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Three provisional theses on Marx’s concept of value
“Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It’s no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values.”
–Marx, Capital, Volume I
I
Value is not transcendental. It is born only when it discovers itself in and through the historical accident of exchange. But the birth of value, which follows its discovery of itself, amounts to it being instituted as that which is a presupposition of exchange so that exchange is its realisation as value. Consequently, exchange ceases to be an accident of history to be transformed into an expression of its systemic principle, which is value. This is precisely the dialectic of history of logic and logic of history that Marx demonstrates while mapping the unfolding of value from its elementary or accidental form to its general form and money-form through the intermediate moment of its total or expanded form.
However, it is precisely the failure to closely attend to this rigorous dialectic of history of logic and logic of history that has often led scholars – mostly post-Marxists, but also a good number of Marxists of various kinds – to erroneously claim (and affirm) that for Marx value begins with exchange. Such an error renders value trans-historical and/or has disastrously reformist political consequences.
Essence, of course, becomes accessible only when it appears. But that does not mean appearance precedes essence or that the latter is an effect of the former. All those who insist that value – or the dialectic qua the principle of mediation – begins with exchange are falling precisely into such an error: it’s only in exchange that value is accessed so exchange precedes value. As a result, they mistake Marx’s demonstration of the historical precedence of exchange over value as the former’s logical priority over the latter.
Qualitative equalisation of (qualitative) difference — valorisation — is not the effect of exchange. Rather, it’s an integral dimension of the mode of organising of production (in its hidden abode) that must be logically prior to exchange in order for it to be realised in exchange. Had that not been the case, there is no way “mental”, “ideal’ or “imaginary” money-form as the measure of value would precede, and be distinct from, the tangible money-commodity as standard of price that really changes hands as definite quantities of metal money in the actuality of exchange. Marx in demonstrating this draws our attention to the logical priority of measure of value (and thus value) over standard of price (and price qua exchange-value). In other words, Marx is emphasising, implicitly or otherwise, how value precedes exchange-value with the latter realising the former.
Besides, if in Marx’s conception value did begin with exchange why would he then need to dwell at length (in Capital, Volume I) on Aristotle’s historical incapacity to come up with a conception of value when the latter is faced with the historical fact of exchange?
Therefore, the assertion that value begins with exchange is a complete and correct statement of things only if one is thinking of value merely in terms of its accidental creation. However, if one is dealing with value in terms of it being the logic of organising production — which is the mode of mobilising labour through quantification of respectively different socially necessary labour times for various qualitatively different concrete labours through a process of reducing them to human labour in the abstract — then this statement is incomplete and perhaps even wrong. In such circumstances, one will do well, instead, to state the following: exchange realises value-relationality (or the dialectic) precisely because the latter presupposes the former. So, instead of saying dialectic begins with exchange one should say the dialectic (value qua value-relationality) appears (or is realised) in exchange (exchange-value qua exchange-relation) precisely because the former is presupposed by the latter as its principle.
To not grasp the dialectic qua the law of mediation, and exchange in those precise terms is likely to lead one into the serious error of conflating and confounding the function of price (and its standard) with that of value (and its measure). Both being distinct functions of the one and the same money-form or money-commodity. That would compel one to erroneously insist, one way or another, that the market is the be all and end all of capital.
II
Marx’s exposition on value in Capital reveals two things at once. One, value is not transcendental. Two, value in being instituted, however, conceives of itself as being transcendental. This thinking of value by itself, which renders it transcendental (value qua value), is precisely the systemic operation of capital. Marx’s articulation of critique of value is intimately bound up with demonstrating what commodities say about themselves – or what value thinks of itself. In fact, what is important for the Marx of Capital is, first and foremost, the demonstration of what value says about itself. (See the citation with which this post begins.) Hence, Marx demonstrates how value is, in its own thinking, transcendental. He needs to do this because his critique of value is a deconstruction of precisely the transcendentality of value – or value as transcendental.
Marx’s critique of value begins by showing how value is, in its instituting, the abstraction of use-value, which is the irreplaceable, uncountable one (the singular). In other words, value, in thinking itself as being transcendental, is negation of this singularity of use-value. When Marx tells us that exchange-value – which is expression of value – has not an atom of use-value, even as use-value is the “material depository” of value/exchange-value, he is underscoring precisely that. He is drawing our attention to how value conceives of itself, or operationalises itself, as transcendental through a process of abstraction of use-value that is, therefore, the latter’s negation or disavowal.
Therefore, in terms of value conceiving of itself as transcendental – something that Marx demonstrates in the process of developing its critique — use-value is an absence or lack in value/exchange-value. But to the extent, that this negation, which renders that which is negated a lack, is made possible precisely by that which goes lacking the lack in question is constitutive of that which renders it a lack. In other words, Marx demonstrates how use-value is, in terms of value conceiving of itself as transcendental, a constitutive lack.
Value conceives itself as being transcendental (value qua value) that is expressed as and in the empirical (of exchange). This means value as such – that is, as the final instant of determination in its loneliness – conceals itself as the character of its (empirical) expressions. This also means that value as this concealed character of its expressions in and as the empirical (of things) is also a concealment of the process of abstraction of the concrete (“historical character” of “meanings” as Marx says in Capital) by which it comes to be the (hidden) essence — the transcendental — of its (empirical) expressions, and the concrete as such (use-value as the singularity it is). In such circumstances, when value as the concealed character of its (empirical) expressions is revealed in its hiddenness, its (empirical) expressions come across as the mystifications or fetishisms/fetishes they are.
Therefore, value as this hidden character of its expressions in and as the empirical — which is value conceived by itself as being transcendental – in being revealed thus is not itself a fetish, a mystification or an ideology. It is, instead, the character of fetishism, mystification and/or ideology. Following Adorno’s explication of the dialectic in Negative Dialectics, we could characterise value as the truth of the untrue. Hence, value qua value, which is value conceived by itself as being transcendental, is not in itself an ideology but is the character, or truth, of ideology.
Besides, value in being revealed as this hidden character of its (empirical) expressions — which are themselves, concomitantly, demonstrated to be fetishes or ideologies — is also a revelation of both the process of abstraction of the concrete and its concomitant repression as that process of abstraction.
This clearly implies that revelation of value as the hidden character of its (empirical) expressions – i.e. its revelation as the character or truth of fetishism or ideology – is also a positing of the concrete qua the reversal of the process of abstraction of the concrete. Which means value in its revelation as the character of fetishism or ideology – or the truth of the untrue – must be grasped and envisaged as the division of this truth of the untrue into itself and truth as such.
III
It is this Alain Badiou points towards in Theory of the Subject, when he writes: “There are two dialectical matrices in Hegel. This is what turns the famous story of the shell and the kernel into such a dubious enigma. It is the kernel itself that is cracked, as is those peaches that are furthermore so irritating to eat whose hard internal object quickly cracks between one’s teeth into two pivoting halves.”
