The opening line of Capital begins like an axiomatic that will subsequently orientate the work, stating the relationship between wealth in capitalist societies and the role of the commodity. Wealth appears in the form of the commodity within capitalism, more specifically with the ‘collection of commodities’. From this starting point the individual commodity is taken to be the basic ‘elementary form’ that will be the starting point for Marx’s investigation into capitalism. The first thing to note is the choice of elementary form. Marx does not begin with money, or labour, or scarcity – this last one being the most common starting point for economists. Instead we begin with Marx with the commodity. Whilst this might seem rather mundane the implications are touched on immediately when the commodity is understood by Marx to be the means by which human needs are satisfied. Talk of ‘needs’ however, might seem to suggest something of the ‘scarcity’ emphasis, it might suggest that they are natural or set in stone for example. If human needs were some basic fact of our existence then the satisfaction of those needs by something we call a commodity wouldn’t really be much to worry about. The problem is that the needs that the commodity can satisfy are unbounded.
In the second paragraph (C:125) Marx refers to ‘needs of whatever kind’ and goes on to say that ‘the nature of these needs, whether they arise … from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference’ (emphasis added). In this simple moment the imagination is brought into the system of capitalism, with all its wildness and desire. If we speculate here then it might be possible to push this idea into some curious territory. The commodity satisfies needs, any need of the imagination. Why not say, to put it another way, anything you can imagine is capable of being satisfied within capitalism through the commodity? If that were the case then to imagine a needed future is to follow a logic where this imagination can be satisfied with a commodity. Imagine an needed alternative, a needed transgression, a needed rebellion – to the extent there is a need attached to the imagined thing, then capitalism will have the potential to satisfy that need with a simple, elementary commodity or collection of commodities. This strikes me as close to the concept of recuperation that the situationists develop, in which rebellion itself becomes transformed from an act of resistance to one of consumption – people ‘need’ to resist, to embody their imagined utopian world, so they ‘buy’ the commodity of rebellion, be it in the form of Che Guevara t-shirts and posters or left groups and programmes. Recuperation is the process of normalisation, a process of regaining normality that occurs when faced with an illness, or a rebellion. It’s fine to rebel, totally cool to revolt, more than chic to protest. Indeed the almost classic moment of recuperation occurs in 2003 when George W.Bush applauds the anti-war protestors for their democractic expression of their views; the protests are recuperated, revolution is televised, revolt is normalised. The dynamic of the commodity is universalistic, it tries to swallow up every bitter pill that arises.
Putting aside the problem of recuperation, the satisfaction of imaginary needs by the commodity, the next move in Marx’s analysis is to address the way in which the commodity satisfies needs through having a use. The property of a thing that satisfies a need is a use-value. The use-value is a way of referring to the ‘usefulness’ of a thing. A pint of water has a degree of usefulness, as does ‘iron, corn, a diamond’. This usefulness is ‘conditioned by the physical’. So for the diamond to have the usefulness of cutting glass it needs to have the specific physical properties of highly organised carbon that it has. Of course we don;t know what use-values something has until it is used and what something is or can be used for changes and is partially ‘natural’ or basic and partially constructed historically and socially. Sand, for example, has a usefulness in glass-making only once the properties of glass have been discovered and a method of production invented. Marx then says that use-values ‘constitute the material form of wealth, whatever its social form may be’ (C: 126). Here some curious facts might emerge. Wealth in a digital age (social form) still needs some material form, in this case the various networks and machines which record and account the figures. If you wanted to disrupt the capitalist mode of production by directly attacking the wealth it holds then attack the material form in which the social form is constituted. Switch off the electricity. Capitalism, at least the big guns of finance capitalism, is susceptible to EMP bombs. That seems to be a rational conclusion if Marx is right on this point about the material form.
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C = Capital Vol 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin 1979
1. Some preliminary notes on the fact of the reading group and its method.
A reading group recently began in London with the aim of reading through Marx’s Capital (Vol.1), Monday nights 7pm at the Red Lion in Hoxton. It’s part of what seems to be a contemporary revival of interest in Marx’s work driven not by the academy but by a mixture of political activists and people who want to try and find some understanding of the contemporary crisis in capitalism. (This Facebook group, for example, has links to groups in Liverpool and Sheffield as well as the London group).
