So the point is not that we can access what remains unthought in Freud through a Hegelian reading, or what remains unthought in Hegel through a Freudian reading; such a procedure should culminate in the self-reflexive move of thinking with Freud against Freud, or with Hegel against Hegel. But is not such an approach too formal—not only in the sense of trying to isolate abstract formal models of the dialectical process, but above all in the sense of missing the ultimate Marxist critical-materialist reversal of Hegel, namely the manner in which dialectical formal models are always mediated by concrete historical content, expressing a certain historical matrix? This case has been made by Peter Osborne: “As for the “materialist reversal” from Marx back to Hegel, it actually happens within Marx’s own texts, specifically in Capital, where the ontological peculiarity of the value-form is shown to enact just such a process. However, it is ontologically particular to capital—THAT is its materialism: in Žižek’s terms, the contingent historical specificity of its necessity. Such dialectical logical necessity cannot be a feature of a general metaphysics without being precisely what it is in Hegel—idealism—because it lacks the capacity for sufficiently determinate significant (that is, practically relevant) differentiation. Simply calling it “materialism,” on the basis of its difference from an ancient philosophical logic of “the One,” does not stop it being idealism in a broader sense.” What Osborne proposes here is the old thesis of the Hegel-Capital school (Helmut Reichelt et al.): the Marxian logic of commodities is the contingent historical secret of Hegelian speculation. However, it is not enough to say this. First, there is the fundamental ambiguity of the Marxist reference to Hegel which begins already in Marx himself, and goes on in Lukács and Adorno: is the Hegelian dialectical process the mystified/idealist expression of the process of liberation, or the mystified/idealist expression of capitalist self-reproduction? Second, Marx is not only historicizing universals: he not only analyzes how a universality is always colored by a specific historical context, he also shows how there is a specific epoch in which a universality that is formally valid for all epochs appears as such—for example, the universality of labor only appears, or comes to exist, in capitalist reality. Finally, from Marx to Adorno, there is always a set of propositions which are presented as trans-historical universals. In his 1859 “Preface to the Critique of Political Economy,” Marx summarizes “the guiding principle of my studies”: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.” These lines are clearly meant as trans-historical social-ontological universals. When, in his Negative Dialectics, Adorno talks about the “priority of the objective,” when he asserts the non-identical, and so on, such statements are definitely meant to be taken as universal ontological principles whose truth is not limited to specific historical conditions. Next there is another properly Marxist aspect: not only the historical mediation of universal philosophical categories, but the “practical” status of philosophy itself. As Althusser put it in his Lenin and Philosophy, philosophy is “class struggle in theory,” by definition it involves taking sides, a practical engagement. The young Lukács said the same thing in a different way when he emphasized that historical materialism is not a new world-view, but a practical engaged stance. Osborne’s reproach is that this dimension is lost when I define materialism in formal opposition to the idealist assertion of the One, as the assertion of abyssal multiplicity against the background of the Void, but within the same contemplative world-view. But are things as clear as this? My reading of Hegel is historically located or mediated in a very specific way: Hegel is to be repeated today because his and our epochs are both epochs of passage from the Old to the New. A certain epoch is coming to an end (for Hegel premodern society, for us capitalism), but the failure of the Marxist revolutions makes it clear that we can no longer rely on the eschatology of the New-to-come—the future is open. From the standpoint of emancipatory struggle, it is thus crucial to take into account how, in the process of the actualization of a Notion, the Notion itself changes (into its opposite). And the purer this Notion is, the more brutal the reversal. This is why Marx is “too (pseudo-)Hegelian,” he really counts on the “synthesis” of communism as the overcoming of all history hitherto. At a general formal level, let us imagine a dialectical process which points towards its future resolution—the exemplary case would be Marx’s vision of history in the Grundrisse, where the progress goes from substance to alienated subjectivity, i.e., subjectivity separated from the objective conditions of its labor. This development reaches its apogee in capitalism, in the figure of proletariat as substanceless subjectivity; however, this point of extreme alienation is in itself already a resolution, for it opens up the perspective of its own overcoming, of the collective subjectivity reappropriating its objective conditions—this time not by being substantially immersed in them, but by asserting itself as the subject of the entire process. From a strict Hegelian standpoint, a teleological process like this will always go wrong, and the intended goal will turn into its opposite (as confirmed by the reversal of revolutionary emancipation into Stalinist nightmare). The standard Marxist counter-argument here would have to be that such a reversal is precisely the basic feature of an “alienated” history in which individuals are the playthings of an impenetrable substantial process. For Hegel, however, the self-transformation of the goal during the process of its actualization is not an effect of the “alienated” character of a substantial process in which subjects are caught up—on the contrary, the idea that the process is dominated by a substantial big Other is in itself an ideological illusion. The Hegelian matrix of the dialectical process is thus that one must first fail in reaching the goal, as the intended reconciliation turns into its opposite, and only then, in a second moment, will the true reconciliation come, when one recognizes this failure itself as the form of success. In this regard, where are we today? Radical historical self-reflection (a philosophy has to account for its own possibility, for how it fits into its own historical constellation) remains a necessity—as Foucault put it, every thought, even a reflection on the ancient past (like his own analysis of Ancient Greek ethics) is ultimately an “ontology of the present.” However, our self-reflection can no longer be that of the revolutionary Marxism exemplified in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (the practical self-awareness of the engaged revolutionary subject). Our moment is more of a Hegelian one: not the moment of highest tension when the teleological (re)solution seems near, but the moment after, when the (re)solution is accomplished, but misses its goal and turns into nightmare. At this moment, the Hegelian problem is that of how to remain faithful to the original goal of the (re)solution and refuse to revert to a conservative position, how to discern the (re)solution in and through the very failure of the first attempt to actualize it. Hegel, of course, refers to the French Revolution, with its attempt to realize freedom that ended in revolutionary Terror, but