So, it is not simply about extracting the rational kernel of value (dialectic) from its mystical shell – which is ideology qua exchange-value as the (empirical) expression of the rational. Rather, this extraction of the rational kernel from the mystical shell is also the former’s division between itself as the rationality of the irrational and rationality as such. More precisely, it is the transformation of the rational kernel in its extraction. Althusser is quite clear on that score while explaining in an anti-Hegelian register “how”, in Marx, “can an extraction be an inversion?”. He writes in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’: “…the mystical shell is nothing but the mystified form of the dialectic itself: that is, not a relatively external element of the dialectic (e.g. the ‘system’) but an internal element, consubstantial with the Hegelian dialectic. It is not enough, therefore, to disengage it from its first wrapping (the system) to free it. It must also be freed from a second, almost inseparable skin, which is itself Hegelian in principle (Grundlage). We must admit that this extraction cannot be painless; in appearance an unpeeling, it is really a demystification, an operation which transforms what it extracts.”
But what would this demystification – this extraction as transformation of that which is extracted – amount to? On this count Badiou’s Hegelianism against itself in his Theory of the Subject is brilliantly lucid. At any rate, it is more rigorous than what Althusser’s anti-Hegelianism is in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’. Badiou writes:
“In the peach there is still a kernel of the kernel, the bitter almond-shaped nut of its reproduction as a tree. But out of Hegel’s division, we will draw no secondary unity, not even one stamped with bitterness.” He then goes on to contend: “…at the heart of the Hegelian dialectic we must disentangle two processes, two concepts of movement, and not just one proper view of becoming that would have been corrupted by a subjective system of knowing. Thus:
“a) A dialectical matrix covered by the term of alienation; the idea of a simple term which unfolds itself in its becoming-other, in order to come back to itself as an achieved concept.
“b) A dialectical matrix whose operator is scission, and whose theme is that there is no unity that is not split. There is not the least bit of return into itself, nor any connection between the final and the inaugural….”
Therefore, unless value in its revelation as the hidden character of its (empirical) appearances – that is, in its revelation as the character of ideology or the truth of the untrue – is also the manoeuvre that divides it between itself and truth as such, which is the concrete as the process of abstraction of the concrete in reverse, it would amount to what “unfree mysticism” – Marx’s characterisation of the Stoics in his doctoral thesis on Epicurus and Democritus.
But what of the Marx of Capital – the one who is supposedly an incorrigible and an incurable Hegelian? In the section on fetishism of commodities, he provides us with his own version of Hegelianism against Hegel — one that indicates in its own way how the revelation of the truth of the untrue must also be a division between itself and truth as such. He writes: “The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality, from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place.”
IoK AND THE ‘PRO-AZADI’ INDIAN LEFT: CHARITY IS NOT SOLIDARITY
There is something Indian mainlanders outraged by the unspeakable brutalities inflicted on Kashmir by the Indian occupation need to realise. Kashmir’s national liberation struggle needs neither the charity of their teary-eyed pity for the plight of Kashmiris; nor the slightly more honourable philanthropy of directing their self-flagellating anger and outrage, abstractly and impotently, at the Indian state and its brutal occupation. What such mainlanders need to actually give is the non-exchangeable gift of solidarity to the Kashmiri movement. And that is precisely what they have failed to offer. That such solidarity is fundamentally distinct from — nay radically opposed to — patronising sympathy for the suffering victims of Kashmir is something one can hardly overstate. Unfortunately, almost all mainlanders who claim to be in solidarity with the Kashmiri struggle against Indian occupation have the two badly mixed up. (As for the politically correct Indian liberal, who is enraged only and mainly by the human-rights abuses carried out in the Valley, the less said the better.)
Sympathy and charity are constitutive of an economy, at once symbolic and political, of exchange and power. And that does not change even if one chooses to construe them, unwittingly or otherwise, as solidarity. If anything, such conflation of solidarity with sympathy and philanthropy amounts to articulating the existing hierarchised socio-political relation between Indian mainland and the IoK (Indian occupied Kashmir) in yet another register. That serves to legitimise and reinforce — admittedly by other, apparently more consensual means — both that relation and the military occupation constitutive of it. It’s time one clearly understood the difference, and learned to disentangle one from the other. Solidarity is not a sentiment to be abstractly expressed and extended. It is a politics that has to be produced as a concrete strategy and materiality. Frantz Fanon, while criticising the ‘solidarity’ extended by “French intellectuals and democrats” to the Algerian struggle against French occupation, underscored precisely that. In an article, ‘French Intellectuals and Democrats and the Algerian Revolution’, he writes:
“…French intellectuals and democrats have periodically addressed themselves to the FLN. Most of the time they have proffered either political advice or criticisms concerning this or that aspect of the war of liberation. This attitude of the French intelligentsia must not be interpreted as the consequence of an inner solidarity with the Algerian people. This advice and these criticisms are to be explained by the ill-repressed desire to guide, to direct the very liberation movement of the oppressed.
“Thus can be understood the constant oscillation of the French democrats between a manifest or latent hostility and the wholly unreal aspiration to militate ‘actively to the end.’ Such a confusion indicates a lack of preparation for the facing of concrete problems and a failure on the part of French democrats to immerse themselves in the political life of their own country.”
The question that has been driving many mainland Indians in their self-proclaimed solidarity with the Kashmiri national liberation struggle, is the following: what can and should they do for Kashmir and its struggle against occupation? However, in order to produce solidarity as a strategy and materiality of politics they would do well to reverse the question: what is the Kashmiri movement against Indian occupation doing – or can potentially do – for the everyday struggles of the masses in the Indian mainland? The answer to that is something they need to build on. Only then will their sympathy for the suffering people of IoK cease to be the abstract charitable pity it is condemned to be, and become a concretely-grounded empathy for the sufferings of comrades with whom they share a concrete horizon of internationalism of struggles.
In other words, one cannot produce such a politics of solidarity unless one recognises that the challenge the Kashmiri movement for national self-determination poses to the geo-political hegemony of the Indian nation-state favours and advances the everyday struggles of the masses in the Indian mainland. Such a challenge, needless to say, tends to concomitantly weaken the Indian nation-state as a concrete historical index of social labour organised into a regime of differentiated or segmented necessity. The Indian nation-state — not unlike every other nation-state constitutive of the capitalist world-system as the basic unit of organising international division of labour — concretely indexes the organisation of social labour into a system or regime of differential (dis-)privilege and differentiated necessity.
In such circumstances, unraveling of the Indian nation and its constitutive state is absolutely indispensable for the emancipation of social labour in the Indian mainland from the regime of differentiated necessity it is imprisoned in. Once this is recognised, all the confusion, equivocation and bad faith, which has recently come to the fore, thanks to some stupidly insidious Indian leftists exerting and contorting themselves to distinguish “azadi in India” from “azadi from India”, will vanish like camphor.
The everyday struggles of the masses inhabiting the Indian mainland are nothing but struggles of various segments of social labour to emancipate themselves from the necessity constitutive of their different and differentiated quotidian existence. However, the systemic regime within which such struggles emerge to challenge that regime in its concrete mediations tends to register, articulate and situate those struggles as demands for rights placed on the system. That amounts to the fetishisation or mystification of those struggles, and their everydayness, into juridicality. And that is precisely the reason why disaffection with the system often adopts nationalism and other related reactionary ideological forms to represent itself in the everydayness of its experience.
