Continuing my recent spate of re-blogging, check out this post by Negatron. In it, Negatron discusses some marxists’ recent uses of categories like primitive accumulation and in the process says some things which are I think useful for making sense of other issues within marxism.
Negatron writes about a “difference of level of the specific philosophical engagement and conceptualization, what could be considered, for lack of a better word, abstraction” when it comes to how people have talked about primitive accumulation and the commons. Some times this has taken place “on a register that is primarily sociological or economic” and sometimes on a register of philosophical reflect “on contingency, violence, and social relations” and “subjective possibilities, the capacity to constitute relations through language, affects, and habits.” In general within the marxist tradition there is a frequent move across registers “where concepts are constantly extended beyond their strictly socio-economic register to become general ontological conditions: alienation, labor, reification, and commodity fetishism all have been extended or generalized in this way. This movement, from specificity to abstraction, duplicates Marx’s own theoretical production, which Balibar has described as falling short and going beyond philosophy.”
I think that’s a useful characterization. I think I’m less patient with or interested in the move to philosophical registers, or perhaps am interested in different sorts of moves. In any case, I think the distinction of registers is useful, and I think that there are clearly these sorts of registers and moves across them in Marx’s work - certainly across the body of his written works over all and often within any particular written work.
My titular question suggests there is one best register. I’m not really sure there is, I’m out to lunch on that. I’d also want to specify that “best” is a relative and contextual matter - best for some people, for some purpose, in some situation. At this point right now I don’t wrestle much with philosophical problems and don’t feel bothered by them (except in a negative/deflationary manner, trying to push these problems aside/put them back in the box). [I’ve got notes for a post on this building off Engels’ preface to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, notes that I seem to have misplaced just now, DAMN IT.]
Anyway, this thing about economic and sociological vs philosophical/ontological registers, as ways to think about and within the marxist tradition…. I’m sure there are all kinds of ways that smart people could trouble these distinctions but I think they’re still useful. (I take it as axiomatic that for any distinction X there is some argument Y with which X could be troubled and probably even shown up as untenable, but I also take it as axiomatic that 1/ any argument Y should not alone be considered a sufficient condition for abandoning the distinction X in question and that 2/ the existence of an argument Y is a relative non sequitur with regard to the utility of the distinction X in question.) Part of my irritation with recent work on the common and so forth, irritation I’m still trying to boil down to a presentable position/argument, is that it involves a sort of category mistake or register mistake.
Recent work by Negri and others involves sociological/economic claims about the uniqueness of the present in terms of objective conditions and in terms of subjective/political potentials, which they use to formulate what they think are good ideas for tasks or proposals that radicals and social movements might take on today. As far as I’m concerned these claims are largely voiced using vocabularies and modes of evidence which are of a philosophical register. More importantly, the claims to temporal/historical/conjunctural specificity are made and supported via recourse to (elements of?) a philosophical register which does not have the appropriate specficity required to support those claims. That is, claims are made like “the present has these unique qualities”, but some important attempts by Negri et al to specify those qualities fail because the qualities stated apply beyond the present, and it becomes really murky how any of that actually relates to the tasks and projects they posit.
It’s like saying “my daughter is unique, she has a latent power to draw upon the existing structure and past practices of language to generate novel utterances; as such a crucial task for the foreseeable future will be for her to actualize that potential and for us as her parents to assist that process.” All the points in the clauses making up that sentence are true:
1. my daughter is unique
2. my daughter does have a latent power to draw on language to generate novel utterances
3. a key part of parenting my daughter and of her development will her learning to use her capacity for language
What’s false are the ways that that sentence strings these elements together. Point 1 is not the case because of point 2, in fact point 2 is an element of my daughter that is not all unique, it’s something true of all or most human babies. Likewise point 3 is the case for all or nearly all human parents at least until their children achieve some threshold of fluency. Let’s say I changed “my daughter is unique” to “my daughter is at a unique moment in her development and/or her life.” That would probably be closer to the type of claim I object to in Negri at al. In that case:
1. my daughter is at a unique developmental moment
2. my daughter has a latent power to draw on language to generate novel utterances
3. a key part of parenting my daughter and of her development will her learning to use her capacity for language
Little seems to have changed. Point 1 is true. Point 2 remains true but is not unique to the moment by daughter is at. Point 3 remains true and retains its prescriptive force, but the temporal specificity isn’t here.
