Later

Contrary to the dire prognostications of the Bognor Regis Monster Shouter ('Are you getting slaughtered tonight? 'No', 'Well you should, the world is going to end tonight'), I/we are still here and so can read Evan's excellent piece on the lagging in advance between apocalyptic film and the economic crisis. It indicates the complication, which my piece on apocalypse fell into, of 'reading off' from cultural objects - also pointed out by cara mia re John Wyndham getting there first on a world without people.

Apocalypse Later (remarks)

Here are some immediate responses to the excellent discussion of Nights of Labour of my work on the 'apocalyptic tone' (forthcoming soon on the Mute website).

i.m. Daniel Bensaid

1.0 In reply I can only agree about the disjunction between the crisis in neo-liberal govermentality and the articulation of the crisis of capitalism itself. There is no doubt that one element of the function of capitalism is its ability to engage and deploy different forms of govermentality, and so although this crisis in this particular 'financial regime' offers a certain alienation or de-familiarisation of capital 'on the ground' the usual 'abstract' mechanisms continue to operate precisely in the 'blind' Dawinian forms NOL identifies. It's worth noting, and this is a point made by Andre Pichot, that Darwin imported models from the social science of his time (Malthus and Smith especially) that emphasised the 'blind' functioning of 'chance' in the nascent field of the 'economic'.

2.0 The very key question here is how 'dysfunction' or 'crisis' can also operate as a form of the reproduction of capital in the mode of non-reproduction - a point emphasised in the work of Benedict Seymour on New Orleans (and, now, its imaginary re-articulation). We cannot afford to assume the automatic rebound of capitalist crisis to 'us', but, as NOL points out, my own articulation of the tendency as possible mode of analysis is more in the form of critique than positive recommendation. Although the implication of my analysis is the need to articulate between real abstractions and change, to start to think together more closely, and more realistically, the subject of change and the object of change.

3.0 Certainly, as I argue in the Mute piece, the apocalypse offers modes of thinking radical re-orderings. In terms of strategy it cannot be dismissed out of hand, abut I don't see how many of its current forms truly articulating either the subject or object of change; although I have my queries Evan's project is the most thorough attempt to deal with this.

4.0 Fascinating is the suggestion of the articulation of apocalypse as missed, which transforms into the discourse of tragedy. I've recently read Althusser's essay on the Piccolo Teatro (in For Marx) where he articulates different experiential forms of temporality. We have the 'melodramatic time' of ideology - the time of the imaginary, and one which seems to resonate with the temporality of the current crisis. This time can make a transition to the temporality of tragedy, which appears to be the moment of decision / action, but there is also another form of time. This is an enigmatic, even non-subjective time, which figures the brute encounter with the 'real' of capitalism, its very absence of relations, and even the embrace of that real ('the true relationship is constituted precisely by the absence of relations.')

4.1 Althusser's example, from the play he analyses, is a daughter's embrace of prostitution as economic choice posed against her father's melodramatic and tragic decision to murder her potential pimp to defend her honour. As he states: 'Father, consciousness, dialectic, she throws them all overboard and crosses the threshold of the other world, as if to show that it is in this poor world that things are happening, that everything has already begun, not only its poverty, but also the derisory illusions of its consciousness.'

5.0 While this last form of time can seen to return to the dangers of disabused embrace of capital, another figuration of the apocalyptic tone, it could also figure a break from such a tone and into the strategic (we could connect this to Althusser's speculations on Machiavelli's notion of the conjunctural connection of fortuna and virtu, which passes itself in 'pure' a-subjective contingency).

6.0 To turn to NOL's last point on the experience of collectivisation as apocalypse or even utopia I think this is best captured in the work of Platanov, notably The Foundation Pit. His work, which I can only recommend you read, captures in uncanny fashion these strange utopian / apocalyptic forms ('We will kill the universe with machines').

6.1 I certainly think then connection of ideas to popular forms of understanding is crucial. In one sense it is the crucial necessity in the attempt to articulate the current crisis in a different form. This is where I see Althusser's point as relevant - a fusion of reason and reality would involve rupture with the melodramatic/tragic into the 'real' of capital as the absence of such relations. Of course, as Althusser's own work suggests, this would still have to be articulated in the register of the imaginary and work-over or exceed any 'return' to the melodramatic/tragic - otherwise we risk an elitism of the disabused 'real'. This is Gramsci's point about the motivating power of Marxism qua the 'religion of the subaltern' - providential narrative of victory - and, we could say, the need to articulate 'profane' forms of Marxism in popular articulations.