For this reason, mainland Indians committed to forging an effective politics of solidarity with the Kashmiri national-liberation struggle must necessarily double up as militants of proletarian-revolutionary politics. They need to intervene in the various everyday struggles of the masses (aka social labour) — including their own — to demonstrate how those struggles are actually system-unravelling, and are rendered juridical only on account of being counted and placed by the system, which in this process of counting and placing recomposes itself. Only through such interventionist demonstrations can those everyday struggles be impelled to generalise what they ontologically are: basic units of a movement that will negate the Indian nation-state as an historically indexed regime of differentiated necessity.
Such a movement in the mainland, needless to say, would further undermine the hegemonic might of the Indian nation-state. And that would, in turn, enable the Kashmiri national liberation struggle to advance further. What we would have, in such circumstances, is the dialectical unfolding of the Kashmiri national liberation struggle enabling the everyday struggles of the masses in the Indian mainland, even as the latter enable the former’s advance by being the generalisation of their own revolutionary ontology.
This is no flight of fancy. History shows us how this might well be a real possibility. C.L.R. James, for one, tells us in Black Jacobins that struggles for political rights of Mulattoes and abolition of Black slavery in San Domingo could significantly advance only when the working masses of France forged a concrete solidarity with those struggles in the process of enhancing their influence on the course of the French Revolution. James also demonstrates how the revolt of the Black slaves of San Domingo, thanks to it accomplishing its goal of abolition, contributed significantly to the cause of defending the revolution in France from its counter-revolutionary adversaries led by Britain and Spain.
Sadly, such lessons are lost not only on the so-called working-class parties and organisations of this country, but also on much of the ‘independent’ Indian left. The moribund Leninism of the former has ensured their politics of competitive sectarianism and left social corporatism is tantamount to no more than building organisations to capture state power, through either parliamentary or supposedly extra-parliamentary means. This is a modality of politics that is the radical inverse of the revolutionary mode of organising politics for the withering away of the state. Not surprisingly, organisation-building as the principal modality of their politics has compelled these moribund Leninist parties, and their mass organisations, to construe everyday struggles of social labour in the Indian mainland as various struggles for socio-economic and/or political rights, which they can then instrumentalise to build and expand their respective organisations.
That, not surprisingly, has made these organisations and parties thoroughly complicit in reinforcing the process of systemic subsumption of everyday struggles. The nationalism and Islamophobia that pervades much of their mass base – and which frequently informs the pronouncements of their leadership as well – has been the result. Consequently, the loud claims of solidarity some of these organisations, and their supporters and sympathisers make with regard to the Kashmiri struggle ring ironically, if not cynically, hollow. All that they do – and there is not much more they are capable of – with regard to building such solidarity in the Indian mainland is try to manufacture and manage public perception through abstract propaganda. This, they are inclined to believe, is a perfectly honourable substitute for mass movements in the Indian mainland that could actually and substantively advance the cause of Kashmir’s national liberation. That they manage to muster no more than a few hundred people at their ‘solidarity’ fests, has done little to force them out of their self-satisfied, conscience-assuaging complacency.
As for the so-called independent radicals – leftists, Ambedkarites, whatever –, there is not much to distinguish them from the so-called working-class parties on this score. They are basically liberals, who for some inexplicable reason, want to pass off as radicals. The management of public perception – as opposed to striving to build concrete mass movements – is the dominant mainland paradigm of articulating ‘solidarity’ with the struggling people of IoK. On that there is very little to distinguish the ‘pro-aazaadi’ independent radicals from the ‘pro-azaadi’ left organisations. For both these categories of activists/politicians, what matters is who shouts about Kashmir the loudest.
BREXIT: SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN GENERAL
Certain individuals from liberalism-addled sections of the Indian ‘radical’ left – particularly those intent on championing the bankrupt programmatic line of democratic revolution in a pig-headed way – have been quick to assert on social media that Great Britain’s exit vote from the EU confirms their thesis that globalisation has not weakened the nation-state but actually strengthened it.
Some other individuals among their fair-weather sympathisers and supporters – especially those who are given to frequent bouts of social media-aided verbal diarrhea, and who tend to swing wildly between the populism of national Bolshevism of the self-proclaimed radical left and that of political formations such as the Aam Aadmi Party — have gone so far as to suggest that we are headed for World War III. From this sort of reading they intend to draw, as is their wont, validation for the bankrupt politics of shameless class-collaboration and tailism, which they purvey under various rhetorically-charged ‘radical’ labels of ‘democratic revolution’.
Such grandiloquent assertions are demonstrations of theoretical vacuousness and strategic insolvency. And the reading of the situation that underpins such statements suggests that this predicted World War III would merely be yet another edition of the previous two world wars, both in essence and appearance. Since such a reading pays absolutely no attention to the changed political composition of the capitalist world-system – and to the differentia specifica of its current conjuctural character – it is incapable of either revealing anything useful about the nature of the globe-enveloping conflict, which would be substantively different from the earlier world wars, or registering the fact that we have actually already been smack in the midst of just such a global conflict for, at least, the past three decades.
This reading of theirs is hastily impressionistic, terribly superficial, perniciously one-sided, foolishly linear, historically illiterate and politically compromised. What they don’t get at all – and this is because they clearly have no taste for historically grounded dialectical thinking in all its complexity and complications – is that the surge in various kinds and forms of reactionary nationalism and ethno-cultural chauvinism across the world symptomatises not the strengthening of nation-states but precisely their crisis. More accurately, the global ascendancy of such chauvinist politics symptomatises the decadence of the re-orientated sovereignty of nation-states.
We need to understand that a geo-political formation such as the EU, as an embodiment of the post-Westphalian order of nation-states, was not, as the advocates and ideologues of such an order would have us believe, the outcome of some noble collective effort to ensure that nothing like the two catastrophic world wars, which wracked the Westphalian order of national states, would be repeated. Rather, the EU, as a post-Westphalian (re-)configuration of nation-states in Europe, was precisely the culmination of that which the two world wars – but particularly, World War II – sought to accomplish.
Such a claim would appear much less outrageous if one were to make sense of the crisis of the Westphalian order of nation-states in Europe, a crisis that manifest itself in the two world wars, in terms of the crisis of its underlying political-economic structure. The nation-state has so far always been the basic unit of territorially organising international division of labour, aka the capitalist world-system. However, the Westphalian nation-states were constitutive of organising the differentiated international division of labour in a situation that was characterised principally by the globalisation of only the moment of circulation, exchange and/or value-realisation in the circuit of capital. That explains, among other things, the self-enclosed and insuperable nature of their respective sovereignties.
On the other hand, nation-states in a post-Westphalian world – and particularly the nation-states that comprise a geo-political formation such as the EU – are constitutive of organising the differentiated international division of labour in circumstances characterised by the transnationalisation of the production and labour processes. This means nation-states now function as basic units of organising the international division of labour in a situation characterised by the globalisation of virtually the entire circuit of capital.