I’m being a bit unfair here as Negri et al do have more concrete proposals. I don’t think these proposals have anything like the tie to the ostensibly conjuncturally specific analysis that these folk think they do. Soon I need to type up all my notes on that in order to try to make the case, instead of just repeating that I happen to be convinced of it. I also should say, none of this speaks to the merit or lack of merit of the political proposals except to say that I think those proposals are treated by Negri and others as being uniquely suited the present conjuncture. I don’t think they are so suited. I also happen to underwhelmed by those political proposals on their own, but that’s another discussion (I think at best this faux conjunctural analysis stuff serves in part to short circuit discussion of these proposals on their merits, or to offer merely rhetorical support for these proposals).
Here’s another parallel to my issue with Negri and his philosophical descriptions of the present. I once was at an art gallery and read a description of a photographer’s work that said something like “this artist’s photos take an image out of its context and hold it up for aesthetic contemplation.” That description is true of those photographs, but it’s too general to say anything in particular about those particular photographs or any particular photographs. This is because it’s true of most and probably all photography. Likewise with a lot of recent work by Negri - he articulates in a philosophical registers things that are true about the present, but true about the present because true about social life as such or about capitalism as such.
None of this is to say that philosophical registers within marxism are always inferior to economic/sociological ones, or that philosophical registers must lack temporal/historical specificity. My claim is about the particular claims made/vocabularies used by Negri et al; their particular recourse to a philosophical register lacks historical specificity. The philosophical work of Negri et al is simply the wrong set of tools for the project of understanding the objective conditions and subjective potentials of the present. People may hold to all of that and still understand the present in its specificity, but in so far as they do so the categories they use will be in addition to the work of Negri and others in a philosophical register.
Hey Nate, I just wanted to say great stuff and I wish I had time to engage with this and your last post. I think I feel the same way about the Negri stuff and you articulate it well. And more broadly, about the philosophical - sociological split within Marxist theory. Clearly I come out of the latter but I spend an awful lot of time reading the theory blogs with a mixture of real interest and frustration. Also have been following the Ads Without Products stuff with interest too.
Comment by Mike Beggs — October 9, 2009 @ 8:00 pm
Thanks Mike!
Comment by Nate — October 10, 2009 @ 1:41 am
Hi Nate,
After having passively followed your blog for quite some time, I thought it suitable to try to respond to some of your thoughts on an adequate, reasonable level. This following reply will in part be a response to this post but also, inevitably, about what I am struggling with for the moment. This is a very long post written according to memmory (or what you say…), and maybe not all of it is entirely relevant, so bear with me…
I agree with the critique of a “confusion” of levels of abstraction or of implicit jumping from the socio-historical to the philosophical-ontological level. I think this is the main reason I find people such as Agamben and Negri less convincing and useful (of course I might have misunderstood, or not at all understood these thinkers – I have only read Homo Sacer, and Empire a few years ago). For example I remeber Negri’s conception of the multitude primarily as moving on the philosophical ontological level while suggesting/claiming (more or less) immediate socio-political relevance (and this is how I understand your critique as well). Apart from this I find this view of the individual and community wholly unrealistic and undesirable.
As opposed to this Moishe Postone (as I read him) at least has the “decency” to explicitly and consciously remaining on a very high level of philosophical abstraction, even though it of course is a philosophical analysis of social categories, and he claims that these have socio-political significance. But still, and this is his main problem, the high level of abstraction means that his categories are devoid of actual concrete content which makes it hard to transform his analysis into an analysis of concrete events and even harder to derive suggestions for concrete political actions (His reading, drawing on Rosdolsky, resembles the tradition of Kapital-logik as I know it from Denmark - my professor describing das Kapital im Algemeinen as laying forth the transcendental conditions of the development of capitalism, and as such very far from the empirical historical level).