7.0 It's here where NOL's work on the experiential consciousness of workers might do well to disrupt my 'dogmatic slumbers'. This was also the therapeutic work of Infinite's intervention at HM, which has prompted me to start to really think about an anthropology of the worker (not so much an ontology, although due to capital's own 'philosophical' functioning ontology is also crucial). This is for future work, but without either this, or a more strategic thinking of actual forms and structures of negativity / resistance my own forthcoming book risks being 'weightless'.

HM talk, the ideal Christmas gift

Many thanks to Evan and Mike for putting up the MP3 of my HM talk - I don't much like the sound of my own voice (insert sarcastic expression of surprise) but it was amusing. It's possible a version will appear in Mute, if not it will be posted here in due course.

We will bury you!

Owen already draws notice to what was a pretty frantic and manic HM this year. I have previously written a conference report but, for a range of reasons, this is not possible this time round. I would just say that (for once) I really enjoyed my own session, with Evan chanting down Babylon and Mark on capitalism as the 'Terminator with a human face'. The Q&A was great as well - the Infinite one pushing me to confess my concept of human nature, China on 2012 as the bukake of the Earth, and Knox and Evan debating the finer points of Mad Max 2 and 3 with, as Alberto put in, the same amount of intensity and attention usually devoted at HM to debating volumes 2 and 3 of Capital. I also hear that Fredric Jameson (!) could not get in because the session was so full...

Thanks to any one else who asked a question and had the patience to listen to my answers.

Badiou, critique of SR avant la lettre

'The fact remains that they are turned off by the partisan taking of sides. The asymptotic perspective of flight makes of the empiricist a wandering materialist, a vagabond philosopher of natural substances. Ignorance of the mirror turns the empiricist into the mirror - of the world.' (209)
Badiou Theory of the Subject

Postone online

With thanks to Principia Dialectica for this link to a collection of work by Postone - easier than reading Time, Labour and Social Domination...

Life v Capital

Stewart Martin's article 'Artistic Communism - A Sketch' in the new issue of Third Text (which yes contains yours truly as well) offers a fascinating periodisation of 'Marxist vitalism'. His argument is that this vitalism passes through a number of phases, from the 'spiritualist vitalism' of German Idealism to Marx's 'materialist vitalism' in the first instance. Marx, and I think this is the most disputable part of the periodisation, poses a situation of 'life versus capitalism' (489).

Then we have Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Englightenment, which registers the dissolution of the independence of culture, or the subsumption of culture. This leads to a disclosure of capital as 'dead labour' - their mordant images of capitalism qua dead and deadening force. In Debord, capital's colonisation of life is registered, but only the beginnings of this process. This leads to an affirmation of the unity of culture and life and the insistence that life remains uncolonisable.

Finally, we have the current situation in which the colonisation of life is played out through the medium of art and culture ('creative' / 'artistic' / 'cognitive' capital). In this situation life, and so vitalism, can no longer play the unequivocal role of point of resistance.

'Capital would no longer be opposed to life as its other. Rather than a form of non-life or death, capital becomes itself a form of life [from vampire to zombie?]. And opposition to capitalism is no longer grasped by the affirmation of life tout court, but by an affirmation of non-capitalist life or communist life, which is thereby also a negation of capitalist life.' (493)

I think what is key for me here is the possibility of formalising and historicising the passing of vitalism as point of resistance, notably in the passage from formal to real subsumption - at least as a tendency or, in Martin's phrase, 'an imminently approaching horizon' (493). There is plenty to cash out here, and I am not knowledgeable enough to truly assess the relation of Marx to German Idealism, especially in relation to art, but Martin's work, as usual, is both insightful and provocative.

Always Historicise! Notes on Jameson

After the reading group on chapter one of Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, hosted by the Institute, I wanted to post a few reflections. The first is that for a book with its famous motto Jameson's own references to literary theorisations seem very 1950s / 1960s: the new critics, Northrop Frye, Norman O. Brown, Greimas / Levi-Strauss. This is obviously not to condemn the book for being 'out of date' as such, but rather to note that this lag (for a book published in 1981) is not thematised as such. There is a sense, as the Institute pointed out, that the book seems to be trying to integrate an academic department with all its factions under the banner of Marxism, qua ecumenical / unifying principle.

Also striking is the theological and quasi-organicist reference to the 'whole body' as utopian trope, taken up in a quasi-Durkheimian moment and in a truly bizzare instance (in the conclusion) tracked through Marx's invocation of the Asiatic despot. This moment in Marx is made to stand-in for his lost thinking of community, which is odd considering that it can be tracked through more 'positive' moments in Marx, such as his remarks on the mir / commune, or his references to human community (Gemeinswesen) (cf. Camatte), or his references to species-being (Gattungswesen). Barring some weird residual Maoism this deliberate provocation seems to be linked to Jameson's argument for a left politics of collective alliances versus a pluralism that mimics capitalist alienation.