In the Westphalian order, the nation-state exercised its sovereignty to manage social labour engaged in a nationally enclosed production process in order to ensure competitive advantage for its national territoriality of production in the globally integrated sphere of exchange. The nation-state now is, however, orientated to exercise its sovereignty in order to enable the effective operation of the transnationalised production chain by way of contributing its executive-managerial mite in the efficient functioning of the division of labour constitutive of this transnationalised production process. The nationally delimited arbitrage of wage and labour it enforces within its sovereign territoriality, not without a more-than-little reliance on various so-called pre-capitalist and pre-modern forms of power and labour relations at times and in certain places, – and the so-called comparative advantage this concomitantly ensures –, is meant to accomplish precisely that: the efficient operation of the transnationally integrated production process.
We would, at this point, do well to attend to the fact that the current phase of capitalism characterised by the globalisation of the circuit of capital almost in its entirety – something that is geo-politically manifest in the post-Westphalian arrangement of nation-states such as the EU — emerged out of the previous phase of capital that was defined largely by the globalisation of merely the circuit’s moment of circulation and exchange. This mutation of the earlier phase into what we have now, it must be clarified here, was effected by a crisis the former had generated for itself. The accentuation of class struggle within self-enclosed national sovereignties, effected in the process of enabling and ensuring their respective competitive advantage in the globally integrated sphere of exchange, resulted in a progressively accelerated unleashing of productive forces and the concomitant diminishing of living labour. This made it increasingly difficult for production processes to remain enclosed and self-contained within nationally defined territorialities without driving capital accumulation into an abyss of unmitigated crisis. Inter-imperialist rivalries for colonies within and outside Europe, Fascism, and, eventually, the two world wars in quick succession, were the result.
The recomposition of the global capitalist regime of accumulation by way of transnationalisation of the production process is something the two world wars – but decisively the second – were clearly driving towards. The EU, as a post-Westphalian arrangement of nation-states, in being the institutionalisation of a new form of differentiated international division of labour that serves a transnationalised production process, demonstrates it’s a culmination of that which the two world wars had decisively pushed the globe towards.
However, the political-economic moment that came to be symptomatised by such post-Westphalian arrangement of nation-states as EU has been the moment of permanent crisis of political economy. As observed above, the transnational integration of production process was due to the accentuated unleashing of productive forces and thus a progressive increase in organic composition of capital. The technological change in the overall industrial process its further unfolding has led to — by way of an unprecedented rise and shift in the quantity and quality of automation of production — has meant two mutually related things: increasing functional simplification of the labour process and same-skilling, and a progressive diminishing of living labour employed in the production process. The first has unleashed hitherto unobserved levels of competition and precarity in the realm of social labour.
That, needless to say, affords the system a huge leverage by way of which it has various segments and sections of social labour mutually regiment one another. The national states, in such circumstances, find themselves exercising their sovereign power as enabling agencies of such regimentation at all levels of the socio-economic formation within their respectively sovereign territorialities. But since progressive decline of living labour employed in the production process is an integral aspect of such precarity-induced regimentation of social labour, a progressively deepening crisis of capital accumulation has necessarily been coterminous with such precarity-induced regimentation. It’s precisely such a situation that has compelled capital to adopt financialisation as the dominant mode of its accumulation. Something that, in turn, has served to further heighten the already unprecedented levels of precarity in the realm of social labour.
At this point, it would probably be useful to detail yet another dimension of the interplay of these two contradictory but mutually enmeshed tendencies of precarity-induced regimentation of social labour, and the deepening of the crisis of accumulation due to attendant decline of living labour employed in the process of value-creation. We can clearly see, following the Marx of ‘Fragment on Machines’ (Grundrisse), that deeper the crisis of capital accumulation the greater the expulsion of living labour from production process by capital in its bid for enhanced productivity, and thus greater the precarity and precarity-induced regimentation of social labour. This, however, also means that greater the expulsion of living labour from production process deeper the crisis of capital accumulation. This is precisely how and why capital is, in Marx’s words, a “moving contradiction”.
So, the more living labour is expelled from production process to beat the crisis of accumulation the deeper that crisis tends to become. Hence, in order to manage that crisis, capital unleashes the productive power of living labour even as it seeks to regiment living labour through a process of capturing the productive power thus unleashed. This, as Marx has demonstrated in Capital, is borne out by the direct relation between the increase in organic composition of capital and the burgeoning of the industrial reserve army, aka the relative surplus population, which serves to regiment the productively-employed living labour suffering under the imposition of increasing intensity of work, even as the latter regiments the former in the process of being subsidised by it. This, it ought to be stated here in passing, is the level of industrially inflected social process where the viciously competitive politics of various kinds of identitarian chauvinisms plays out.
The post-Westphalian functionalisation of nation-states to, at once, induce and police migration of labour, both within and across nation-states, by way of internal colonisation, occupations, and imperialist and sub-imperialist meddling within the sovereign territorialities of relationally and relatively less powerful nation-states, is nothing but a geo-politically institutionalised expression of this political-economic process of moving contradiction.
Clearly, the system in its operation cannot afford to allow labour to be as globally mobile as capital because that would push capital accumulation towards its own extinction. This is precisely the reason why nation-states continue to be indispensable politico-ideological units of organising international division of labour even in a situation where the production process is transnationalised. And yet, it’s precisely this transnationalised production process – together with functional simplification of the overall labour process, which is its condition of possibility– that has rendered those nation-states the agencies that simultaneously enable and police migration, orientated as they now are by political regimes determined more and more by a variety of majoritarian and majoritarinising chauvinisms.
This, not surprisingly, has resulted in a situation where the geo-social and the geo-political dimensions constitutive of territorially sovereign nation-states are no longer fully congruent and in sync with one another. Thanks to migration, both internal and foreign, the neat arrangement of regions constitutive of the sovereign territoriality of a Westphalian nation-state is significantly diminished. Increasing migration of labour, both internal and foreign, has resulted in the geo-social dimension of the nation-state – or, for that matter, the geo-social dimension of a politically demarcated region within the nation-state — overflowing its geo-political dimension. This is the root of the crisis of (territorial) sovereignty symptomatised by the post-Westphalian nation-state. Institutional arrangements such as the EU, we would do well to bear in mind, are the dialectically articulated expressions of such crisis-causing political-economic processes. Such institutional arrangements, even as they reinforce those processes and the crisis of sovereignty they constitute, are not the first cause of that crisis.
In fact, if one were to carefully inquire into the nature of virulent nationalisms that are currently on the rise, one is likely to figure that such nationalisms no longer correspond to territorial sovereignty of nation-states in the traditional Westphalian sense. Rather, such nationalisms – and sub-nationalistic chauvinisms of different kinds — are politico-ideological exertions of different segments of social labour in their competitive bid to position themselves better vis-à-vis one another within the deterritorialised – or transnationalised – production/labour process. This is the glocalising essence of capitalist globalisation.