his entire effort goes into demonstrating how, through this very failure, a new order emerged in which the revolutionary ideals became actuality. Today, we find ourselves in a strictly homologous Hegelian moment: how to actualize the communist project after the failure of its first attempt at realization in the twentieth century? What this impenetrability of the future—this impossibility of the agent’s taking into account the consequences of its own act—implies is that, from the Hegelian standpoint, a revolution also has to be repeated: for immanent conceptual reasons, its first strike has to end in fiasco, the outcome must turn out to be the opposite of what was intended, but this fiasco is necessary since it creates the conditions for its overcoming. Every historical situation harbors its own unique utopian perspective, an immanent vision of what is wrong with it, an ideal representation of how, with the necessary changes, the situation could be rendered much better. When the desire for radical social change emerges, it is thus logical that it should first endeavor to actualize this immanent utopian vision—which is why it has to end in catastrophe. It is here that we can also discern Marx’s fundamental mistake: he saw how capitalism had unleashed the breathtaking dynamic of self-enhancing productivity; on the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this dynamic is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism—the ultimate limit of capitalism (of self-propelling productivity) is Capital itself; the very development and revolutionizing of its own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate attempt to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction. Marx’s mistake was to conclude that a new, higher social order (communism) was possible, an order that would not only maintain but would raise to an even higher degree the potential of the dynamic of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent contradiction, is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises. In short, what Marx overlooked was that the inherent antagonism as the “condition of impossibility” of the full deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its “condition of possibility”: if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, then far from fully unleashing the drive to productivity, we lose precisely this dynamic that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism. If we remove the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by the obstacle dissipates (herein would reside a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlap between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment). The critics of communism were thus in a sense right when they claimed that Marxian communism is an impossible fantasy. What they did not perceive is that Marxian communism, this notion of a society of unleashed productivity outside the frame of Capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself, a strictly ideological fantasy of maintaining the thrust of productivity while removing the “obstacles” and antagonisms that are—as the sad experience of “really existing capitalism” demonstrates—the only possible framework for the effective material existence of a society of permanent self-enhancing productivity. This is why a revolution has to be repeated: only the experience of catastrophe can make the revolutionary agent aware of the fateful limitation of the first attempt. Marx, especially in his youthful texts, provides the basic formula of the illusion on which this fatal limitation is based in a series of implicit “instead of” theses which begin with the alleged “normal” state of things, and then go on to describe the alienated inversion of this “normal” state. Here is a long representative passage from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: “So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death … So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital. “All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the PRODUCT OF LABOR as to an ALIEN object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world—becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself … “(According to the economic laws the estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more value he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the more powerful labor becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labor becomes, the less ingenious becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s slave.) … “As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.” It would be easy to rephrase this passage in explicit “instead of” terms: instead of being the realization of the worker, labor appears as the loss of his realization; instead of appearing as what it is, the appropriation of the object through labor appears as its estrangement; instead of possessing what he produces, the more the worker produces the less he possesses; instead of civilizing himself through producing civilized objects, the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker becomes; and so on and so forth. Although the mature Marx, returning to Hegel to articulate his critique of political economy, generally leaves this rhetorical figure behind, it returns from time to time, as in the following passage from Capital: “This INVERSION (Verkehrung) by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterizes the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say: Roman Law and German Law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say: Law (Das Recht), this abstraction (Abstraktum), REALIZES ITSELF in Roman Law and in German Law, in these concrete laws, the interconnection becomes mystical.” In this case, however, we should be careful: Marx is not simply criticizing the “inversion” that characterizes Hegelian idealism (in the style of his youthful writings, especially The German Ideology)—his point is not that, while “effectively” Roman Law and German Law are two kinds of law, in idealist dialectics the Law itself is the active agent—the subject of the entire process—which “realizes itself” in Roman Law and German Law. Rather, Marx’s thesis is that this “inversion” characterizes capitalist social reality itself. But the crucial point lies elsewhere: BOTH POSITIONS—THE ALIENATED INVERSION AS WELL AS THE PRESUPPOSED “NORMAL” STATE OF THINGS—BELONG TO THE SPACE OF IDEOLOGICAL MYSTIFICATION. That is to say, the “normal” character of the state of things in which Roman Law and German Law are both laws (or in which the worker becomes more powerful the more powerful his labor becomes, or more civilized the more civilized his object becomes, etc.) is effectively the everyday form of appearance of the alienated society, the “normal” form of appearance of its speculative truth. The desire to fully actualize this “normal” state is therefore ideology at its purest and cannot but end in catastrophe. In order to see this, we have to draw another key distinction: between the “alienated” situation in which we, as living subjects, are under the control of a virtual Monster/Master (Capital), and a more elementary “alienated” situation in which, to put it in a somewhat simplified way, NO ONE is in control: not only us, but the “objective” process itself is also “decentered,” inconsistent—or, to repeat Hegel’s formula, the secrets of the Egyptians are also secrets for the Egyptians themselves. Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, Verso, 2014, ebook, Intro.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 16:41:42 +0000