The first thing I note was about the inaugural meeting and this was the number of people attending. I am used to reading groups being small in the academic world, quite often only half a dozen people, maybe a dozen or so for larger groups. In this instance, however, some 40 people turned up to the first meeting and after four sessions the numbers are still around 25 or so. A number of people expressed their reason for coming in terms of the practical goal of attempting to understand the world around them, the crisis in capitalism that is the contemporary horizon we all live in. That they have turned to Marx is indicative perhaps of the centrality that he has to any criticism of capitalism. Even if the name is not mentioned the spectre of Marx nevertheless lurks in the background every time a Banker attracts criticism for being greedy. There’s a curious logic at work here because there’s no reason to assume Marx will ever simply disappear, anymore than there’s a reason to assume Nietzsche or Freud will disappear. At times, no doubt, they will inform thought, culture and life in greater or lesser depth but their presence, the possibility of their return, haunts thinking, discourse. dialogue. These three figures are mentioned because they are gathered together by Ricouer under the title ‘Masters of Suspicion’ and it is the suspicion of belief that Ricouer refers to. Now whilst this is a problem for faith, as Ricouer himself notes, it is also a problem for trust. Each time the system of capitalism enters one of its periodic crisis the implicit trust we that we must have in capitalism, almost of necessity, slips sideways. The world can often seem a little screwy, off-kilter and badly organised but even then we still live as though it were capable of being less so, this active living of our lives relying upon a trust, in this case a trust that the form of life we are in has the capacity to be improved. The trust that the masters of suspicion displace is a trust in the future within the world as it is now. Of all the three Marx is perhaps the most radical in this displacement because he radically disrupts the role of the individual, more radically than either of the other two who remain wedded to some sort of future the individual can achieve with their own effort. If Marx ‘works’ it is in describing the machinic operation of a system that positions the individual as a place within the machine. It is not without reason that he was fascinated by the story of Faust. Capitalism is not the result of individuals but results in a type of individual. Our actions are not just unconscious and perhaps capable of becoming more conscious, or filled with resentiment and capable of becoming less so, instead they are the result of some event that occurred behind our backs and which we might be able to understand but which we will not change merely through understanding. The machine is real in the sense that Philip K Dick gave to the term ‘reality’. For Dick the real is what remains when we stop believing in it. Capitalism is entirely real in this sense, perhaps the epitome of reality. An anti-capitalism that is more than a mere intellectual dislike or dismissal faces the rather daunting task of both destroying one reality and constructing a new one. No greater adventure can be imagined than the task facing the anti-capitalist.
The second thing I note was the way the group reads, which is slowly. By slowly I mean two to three paragraphs a session at the moment – though this is in part because the starting point for Capital contains a whole range of difficult and curious notions that need quite a lot of attention. Slow reading is a curious thing, something I’ve mainly come across in academic situations, often with a nod to Nietzsche who is perhaps the first to make explicit the resistance to dominant culture that is involved in slow reading. For many it’s a difficult thing because it disrupts the common focus of consuming a text, turning it into a tool or resource. Instead slow reading draws the reader into a process that refuses to allow the reader to simply ‘understand’ the text. The process combines the attempt to understand a text with an increasing awareness of the resistance and mis-reading we bring to a text, whereby we tend to read into the text. In the case of most works of philosophy it is a danger to ‘read into’ a text because what happens is that the reader merely reproduces their own pre-existing concepts, overlaying them onto the text rather than reading out of the text the arrangements that exist within it. The implicit assumption that we all speak the same language is fundamentally what is challenged by slow reading. The arrangements of concepts within each individual have both particular idiosyncrasies but also cultural and ideological determinations. For practically orientated work this is not necessarily a problem but for any type of critical activity it is the central difficulty in any act of actual learning. Too often a student responds not to the text they’re reading but from the position they’re within, one that they live as though it were their own but which is more than likely part of their cultural ‘common sense’. The resistance to slow reading appears in the need to understand, which often arises in amusing ways. When faced with a difficult line, a strange phrase or a curious concept what is often used is the strategy of buttressing. We grab hold of concepts that lie to hand, either from our ‘developed’ understanding or from the ‘common sense’ referred to and we buttress the difficult passage with these other concepts, stabilising it in our minds so we can move on. What this does, however, is to buttress the difficulty within our own understanding which sounds on the face of it like a reasonable thing to do. However if the concept we’re trying to understand is in essence hostile to our existing understanding then all we have done is, in effect, to neutralise it and assimilate it. We de-fang difficult concepts by making them part of our everyday world. The task is not always to assimilate but to allow the possibility that the concept will destroy our everyday world, change our understanding – what else is actual learning than to undergo a process of change. If the change that is sought is radical – as I would suggest it is with all the masters of suspicion – then this means that the understanding will undergo some radical change, root and branch destruction to clear the land for new growth. One of the problems of ‘understanding’ is that it tends to make us passive, it tends to make us feel like we understand rather than give us anything actual, concrete and real. When we feel like we understand we stop learning, we begin to use words and phrases as though we knew what they meant and what they did, in the process losing the radical experimentation that can offer us new discoveries, radically new discoveries of new worlds that are possible.