The unprecedented rise in precarity, thanks to functional simplification of the overall labour process, which has created the new category of the footloose “mass-worker” moving rapidly across factories, trades, sectors, regions, nations and continents, has served to further intensify the chauvinistically-articulated competition among various segments of social labour. And yet it’s this mass-worker, thanks to it being the objective embodiment of mobile labour, that has revolutionary-internationalist potential like no other proletarian social subject ever before. However, what has been thwarting the actualisation of this potential is the fact that precarity of segmentation – or the crisis of the law of value – continues to be animated and articulated by the law of value and the logic of segmentation respectively. Something that, therefore, produces the glocalised neurosis of nationalist chauvinisms mentioned above.
As a consequence, the globe-enveloping conflict will be – actually already is – nothing like the previous two world wars. It’s no longer a war purely among nationally defined states. Rather, what we have at hand – something that is destined to further intensify — is a generalising state of deterritorialised civil war. The institutionalised repressive apparatuses of nation-states are now only one among the many actors in this far more dispersed and thus far more intractable global conflict, which clearly reveals the crisis of the Hobbesian state of yore and its monopoly over violence. In such a situation of highly dispersed globalised confict, it will not do to see the state merely in terms of its institutionally congealed forms. One would do well to go beyond what is empirically immediate and grasp the repressive functioning of the state, and resistance against it, by looking closely and carefully at each subject-position involved in this conflict of global proportions in terms of its situation in the larger dynamic of social power, and the vector of transfer and extraction of labour-time that articulates this dynamic. Clearly, the inseparability of the state-form from the movement-form is now far more evident than ever before.
In a situation like this, which is characterised by class struggle being waged in the cathected and distortionary garb of racial, and other forms of ethno-nationalist and ethno-cultural, chauvinisms, the adoption of the dialectical approach while analysing socio-political reality becomes even more important. It is equally important that one discerns the fundamental distinction between Marx’s “scientific dialectic” and the speculative dialectic in order to uphold and adopt the former. The “scientific dialectic”, which is produced arguably through Marx’s epicureanisation of the speculative dialectic, enables one to see the good in the bad and the bad in the good. This is in striking contrast to the speculative dialectic that seeks to make sense of reality in terms of good and the bad, or, more precisely, good is the bad and bad is the good. Therefore, the speculative dialectic, insofar as political strategising goes, is destined to be reduced to the nonsense of petty-bourgeois ambidexterity. Something that Marx had quite accurately criticised Proudhon for.
A strategic intervention underpinned by Marx’s “scientific dialectic” will be one that is able to concretely envision a politics of “subtraction” (Badiou) and “denegation” (Althusser). The speculative dialectic, on the other hand, will, at best, generate a reactive politics of system-reinforcing seriality of negation of the negation, and progressive ‘democratisation’. That, in fact, has been the bane of class-blind radical interventions in struggles against racial and other forms of ethno-cultural oppression. As a result, such radical interventions have, ironically enough, failed to enable those struggles to break with the paradigm of race- and ethno-culturally blind ‘class-antagonistic’ politics of subjective forces situated in the realm of majoritarianised identities. And while the doorstep of the latter is pretty much where the blame for Brexit– or the political ascendancy of Narendra Modi in India and the possible ascension of Donald Trump in the US for that matter – ought to lie, the responsibility of the radicals of anti-racism, anti-casteism, etc., is, on those counts, only a wee bit less.
Adopting Marx’s “scientific dialectic” would mean that we grasp how the bad of reactive and reactionary ideological self-representation of various kinds of chauvinist politics has in it as its good radical core its performative dimension. This means the bad of chauvinist ideological self-representation is not the good of performative radicalism, but that the good of radicalism is in the bad of chauvinist ideological self-representation as its interrupted performative core. The task of theorisation, which seeks to develop a strategy of radical intervention and revolutionary generalisation, is to constantly separate out one from the other by way of concrete analysis of the concrete situation.
This analytical approach ought to be applied with dispassionate rigour to both majoritarian and minoritarian chauvinisms if one is truly committed to developing an effective strategy of revolutionary transformation of the crisis-ridden, barbaric conjuncture of the capitalist world-system. Of course, this is not to be mistaken as a plea for equivalence of chauvinisms. Whether the immediate political effect of a chauvinism is progressive or not depends on its positioning within the larger balance of class forces. To that extent, minoritarian chauvinist expressions must, from a revolutionary perspective, be treated differently from the majoritarian chauvinist ones. And yet, this engagement with the former by subjective forces of revolutionary transformation should be such that the performative radical core of such minoritarian chauvinist politics is demonstrated to its constitutive subject-positions in order to enable them to move towards generalising that performativity by separating it out, in their practice, from its ideological self-representation, and thus breaking with the latter in that process. Any passively reactive, or reformist-liberal, champinoning of minoritarian chauvinisms by radical subjective forces, without any engaged effort on their part to demonstrate how the performative radical core of such politics is separable from its ideological self-representation, yields nothing but lobby politics. Such politics serves to further imprison the oppressed minorities in their socio-political ghettos, which, in turn, bolsters the ideological hegemony of chauvinist politics in general and the concomitant political dominance of majoritarian chauvinism in particular. In the final analysis, such bleeding-heart, reactive politics is condemned to do nothing other than ensure its own continued existence by reinforcing the current post-fascist situation of fascisation of the entire conjuncture.
All this analysis, however, does not merely pertain to the UK and Europe. Once we start making sense of the structural-functionality of nation-states constitutive of the current conjuncture in terms of transnationalisation of the production process we will see that the post-Westphalian order of nation-states is not simply a continentally – or regionally – delimited institutional arrangement such as the EU, but is actually a generalised condition of nation-states that extends beyond the EU to the rest of the world as well. This, for one, would reveal the hollowness of claims made recently by a top-dog ‘Marxist’ economist – who is also one of the main ideologues of the thoroughly bankrupt parliamentary left in India – about how nation-states in the Third World have had a different historical trajectory than those constitutive of the post-Westphalian arrangement of the EU, and are thus intrinsically different from them.
Such claims by this economist, needless to say, are an exercise in saving the appearances in order to continue validating that which can no longer be validated: the national-Bolshevist politics of both democratic and so-called socialist revolutions. In fact, in this respect there is not much by way of which one could distinguish India’s parliamentary Indian left from most of its so-called radical versions, even the ones that claim to uphold a programme of socialist revolution. For another, and this is even more important, this would help explain not only Brexit, but also the ascendancy, and possible rise, of such post-fascist neoliberal dictators as Modi in this part of the world, and Trump in the US respectively.
A QUICK NOTE ON THE POST-PHENOMENOLOGY OF MARX AND HOW TOTALITY IS A PHANTOM THAT IS REAL
Hegel’s phenomenological story — i.e. phenomena as constitutive moments of the unfolding of the dialectic of essence and appearance — is theoretically central in Marx. Yet, Marxism is post-phenomenological. But what is post-phenomenology? It is nothing but praxis — practice that in its actuality is, at once, itself and its own dialectically-inflected critique. This is “practical materialism”, which Marx radically distinguishes from Feurbach’s “contemplative materialism”. The latter in being a partial materialist critique of Hegel’s dialectical spiritualism is rendered, in the final analysis, subjective-idealism and thus a necessary complement of Hegelian spiritualism. Hence, in its theoretical or cognitive moment (Marxist) post-phenomenology is phenomenology as both the symptom of praxis in its interruption, and a placeholder of the praxis to come.
