What in the hell …

Marx writes in the introduction to the Grundrisse, “The human being is (…) a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious [geselliges] animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” Production by an isolated individual outside society (…) is as much an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.” He takes this point as foundational to such an extent as to be obvious, worth mentioning solely because some people - Bastiat and Carey, for example - have been foolish enough to miss it. (84.) [Note to self, look up the political animal/linguistic animal stuff in Aristotle, and potentiality too. Also compare this with Wittgenstein on private languages, with Virno on Wittgenstein, and with Virno and Negri on the community formed of immaterial laborers, ie, the multitude-in-itself as possible only in specific conditions.]

He also writes of an “illusion [that] has been common to each new epoch to this day” wherein developed “new forces of production” are taken “[n]ot as a historic result but as history’s point of departure.” (83.) It strikes me that this taking of product as given is one of the constitutive elements of the declaration of an epoch.

Attending to conditions as having a history rather being eternal, and having a historical particularity, is what Marx’s statement means that “production (…) is always production at a definite stage [Entwicklungsstufe] of social development,” which is to say, “there is no production in general.” (85, 86.)

Marx at the same time holds that one can identify certain general features of production. This is what allows different particular cases of production to still be production, the common elements which allows the term to apply to different instances and group them in relation to each other, even this commonality is never instantiated without differences as well. One of these features is that there “[n]o production without stored-up, past labour,” which is to say that objects, like the forces of production mentioned above, are to be taken as the result of activities. (85.) Marx holds this to be true of all production as such, “even if it [the accumulated labor] is only [present as] the facility gathered together and concentrated in the hand of the savage by repeated practice.” (85-86.)

One could spin this offhanded example into a philosophical anthropology, were one so inclined, wherein the picture of humans includes a power to learn and improve in response to experience. This would be unnecessary, however, for the example could be taken in a more limited way but with the same resulting function. Rather than a universal - for all humans there is a power such that facility is gained via practice - it could taken as a historical claim: there are or have been some humans who demonstrated such a power. Following from this one can simply act as if this power is the case universally, without having to argue for it. The stakes here for me are to hold something like what Infinite Thought has called the ‘minimal philosophical anthropology’ put forward by Alain Badiou without having to enter onto the terrain of seeking to prove or defend claims about human nature or ontology. In this sense, then, the move is that made by Jacques Ranciere: we hold this as an opinion, an assumption or a belief. If others seek to disprove it, let them do so, though they will then also need to account for the historical phenomena from which the principle is abstracted. In the meantime we will act as if it is true.

This view which can be held as if true, which is something like what I take Badiou to mean by the assertion that there is a power of thought, is akin to the “characteristics which all stages of production have in common” though they apply to different locations. Marx’s common characteristics are, so to speak, part of the description of (the historical processes of production of) the objective conditions. The power of though is of the subject or of subjectification. In both cases these “general preconditions of all production” are simply “abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped” because the specificity of any stage - or better, instance - does not lie in its being simply an instantiation of a general precondition (88). Still, they have a use, being a species of “rational abstraction” which “fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition.” (85.) This use just should not be overemphasized.

I mentioned earlier that on my reading, object in Marx are to be taken as the result of activities. In addition, objects are to be taken as themselves present in a context of activities rather than simply inert objects. This is what is meant by Marx’s citation of Spinoza’s dictum that determination is negation (90). The point can be seen more clearly when Marx writes that “[c]onsumption produces production.” That is, “[a] railway on which no trains run, hence which is not used up, not consumed, is a railway only potentially and not in reality.” This means that “a product becomes a real product only by being consumed. For example, a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn; a house where no one lives is in fact not a real house; thus the product (…) becomes a real product only through consumption (…) for the product is production not as objectified activity, but rather only as object for the active subject.” (91.)

This point about the ‘making real’ or ‘becoming real’ of the product in consumption suggests to me a reading of what Marx means by ‘real.’ In this passage the term in German is ‘wirklich.’ I assume, but I haven’t checked, that this is the same term used in Capital when Marx writes of real subsumption/subordination/subjection and relative surplus value being the ‘real’ capital relation.

If this is so, then I would like to suggest that the use of ‘real’ in the above cited passage from the Grundrisse can inflect the meaning of ‘real’ in the passage from Capital (passages which, unfortunately, lend themselves to a periodizing reading like that of Negri). In the above passages, the railway without trains, the unworn garment are unreal. Yet, clearly they, so to speak, have being. They exist. The garment that is worn, the real garment, does not spring into existence at the moment of its donning any more than the house leaps from the ground the instant it is occupied. [This could maybe be read for kicks in relation to Lewis Carroll’s “The Two Clocks”. Look that over again and see.] The unreal coat, the unreal railway, the unreal house already exists prior to its donning, its bearing a train, its becoming occupied. “Real” here then is not a reference to being but rather a statement of importance on Marx’s part, in my view a rather clumsy and confusing statement but an important aspect still of the orientation to thought and the world that his work suggests. “Real” functions something like an honorific or a statement of what will be attended to. Marx’s “real” means “that which I will be attending to in my analysis” and “that which I recommend that others attend to in their analysis” and in the politics connected to that analysis. [Look into this further, dig around in Capital in German and in English.]