I much prefer to read people in the tradition of the British Marxist historians such as E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Neal and Ellen Wood, and Peter Linebaugh. While of course building on philosophical presuppositions they mainly and consciously remain on the level of (more or less) concrete historical and social analysis and are able to draw lessons from these concrete historical and political events and developments. Also, the conception of the individual (and class) that I find in these writers (here I am thinking mainly of Linebaugh and Thompson, maybe Hill) is one that differs radically from Negri’s multitude. Here the individual is embedded in a very strong sense of morality and community, whether the English crowd in the 18th century, the village commoning, the digger colony or the buccaneer crew, from whence the individual derives an identity, solidarity and a sense of justice. The important lesson to derive from this is that this sense of community, identity, solidarity and justice is very much bound up with and derived from the communal practice – Linebaugh’s “commoning” - and historical specific to this, although it might be conceptualised in a philosophical, theological or political vocabulary that is not historically specific to the same extend, for example the moral economy which draws on paternalism and Gerrard Winstanley’s “utopian” agrarian “communism” framed in a very strong religious vocabulary. I think Louis Wolcher (http://www.commoner.org.uk/blog/?p=204) is fundamentally correct in his interpretation of the lessons of Linebaugh’s The Magna Carta Manifesto, and in his diagnosis of the problem as being the non-existence of communal “commoning” (in a very concrete way) in todays society – as opposed to the philosophical conception of commoning, and its existence, forwarded by Negri, the idea of intellectual commoning and Gorz’ intellectual communism in Wissen, Wert und Kapital. Also I don’t find De Angelis’ corrective of Wolcher entirely convincing (http://www.commoner.org.uk/blog/?p=207) - his argument being that “There is commoning among workers in offices and factories. There is commoning in schools and hospitals. In neighbourhoods, in social movements milieus, in domestic spheres and there is definitively both commoning and a memory of commoning among the indigenous people, the migrants from the global south and in their original communities.”
I will grant that there is genuine commoning in original communities and among some indigenous people, but their relevance to struggles in developed western countries are not obvious.
I found De Angelis’ article on the continuing relevance of the concept of primitive accumulation interesting, but I don’t think it is correct to characterize the existence of a public sector, socialized health care, social security as commons/commoning as this article maybe does (as I remember it).
I am probably guilty of jumping levels of analysis myself right now…
Comment by MadsLJ — October 11, 2009 @ 2:13 pm
Nate,
Great response, it really helped me clarify my thinking on the matter. To put it briefly, I think the instability between the different registers is constitutive of philosophy, or, at the very least it is constitutive of materialist philosophy. (In fact, i think that this might be one way to define what is at stake in the dialectic, but I can’t back that up) However, I do not simply see it as a limitation. Going beyond the socio-economic level is necessary in order to problematize the sedimented ontological concepts that are part of our day to day vocabulary.
Comment by unemployednegativity — October 14, 2009 @ 5:27 am
hey UN,
Thanks. One thought I had afterward, not sure this came across here, is that part of my concerns are about when and where and why people resort to philosophy. This is overly schematic but I think there are philosophical answers to those concerns and there are extra-philosophical answers (for instance, sociological/economic answers to use the terms above). I may have told you this before, but I was in a Marx reading group once that ran aground in part because one friend had as his over-riding priority finding and explicating moments of purchase for an understanding of Marx as Hegelian (he was in favor of this), while my over-riding concern was relating the text to my workplace. Now, part of the problem was that we each made our concerns over-riding concerns, but that’s another matter. My friend never could see how my attempts to use Marx to explain and understand my workplace helped him in his attempts to demonstrate the dialectical logic of Marx’s method, and I could never see how his project helped me understand my workplace. I don’t mean this is as a power play a la cheap invocations of the 11th thesis on Feuerbach where I’m the real stuff and my friend is just posturing, I mean this as an example that I think states a real difficulty in relating across different aims and different registers. If one is starting from Hegel/Lukacs and the dialectic (or Spinoza/Althusser and immanent causality, or Deleuze/Negri and the common, etc), Marx can be very powerful for understanding those ideas further, and those ideas can be powerful for understanding Marx in a philosophical register. Those are legitimate uses of Marx. The difficulty for me, and I think this may be one which is not eliminable, is that I think there are legitimate uses of Marx that don’t reinforce each other, that are indifferent to each other. Posed at this level of generality, as I type this, I feel like what I’m saying is dully obvious. My complaint, I think, then, is about when people posit a link across (a relationship of utility between) two different legitimate uses when I don’t see the link. As I think I said in the post, I can’t rule out that unforeseen uses and benefits may arise, but I also think it’s quite clear that sometimes attempts to find new uses fail, some things in one register aren’t useful in another. What’s left out in what I’ve said here is that “useful” is contextual, of course; I’ve said nothing about the contexts in which something is or isn’t useful. But I guess another way to put my complaint is that sometimes I feel like around certain philosophical strains within marxism there’s a sort of sensibility or posture of a-contextual or pan-contextual utility. Know what I mean?
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 15, 2009 @ 2:37 pm