In that context, one can clearly see how Walter Benjamin’s “dialectical image” (dialectic as an image of its own standstillness), or, for that matter, Brecht’s “gestus”, are nothing but discursively articulated conceptions of the post-phenomenology of praxis in its theoretical or cognitive moment. Something that radically re-defines the cogitative order itself to render thought the image and/or concrete index of its own determinate excess and suspension. This reveals how such conceptions are radically and modally distinct from such essentially phenomenological conceptions of Heideggerian discourse as historicality and the ontico-ontological nature of Being — their seeming resemblance notwithstanding.
Many new-fangled theorists and fashionable ‘radical’ philosophers in their post-Marxist zeal to either reject, or, more dangerously, appropriate Marx, tirelessly insist that totality is a phantom. But if one adheres rigorously to what one has sought to demonstrate above — i.e. the post-phenomenological character of Marxism, which amounts to extenuation of phenomenology precisely through its radicalisation — one will have to admit that even as totality is a phantom it is a real phantom (a “real abstraction” a la Marx). Alfred Sohn-Rethel in his critique of Althusser insists that Marx’s conception of commodity abstraction is, contrary to the French philosopher’s explication of the same, not merely metaphorical but literal. That is to say, the commodity-form is not merely a symptom of its own impossibility — a mark of its own inexistence as it were. Rather, the value-expressing commodity-form — one ought to say following Sohn-Rethel’s critique of Althusser — is a symptom of its own impossibility precisely because it exists as a commodity-fetish in a literal sense. Marx’s explication of commodity-abstraction, particularly in Capital, Volume I, points unambiguously in that direction.
Marx demonstrates how commodity abstraction — and therefore the value-bearing commodity-form — is a living contradiction. He reveals with great clarity how commodity abstraction — or valorisation — is about difference being qualitatively equalised precisely in its being difference. He, therefore, also shows that there is no qualitative equalisation — valorisation — without qualitative difference because the question of exchange, and thus qualitative equalisation, arises only when there is qualitative difference. That is to say, a commodity-form is qualitative difference bearing its own negation, which is qualitative equalisation. That is how commodity-form/value-form, in being itself as a unit of qualitative equalisation, is a symptom of its own negativity; and is, therefore, a living contradiction.
There is no doubt that Althusser’s rearticulation of Marx’s concept of commodity abstraction in Lacano-Freudian terms of “symptomatic reading” is, from a strategic-interventionist standpoint, a crucial theoretical breakthrough. But it is likely to pave the way — as it unfortunately often has — for a post-Marxist, poststructuralist appropriation of Marx. That, not surprisingly, has rendered Althusser’s conception of relative autonomy of contradictions into an absolute autonomy of difference — a good example of this is Deleuze’s affirmative conception of “difference-without-opposition”.
This problem cannot be obviated unless Althusser’s revolutionary anti-humanist theoretical breakthrough — which he accomplished through the Lacano-Freudian symptomatic reading of Marx’s conception of commodity abstraction — is supplemented with Sohn-Rethel’s Hegelian-Marxist critique of the same. This would serve to underscore the fact that Althusser’s entirely valid anti-humanist critique of Hegelian historicism (and Left-Hegelian humanism) is essentially radicalisation of Hegel by thinking Hegel in the extreme — an operation that amounts to brushing Hegel against his own grain.
Clearly, Althusser’s anti-Hegelianism, in radical contrast to the anti-Hegelianism of his post-Marxist epigones and poststructuralist compatriots, is not a premature jettisoning of Hegel but his rigorous extenuation. This is an aspect of Althusser’s thinking that is quite evidently there in such essays of his as ‘Marxism is Not A Historicism’ (in Reading Capital) and ‘Lenin as Philosopher’ (in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays). And supplementing his symptomatic reading of the commodity-form with Sohn-Rethel’s critique of the same is likely to foreground that aspect of Althusser’s discourse and thinking. In fact, the Spinozist moment in Althusser, and more significantly in Pierre Macherey, emerges arguably as an integral dimension of this manoeuvre to radicalise Hegel in order to have Hegelian historical reason exceed and surpass itself. This, for example, comes out most clearly in Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza, wherein Spinoza is made to function deconstructively within the symmetrical Hegelian dialectic of recognition (historicism + humanism) to radicalise and transfigure it into an asymmetrical, materialist dialectic of anti-humanist action.
Affirming poverty, or, how to radically break with fascistic underconsumptionism
“To deny poverty is to deny the absence of the Kingdom in the present system. It is to affirm the existing system as the Kingdom of this world. To affirm the poor, on the other hand, and to serve their eventual liberation, in the structures and in history, is to witness the presence of the Kingdom in the satisfying of the poor and to the absence of the Kingdom in the imperfection of society. The poor are the epiphany of the Kingdom or the infinite exteriority of God.
“It remains to distinguish between the inorganic multitude and the people as the emerging subject of history (Gen. 41:40), and the People of God as Church (Acts 15:14) called to a special role in history:
Come out of her (Babylon), my people, lest you take part in her sins (Revelation 18:4)”
–Enrique Dussel, ‘The Kingdom of God and the Poor’ (Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology)
It must be stated quite explicitly here that the bleeding-heart, underconsumptionist politics of poverty alleviation — something that is preponderant among South Asian radicals, Marxists included — is precisely what we ought to, pace Dussel, characterise as denial of poverty. Such ‘Marxian’ underconsumptionism, and its concomitant ideology and politics of philanthropy and reformism respectively, is no more than the obverse of neoliberalism, which denies poverty in as many words. From a position that is rigorously Marxian, and is thus conceptually premised on overproduction/overaccumulation, poverty must be affirmed; neither denied, nor, for that matter, alleviated. Affirmation of poverty would be constitutive of politics proper — politics as the excess of all that which exists and which will come to exist — because such affirmation would amount to the affirmation of the condition of being unmeasured.
For, what else is poverty other than the condition of being unmeasured in the face of a system of quasi-objective measure (or value). This condition of being unmeasured, thanks to it being the condition of the absence of measure, and thus the condition of the limit of measure, makes measure possible. Hence, it is the limit of measure that is nevertheless constitutive of it. In that context, affirmation of poverty as politics would amount to affirmation of the limit of this system of quasi-objective measure or valorisation so that the latter is destroyed even as the former abolishes itself as the constitutive limit of that system of measure to emerge on its own terms as the immeasurable. In more clear strategic terms, such unsentimental affirmation of poverty would be, in Pasolini’s immortal words, unrelenting antagonism, without a shred of dialectical respite or reconciliation, towards the subsumptive value-relational system of quasi-objective measure in its concrete appearances.