Meillassoux expresses the problem that the correlationist has with the arche-fossil via the concept of ‘the given’. For the correlationist the arche-fossil is quite straight-forwardly a self-contradictory concept because it suggests that there is a ‘givenness of being anterior to givenness’. The correlationist points out that what we should do is conceptualise the scientific quantitative facts that the arche-fossil is aimed at as modes of ‘given-ness’. For the correlationist, “being is not anterior to givenness, it gives itself as anterior to givenness” (AF:14). The presentation of this argument is close to the bizarre notion that somehow God placed dinosaur fossils in the rocks in order to ‘test our faith’, a curious convoluted manoeuvre that is blatantly designed to maintain some sort of ‘biblical consistency’ in the face of science.
In once sense the argument is curiously distorted by the idea of givenness, because if we begin by accepting that ‘the given’ is the starting point from which we know the world then we are already inside the determinative framework which leads to correlationism. Think of this in terms of the analogy with the argument about God and the dinosaur bones. If the existence of god as outlined in the Bible is already axiomatic then any empirical fact must be determined within the determinative framework of the biblical frame. If I find geological evidence of timespans that appear inconsistent with such a framework, if I find fossils that appear to be located in geological layers older than is seemingly possible within the biblical axiomatic, then the appearance must be deceptive. The axiomatic determines the range of possible solutions. This is the crux of Meillassoux’s argument – the axiomatic of the given determines the range of possible solutions available to us in terms of knowledge of the world.
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In the first of these notes on After Finitude the focus was on the initial move in the book, the retrieval of the concept of primary properties. Even though this is the first move it is still vital to realise that it is the starting point for a more prolonged attack on the dominant contemporary philosophical mode of thinking. This contemporary mode of thinking is what Meillassoux calls correlationism. Correlationism begins with the ‘transcendental revolution’, which finds its origin in Kant. If we have no access to the in-itself then what we are left with are different types of subjective representation. It is no longer the case, the correlationist thinks, that we distinguish between representations which are correct because they adequately represent the object and representations which are distorted by subjective influence (primary properties fulfilling the formal role and secondary properties the latter). We should now distinguish between representations that we must all agree upon and representations that do not demand universal consent. “From this point on, intersubjectivity, the consensus of the community, supplants the adequation between the representations of a solitary subject and the thing itself as the veritable criterion of objectivity, and of scientific objectivity more particularly.” (AF:4). Read the rest of this entry »
This is part of a series of notes, intended primarily to work through the arguments in Quentin Meillassoux’s book After Finitude.
The first move made in Meillassoux’s book is to attempt to retrieve the viability of ‘primary properties’ as a philosophical concept that can do serious lifting. The origin of the explicit ‘primary’ versus ‘secondary’ properties distinction is in Locke – although he uses the term ‘qualities’ rather than properties - and it’s core problem is perhaps found in Berkeley. Locke posits primary properties of an object as those which, we might say, are in the object itself and secondary properties as those which are in the perception of the object 1. The former might be extension, solidity and motion whilst the latter might be colour, taste and smell. Berkeley’s objection to the distinction is to the primary property as being ‘in the object itself’ – for Berkeley all we have are ideas and even if there is a distinction among our ideas of an object that matches the ‘primary/secondary distinction, this is still a distinction only amongst ideas and has no necessary bearing or connection on anything outside the mind.
There has been debate over what exactly might be listed under the category of ‘primary property’ but in the initial outlining of the distinction the primary properties are those that are divisible. “Take a grain of Wheat, divide it into two parts, each part still has Solidity, Extension, Figure and Mobility; divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities; and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible, they must retain still each of them all those qualities.” The crucial move here – ‘and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible, they must retain still …’ – indicates the presence of a non-empirical principle. The necessity that these particular qualities must exist in any object whatsoever, no matter how large or small, is not something that we extract from experience but something with which we organise or understand experience. Primary properties, then, are what belong to the objects themselves as objects not as perceived objects. The existence of these properties does not depend on any subject, any observer, discovering them – they are properties in the object itself.