This also links to Jameson's constant reference to the unity of history as singular narrative, which is then used to license (in a tricksy move) the necessity for a hermeneutic that can reconstruct and mimic this unified historical narrative. Again what is strange in terms of historicisation is that this conception of history as 'what hurts', as the Real, and as the 'absent cause', only present through and in the effect of its textual traces, is not regarded as an effect of capital. Marx famously noted that 'world literature' become available as a category on the basis of capital; Jameson, instead, argues that history was whole before capital, fractured and broken-up by capital, and will be whole again - seemingly through a joint political and cultural revolution, prefigured by the political hermeneutic that can gather the limbs of Osiris.

This para-modernist reconstruction of the traces / fragments seems to depend on a model of formal subsumption in which history stands outside of capital - both before, during, and after, we could say. Gesturing already to the problematic of the disappearance of 'nature and the unconscious' that he would take up in the Postmodernism book, we could say that later work takes more seriously the problem of real abstraction and real subsumption that immanatises 'History', reduced, we could say, from Jameson's capitalisation. 'History' would no longer stand for some external standpoint, nor completely subsumed in the paranoic sense, but rather as presupposed by capital, as 'internal' resistance to it.

The final irony of historicising Jameson, which I am sure he would not be resistant to. It seems that The Political Unconscious stands not only on the threshold of defeat, hence it is an oddly 'sixties' book (a category Jameson himself has analysed), but also on the threshold between formal / real subsumption - caught in an uneasy formulation that leaves 'History' and the 'Real' as (bad) Kantian noumenal rather than internal impasse.

Labour Metaphysics (some scattered and incoherent remarks)

We could treat the history of capital as unimportant because in 1845 (or 1867) and in 2007 it is identical in itself, and conclude that what was said of communism at its beginning is fixed in stone. But those who believe that the history of capital is without importance in the sense that, from the beginning, it is as it is in itself, have not yet managed to become Hegelian. Parmenides suffices. They leave the development alongside being as something which doesn’t form part of it, something accidental. Contrary to the Marx of 1843-46, if we can and must speak of revolution today as the abolition of work (and all the rest) we do it on the basis of the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, of exploitation, of the situation of the proletariat, without any reference to the “person” of the proletariat, to a “human essence”, to “man as community”. We are in contradiction with capital on the basis of what we are, that is to say of what capital is, and not from what we could be, a potential which would somehow already exist as suffering. It is the breakdown of programmatism which, at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, momentarily resurrected the very conditions of its emergence as if they could also be those of its overcoming. We momentarily all became Feuerbachians again, …some of us remained so. They have thus made of an ideology born of the failure of ’68, the eternal formula of the communist revolution.
Théorie Communiste, 'Much Ado About Nothing', trans. Endnotes

C Wright Mills famously remarked about the 'labour metaphysic' of the American New Left that made the proletariat 'the historic agency'. While this speaks to what we might call a strategic difference in terms of agential forms, it also speaks to the issue of the metaphysics of labour itself in Marx - or whether there actually is any such metaphysics. For example, Enrique Dussel treats 'living labour' as the 'creative source' of surplus-value, but rather than argue this is an immanent dynamic of the capital-relation instead he argues that living labour is in exteriority to the value totality of capitalism. [1] Dussel therefore affirms the positivity of living labour as the affirmation of otherness - an 'eternal' otherness. Hence his Shellingian critique, by drawing out Schelling's positive philosophy as the alternative to the 'negative' Hegel, appropriate for capital qua subject.
Chris Arthur follows Dussel to this point but dissents firstly on the appropriateness of the use of Schelling, although he concededs it could offer a useful analogy, and on the issue of labour as 'creative'. For Arthur labour is the source of value, but not creative of value. To be the source of value is to be that out of which capital creates value, while capital harnesses and exploits living labour to create value from this source. Capital is the 'creative' principle, but it does not create itself out of nothing. In this case labour is negated by capital, forming a 'contradictory unity' (here is where exteriority seems to lose its traction and a thinking of immanence take over, as Nicole outlines, or in a different form Theorie Communiste).

For Arthur labour is (still) the 'standpoint of critique', if the reality of this stand-point is 'historically open-ended'. In contrast, despite the backsliding identified by Nicole Pepperell, Postone insists that labour is the object of critique. In the form of their historicisation of capital Theorie Communiste would argue that these standpoints of exteriority (correlated with Schelling or with vitalism) are symptomatic of formal subsumption rather than real subsumption. That is, still conceptualising capital on its past modelling of labour as exteriority. While I think this is correct, and can only recommend Nicole's summary comment in the post below, the constant point of anxiety such models provoke is the seeming collapse of agency.