Underconsumptionist ‘radicalism’, on the other hand, seeks to alleviate and thus deny poverty. The denial of poverty and suffering implicit in the apparent radicalism of struggling precisely for the alleviation of poverty and suffering stems from its underconsumptionist theoretical presupposition, wherein poverty and suffering are made sense of not as a crisis of the system of measure, which is precisely produced by this system in order to keep itself going, but as a curse of not being measured; or, not being fully subsumed by the system of measure. Such politics of alleviating poverty and suffering, needless to say, reinforces the system of quasi-objective measure (or valorisation) that produces poverty and suffering — which is the condition of being unmeasured — precisely in mobilising this limit of measure to found and (re)found itself as that system. It is not surprising that Pasolini, who was unflinching and unsentimental in affirming poverty as a revolutionary virtue, would see such underconsumptionist ‘radicalism’ as an unforgiveable handmaiden and ally of “neo-capitalism”.
Pasolini, in his characteristically counter-intuitive manner, repeatedly criticised such politics for undermining the revolutionary project. Here is an excerpt from his Lutheran Letters:
“The sin of the fathers is not only the violence of power, Fascism. It is also this: the dismissal from our consciousness by us anti-Fascists of the old Fascism, the fact that we comfortably freed ourselves from our deep intimacy with it (the fact that we considered the Fascists ‘our idiot brothers’; secondly and above all, the acceptance (all the more guilty because unconscious) of the degrading violence, of the real, immense genocides of the new Fascism.
“Why is there such complicity with the old Fascism and why such an acceptance of the new Fascism? Because there is — and this is the point — a guiding principle common to both, sincerely or insincerely: that is the idea that the greatest ill in the world is poverty and that therefore the culture of the poorer classes must be replaced by the culture of the ruling class.
“In other words, our guilt as fathers could be said to consist in this: that we believe that history is not and cannot be other than bourgeois history.”
Clearly, such politics, if we follow the train of Pasolini’s reasoning and analysis, effects the subjective embourgeoisement of the proletariat even as it not only leaves intact, but also actually reinforces, the proletarian condition in its sheer objectivity. This is arguably what Pasolini sought to argue when he insisted that “neo-capitalism” was a form of fascism more pernicious than political fascism that Europe had already experienced. And that, according to Pasolini, was because the latter was (is) characterised by, among other things, the continuance of “economic class struggle” even as the antagonistic class struggle between bourgeois and proletarian cultures had lapsed and disappeared. Pasolini’s “neo-capitalist” fascism — which he acutely demonstrated as being more insidious and more dangerous than the political fascism of yore — is nothing but our conjuncture of neoliberalism. This conjuncture is characterised by the state of exception having become generalised. So much so that struggles claiming to be anti-fascist are, precisely in asserting those claims, rendered fascistic in their own right. Thanks to ineluctable objective conditions, fascistic politics today is easily – and, as a matter of fact, invariably– operationalised precisely in the very moment of liberal-democratic juridicality, and in its political register.
It is in this context that the following contention of Dussel’s becomes extremely pertinent from the point of view of thinking an effective revolutionary strategy by way of articulating a thorough critique of underconsumptionism:
“It remains to distinguish between the inorganic multitude and the people as the emerging subject of history (Gen. 41:40), and the People of God as Church (Acts 15:14) called to a special role in history:
Come out of her (Babylon), my people, lest you take part in her sins (Revelation 18:4)”
Some provisional notes on the materialism of thought, and modernism as “an aesthetics of necessary failure”
The fundamental question, insofar as modernism is concerned, is what does modernism make its diverse forms say about themselves. Depending on what modernist forms say about themselves — i.e. whether those forms construe, envisage and articulate themselves as myths of non-meaning, non-cogitation and non-thought; or, allegories (in Benjamin’s sense) or symptoms of the same — we need to internally divide modernism into two temporalities, two periodisations and two politico-aesthetic trajectories: fascist (or postmodernist, that is, neoliberal) and critical. And yet, as ‘consumers’ who are already always producers, even the fascistic and/or postmodernist politico-aesthetic temporality of certain modernist forms — something those forms speak as the intentionality of their producers — we need to brush against their own grain.
Brecht brilliantly anticipated that through both his intervention in the famous realism/modernism debate, and through the dramaturgy of his theatrical productions. So, the problem, from where I stand, is not whether a phenomenology of thinking haunts an aesthetic form. The problem for me, instead, is whether or not such a phenomenology is able to found itself in and as its own materiality by finding its own historical index and historicity. This is precisely where Benjamin’s post-phenomenological thinking — contrary to the dominant poststructuralist current that seeks to interpretatively assimilate him to difference-thinking — stands rigorously and radically distinguished from both Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenology of thought. The ‘Convolutes N’ of his The Arcades Project unambiguously declares that. And it is precisely such post-phenomenological thinking — in its radical separation from the phenomenology of thought — that Badiou, following Althusser, rightly affirms as the materialism of thought.
What, therefore, needs to be stated here unambiguously is the following: post-phenomenological thinking, or the materialism of thought, is not some premature abandonment of phenomenology of thought. Rather, it amounts to the extenuation of what is sheer phenomenology precisely by traversing it to its post-phenomenological antipodes, wherein it stands realised as its own materiality in and as the institution of its own duration and historicity. Conversely, sheer phenomenology of thought in its existence is – from this Benjaminian-Badiouian perspective — the incompleteness of its realisation as the post-phenomenology or materiality of thought, and thus the incompleteness of its own extenuation. [As an aside, it must be said here that this reveals how the line that separates mystified revolution, which is mysticism of difference (Fascism, Bonapartism, social democracy and/or neoliberal postmodernism) from revolution as difference demystified is perilously thin.]
If we attend closely to Badiou’s conception of “fidelity to the event”, we will see that what underlies this conception is precisely the move of extenuating phenomenology of thought by traversing it to its post-phenomenological antipodes, wherein it is its realisation as its own materiality. The event, for Badiou, is not truth, but an interiorised subjective illumination. And yet the event is, for him, indispensably crucial because it enables what he terms fidelity to the event, which in and as its own actuality is the truth of the event in its forcing. That is why, for Badiou, even as the event is not truth; truth is the truth of the event in its forcing. So, for Badiou truth is not the thought of the event. Instead, truth is the event as its own thought in action. And this event as its own thought in action is already the thought or the truth of the event in its forcing. That is precisely why Badiou thinks the event — contra phenomenology of difference and poststructuralism — as neither event of being nor being of event; but as the supernumerary supplement to being that in being identified thus is already always integrated into being. Therefore, for Badiou, the post-phenomenology or materiality of thought is not an out-of-hand rejection of phenomenology of thought. Rather, phenomenology of thought is for him not sheer phenomenology, but is the post-phenomenology or materiality of thought as already always its own limit and thus the already always crossing-of-that-limit.