In a report of recent neuroimaging techniques, the lead scientist said the following – “our findings suggest that unconsciousness may be the increase of inhibitory assemblies across the brain’s cortex” (See here). The statement is taken to be supportive of a particular theory about consciousness put forward by Susan Greenfield, which may or may not be the case. Greenfields hypothesis seems, on the face of it, simply another form of modularity thesis about consciousness and although her metaphor of consciousness as a ‘dimmer’ switch rather than a binary state of on/off may be a good metaphor, it’s also rather obvious. Did anyone actually think consciousness was a simple state that one either ‘had’ or didn’t have? If they did, it seems rather absurd. That said, the neuroimaging work, in probing the dynamics of the brain as it rises and falls into consciousness, sounds fascinating. The spectral consciousness that begins to appear on the horizon as a result of increased levels of communication and signalling between neural assemblies in the brain doesn’t directly answer the central problem with any modularity concept when applied to the mind, rather than the brain, however – which is the question of how the parts become the appearance of a whole, the extent of what we might call the ‘holistic reality’ of the mind. There’s much interesting discussion of this problem, some of which is usefully summarised in Carruthers article ‘Moderately massive modularity’. In general Carruthers account of this holistic reality rests in the architecture sketched, in which language enables us to “build non-domain-specific conscious thinking out of modular components”. All of this is fascinating stuff and at some point I want to explore the details of this in more depth. For now, however, I want to pursue another thread, albeit in a kind of rambling ‘thinking out loud’ way. As is common on this blog these are notes for myself, part of the process of thinking through things.
What struck me as I read that phrase from Professor Pollard, the lead scientist on the neuroimaging work, was this idea that the increase of inhibitory processes is the ground of the unconscious.
They will never give it away for free
With new protests against the fees and cuts being made to Higher Education planned for this Wednesday on what’s being called ‘Day X’ (more information here) it’s necessary to avoid getting drowned in the new slave consensus. The ‘cuts’, the ‘deficit’ and the whole new way in which economics is being organised are presented as obvious, necessary, inevitable. They are no such thing. There are always options. There are realities that we can imagine but these realities must be fought for, both physically and mentally. We must dream and demonstrate the new reality. The only other option is to let the new ‘common sense’ drown us. They will never give it away for free, it has always had to be taken from them by force. This time will be no different. Prepare to fight now. It’s the students and universities at the moment, it will be your hospitals, schools and homes next…and soon.
We’re all pretty fucked…It’s not just cuts in education and upping the fees that’s the problem. The problem is that the cuts in general mean we’re all pretty fucked. Whether you’re a student in a F.E college or University, whether you’re a working single-mum, whether you’re self-employed, whether you’re unemployed, whether you’re working a precarious temp job, whether you working a good job in the public sector. The depth of the cuts means most people are going to become worse-off.There are differing trains of thought that link the cuts to ‘The Crisis’ or ‘The Deficit’ or ‘The Tories’ but for many there is a much more simple truth – it’s just called ‘Life as normal’. The rich have been getting successively richer in this country and the poor have been getting poorer. If the cuts are setting out to re-float a busted economy of over-inflated debt and speculation by taking more and more from the poorer section of the population, well, it’s just more of the same for most people. Poverty, crap jobs, insecurity, health problems – well, that’s just how we’ve been living anyway. But do you feel like politicians will sort it out for you? Do you feel like if you keep your head down and work hard, you’ll be okay? Do you feel scared? Had enough of that shit yet?”