Whereas Wright Mills' point was that the horizon of the New Left was too constrained by a 'Victorian Marxism', the difficulty here seems to be the lack of forms that make-up the critique of labour / the rupture of the capital relation from within. Hence in the Historical Materialism symposium on Postone the recurrent charge that he completely evacuates agency. The difficulty here is between splitting a contradiction in unity and a contradiction that appears to only line-up on the side of capital; in the second case any standpoint of critique appears to be threatened because its immanence is always vulnerable to subsumption. This is excerbated in a time which seems to lack 'points' (to use Badiou's term).

This issue is further complicated by Virno's argument that within the current formation of real subsumption 'human nature' itself becomes visible as the site of subsumption. In this case we have not so much a vitalism, but the posing by capital (and the struggles within/against it) the question of the human in terms of the capacities that make us open to subsumption. In Virno's sense it is our very anthropological openness and dis-adaptation (our anti-nature we might say) that makes us all too suited to the 'nature' of capital as axiomatic machine of flexibility, mobility, and de-territorialisation. Again I see Nina's project as not simply 'becoming Feuerbachian' as a result of historical irony, but the attempt to think through the posing of the 'generic' human, and especially 'equality', within the anthroplogical determinations of capitalism.
It would also be on this unstable and deeply ambiguous line that projects of neuro-philosophy and eliminativism could be focused. On the one hand, styled as critiques of the self they appear as anti-humanist wedges against (why not?) bourgeois ideology, on the other hand, the flexbilisation of capital doesn't appear to have any necessary need for human subject as such, merely any form/content for accumulation. In a sense labour here as source of value within capital again comes into question; broadly whether the re-programming of our sensorium be oriented to value-extraction or in rupture with the law of value.
Here I'm sceptical of how far the second path can be taken without active struggle (itself something of a paradox in a paradigm which would regard 'will' and 'activity' as folk-psychological illusions). In a sense, as I understand it, SBA embraces this by placing the contradiction in capital; capital is a 'sorcerer's apprentice' that dissolves its own bases for accumulation. In contrast, it appears, Planomenology wants to follow the first path of critique, and it will be interesting to see how this deals with the problem of capital qua axiomatic and the seeming disappearance of agency as mere folk-relic of our psychology.

Notes

[1] The material on Dussel and Arthur is from Chris Arthur's review in HM 11.2 (2003).

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'.

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)

Theory and the PCF

In the spirit of one of those Derrida footnotes that sets a near-impossible task for anyone who would actually take it up ("write a history of philosophy in terms of the telephone" - oh, someone did that) I've realised a project that I can't do but would be fascinating: write a history of French philosophy / theory in terms of the relation with the PCF. Obviously we have the debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty concerning the Party and negativity in the 1950s (due to make an appearance in the conclusion to The Persistence of the Negative). The key moment appears to be the 1970s and especially the "Union of the Left", which seems to have generated hysterical terror of the "gulag in France" (see Michael Scott Christofferson's fascinating French Intellectuals Against the Left). A vehment anti-communism runs through a number of thinkers in this period, and not only the easily derided Nouveaux Philosophes. Perry Anderson notes that in 1974 Lyotard "confided to startled friends in America that his Presidential choice was Giscard, since Mitterand relied on Communist support." (29)

Summing up Lyotard's later work Anderson notes the symmetrical parasitism between "libertarian theory" and the PCF:

"From the seventies onwards, so long as communism existed as an alternative to capitalism, the latter was a lesser evil - he could even sardonically celebrate it as, by contrast, a pleasurable order. Once the Soviet bloc had disintegrated, the hegemony of capital became less palatable." (35)

In the wake of capitalist triumph resistance was discovered, but only, as Anderson notes, in the melancholy figures of the reserve of the artist, childhood, and silence. (If you want another project the comparison here with Walter Benjamin would be worth exploring.)

The "exception", so I have been reliably informed is (oddly) Derrida - who, it seems, displayed qualified sympathy to the PCF. In the context of this rabid and excessive anti-communism this seems all the more interesting gesture. Of course I'm not re-valorising the PCF; widely and justifiably regarded as the most Stalinist of the European communist parties. Instead, I think more probing is required into forms of anti-Communism, and into the tendency to often regard France and French intellectuals as "naturally" left-wing.

References

Anderson, Perry (1998) The Origins of Postmodernity. London and New York: Verso.

Christofferson, Michael Scott (2004) French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s. Oxford and New York: Berghann Books.

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?