As a consequence, Badiou’s post-phenomenology or materiality of thought — unlike the post-phenomenology of poststructuralism such as Foucault’s genealogy or Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic ontology – is not a future-anteriority that is retrospectively constructed in, as and through the production of phenomenological effects, which as those effects are no different from the effects produced by Hegelian and Left-Hegelian phenomenologies of identity-as-identity and identity-as-change-of-identity respectively. Badiou’s post-phenomenology is, therefore, clearly, not hermeneutics. Rather, it’s a future-anteriority that is an adventure of construction in being an anticipatory, prefigurative ‘hermeneutic’ thought in action.
Materiality, therefore, cannot be the rejection or abandonment of the idea. That would merely be the inversion of the constitutive diremption — or idealist dialectic — of idea and matter, taking us towards a positivist and vulgar materialism that would continue to confine us within the structure and/or force-field of idealist rationalism. Rather, materiality is the singularising rupture — or rupture as singularity — with that constitutive diremption. This means materiality is the moment of the idea in its emerging as the instantiation of its own absence as the cause of such emerging. In other words, materiality is about the inseparability — and thus singularity — of matter and its idea. Hence, it’s also the movement that is constitutive of prefiguring the overcoming of its interruption by anticipating the limit this movement generates by virtue of precisely being that movement. Materiality then is, as its own (immanent) thought, the already always grasping of its own limit.
This, in my view, is what one learns from the poems of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, particularly Alberto Caeiro’s; Badiou’s rigorously engaged reading of the same, and Adorno’s explication of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure.
In fact, it is in this context of materiality being its own (immanent) thought as the already always grasping of its own limit that Adorno’s conception and explication of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure needs to be situated and made sense of. Modernist forms as forms of non-meaning, non-thought and non-cogitation, vis-à-vis the forms of historical-realist meaning and sense, do not call on us to approach them in a melancholic contemplation imbued by “aecidia” — something that Benjamin warned against. Such forms call on us, instead, to approach them, as Benjamin would have us believe, by intensifying our contemplation of them to such an extent that such contemplative thought turns into its radical opposite: the thought of historcisation that is, therefore, thought in action. This is thought immanent to being now-time; or, ontological subtraction as its own thought in action. Therefore, to grasp modernist forms in terms of Adorno’s conception of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure is to see how such forms call on us – regardless of what the intentionality of their respective producers is or was – to grasp themselves as something that must already always be exceeded.
Clearly, Adorno’s conception of modernism is in line with Benjamin’s deployment of Schlegel’s romantic conception of aesthetic criticism, wherein a work of art is, at once, itself and an articulation of its own criticism. This is also what Brecht, through the conception and practice of his V-effect, points towards, as does Badiou through his “inaesthetic” conception of art as the real of reflection.
Benjamin’s aforementioned approach to the question of art is, admittedly, from the side of the producer. And that is largely true of Brecht too. But do such approaches of Benjamin and Brecht not, therefore, imply that the consumer is already always the producer, and that he/she thus reads forms not as forms, which would reduce the question of form to that of sheer style, but as modes. To read form as mode is to read form as the transparency of its own formation. We would do well to pay attention to Andre Breton’ glass-house in Nadja, the one he wished to inhabit as a writer, and which Benjamin also affirmatively alludes to in his essay on Surrealism. Thus, to read a form as a mode is to grasp it as the determinate excess of form, and subtraction from the abstract logic of formalism that the concrete form, which is being thus exceeded, mediates.
To read form as mode is to grasp a form as articulating its own criticism, and thereby already always being its own excess and voiding. Adorno’s conception of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure, not unlike Badiou’s inaesthetics, amounts precisely to that. What Benjamin and Brecht merely imply for the consumer’s side through their insistence that the producer of a form have that form articulate itself as mode, stands cogently formulated as the consumer’s task in Adorno’s conception of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure.
Clearly, Benjamin and Brecht on one hand, and Badiou and Adorno on the other, together complete the asymmetrical or singular dialectic of productive consumption and consumptive production that Marx clearly indicated while laying bare that same dialectic as the symmetrical and thus idealist dialectic of capital.
In such circumstances, I don’t feel like quibbling much when I am confronted with a certain heuristically recursive reading of this conception of aesthetics of necessary failure as itself a necessary failure. Nevertheless, I cannot stop myself from saying that this conception as the concept that it already is, operates at the modal, not formal, level of abstraction. As a result, this theory is an affirmation of itself in and as its singular temporality and mode by already always being an articulation of the criticism of its own discursive-formal specificity that interrupts its singularity precisely in instantiating it. So, unless one’s insistence about the Adornoesque conception of modernism as an aesthetics of necessary failure itself being a necessary failure proceeds through such specification, it runs the risk of becoming a theoretical argument for founding a ‘new’ historicist aesthetics – or, an aesthetics for a ‘new’ historical realism.
Of course, I have my share of problems with Adorno. The way he explicates his concepts of negative dialectics and constellation demonstrates the dialectic as the mode of presentation of its own negativity. This clearly points us towards thinking the dialectic as the affirmative mode of determinate presentation of its own void, and thus excess, in its limit.
In other words, Adorno’s concepts of negative dialectics and constellation clearly point towards thinking (and envisaging) a new order of affirmation that is non-productive. And yet Adorno himself is not able to fully see what his concepts point towards, and walk that path of thinking (and envisaging) affirmation as a non-productive order of ‘being’. His concepts of negative dialectics and constellation show he understands that negativity can escape from its Hegelian dialectical inscription only if it’s thought in terms of the uninterruptedness of destruction. And yet he cannot understand how such an (im)possibility can actually happen. That is because he is unable to think of negativity in terms other than that of destruction. In other words, we find him unable to think negativity in terms of adventurous constructionism of subtraction as an actuality, which would be the actuality of destruction in its uninterrupted ceaselessness. It is not for nothing that Badiou conceptualises and envisages subtraction as that which is the articulation of destructive antagonism towards the sublationary force-field of the (idealist) dialectic. This is why Badiou terms his subtractive affirmationism political negativity.
In such circumstances, Adorno’s failure to think the happening of the (im)possible, which his “negative dialectics” conceptually articulates, can possibly only be ascribed to the limit imposed on his thought by its objective conjunctural location. This failure of his to draw the non-productive affirmative consequences from his own concepts of negative dialectics and constellation is clearly evident in his melancholic conception of the “totally administered society”. Something that then risks generating its own obverse: the Heidegger-like affirmation qua the irrationality of poetic-thinking, and the deconstructive infinite finitudes. And yet, unless we are able to arrive at this criticism of Adorno by showing how his concept of negative dialectics frees negativity of determination from being merely the negation of determination to become its own moment of presentation as negativity, we won’t be able to think and envisage the non-productive order of affirmation in and against the productivity of capital. And that, ironically enough, would make us bring the Heideggerian deconstruction, we strive to throw out of the front door, back in through the rear window.
The heuristic-recursive insistence that we see Adorno’s modernist conception of aesthetics of necessary failure as itself a necessary failure unwittingly risks upholding the ways of deconstruction, and the infinite regress that is concomitant with it. This, as far as aesthetic production within a Marxist field is concerned, could easily compel artists to submit their productive activity, paradoxically enough, to a kind of Lukacsian aesthetic imperative of historical realism.
Pothik Ghosh
Pratyush Chandra