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2010/11//468269.pdf
http://anticuts.org.uk/
http://educationactivistnetwork.wordpress.com/
There are few things which sorcerers share, indeed this may even be central to the very practice of sorcery itself. To this extent sorcery forms, almost par excellence, an example of the ‘minoritarian’. This concept, derived from Deleuze and Guattari, names a practice of deviation from a standard. It is distinguished from the merely minor, which is akin to a minority practice, by being instead the process of ‘becoming-minor’. Given a standard (‘I should get a paying job to support myself‘) there will be a majority that incarnate this standard and a minority who do not. The minoritarian, however, is neither the major nor the minor but the resistance to the fixation of any standard, major or minor. The minoritarian resists encapsulation and stasis and not out of a voluntaristic decision but precisely as an ‘impulse’ which is active and dominating, if not actually dominant. It is not that the minoritarian is a response to a pre-existing major position but rather it is a necessary companion or contamination of any major position. The minor might be a reaction to a major and capable of being understood only in terms of the major but the minoritarian is a necessary ‘coming along with’. It comes along with any major position. It is, in this sense, an unconscious of forces. If the major is the name we give to the coalescence of forces in a particular configuration, a stabilised set of values and norms, then the minoritarian is that set of forces which swirl on the edges and underneath the central major current. Sorcery, in this sense, is minoritarian – it has swirled its way through centuries and millenia of human practice and will no doubt continue to do so. Nothing, after all, speaks to its demise and everything to its continual existence. Read the rest of this entry »
From the very beginnings of organised philosophical thought there has been a keen awareness of the problem of causality. In its most basic form this problem arises whenever the concept of freedom is considered. To be free is to be uncaused. This basic axiom has considerable implications. If we agree that ‘to be free is to be uncaused’ then it seems like we face two simple options as implications of this axiom. Either we deny that there is any such thing as freedom or we deny that cauality is universal. This simple axiom, that to be free is to be uncaused, produces a quite strange and difficult tension between these implications. On the one hand we might want to affirm freedom as real and present. In general we might want to go further and not only affirm the actual reality of freedom but also affirm it as something to be valued and retrieved in the face of its removal. On the other hand we want to affirm the capacity to know the world and the conection between the various facts of the world, connections of causality. Freedom breaks open the world, whilst causality constructs its’ connections and it would seem we want the strange mixture of freedom within a connected world. One of the basic responses to this type of tension has been to suggest that there are, in fact, two types of causes. Everything is thus connected through the concept of cause, but the connections are variable dependent on which of the two types of cause is in play. We thus reconcile freedom and cause by turning freedom into a type of causal force. Read the rest of this entry »
My dying breath is a magician.
This sits, written in chalk dust, on the board, bored bored bored board. Metaphor, all three elements from Aristotle, those elements it’s not supposed to have (supposedly), the tradition that’s opposed (opposedly) by Lakoff and Derrida, with metaphor as domain translations or catechresis as metaphoric literality.
The moment that is unexplainable is the new. The poetic metaphor. That which is ruled out of court or which doesn’t fit into the domain maps of Lakof (is it one F or two?) and Johnson, that which doesn’t accept itself as catechresis, which isn’t reducible to simply a concept. He focuses on one moment. For some of the terms of the proportion there is at times no word in existence; still the metaphor may be used. Each time the word that seems to be used is a good metaphor and allows someone to see something.
I never know what to make of this. I remember a long time ago a science fiction story about a community of blind people, about the way in which they adapt their social environment to become a touchable space and interlacing bodies, about – I think – someone on the run who takes refuge in this community, about the strange eroticism of the body in a space where the blind revel in exploring the positivity of the touch that is dominant without ever falling foul of a notion of lack (there is never any lack).
To talk of seeing things is just too facile. So they use the greek don’t they – theorein – to see. Theoria, theoros, the spectator, theoreo, to look at. Supposedly. The greek root seems to be thea. My dictionary cites it as ‘a seeing, looking at’ as well as, in the listing before that which mentions sight – with a minor change of accent – goddess. But they wouldn’t deign to speak of the goddess.
The story, the anecdote (good philosophy always needs a good anecdote), is about a lecturer on Hegel, Professor Harris, this is Paul’s anecdote not mine, a lecturer on Hegel who is tedious, boring, Hegelian (all Hegelian’s are fools) and who is being listened to by Paul and his colleague and Paul turns to his colleague and says ‘Harris is Quixote’ but not the Quixote of the first book alone but also of the second where the Quixote of the first book victimises the Quixote of the second who is the real Quixote of the fictional Quixote that Cervantes invents who now reveals Harris as tilting at Hegelian windmills. ‘Harris is Quixote’ is said with some humour but Harris is then lost, like the Quixote of the second book, under the weight of the metaphor, the new vision.
I see him anew. This is the only form of new metaphor. I see it anew.
I sit and stare at this chalk dust line. The magician brings about a magical event. The magician transforms things.
Like a dying breath.
My explanation is death.
The metaphor can be paraphrased but the poem cannot.
"Metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion. Thus from genus to species, as: ‘There lies my ship’; for lying at anchor is a species of lying. From species to genus, as: ‘Verily ten thousand noble deeds hath Odysseus wrought’; for ten thousand is a species of large number, and is here used for a large number generally. From species to species, as: ‘With blade of bronze drew away the life,’ and ‘Cleft the water with the vessel of unyielding bronze.’ Here arusai, ‘to draw away’ is used for tamein, ‘to cleave,’ and tamein, again for arusai- each being a species of taking away. Analogy or proportion is when the second term is to the first as the fourth to the third. We may then use the fourth for the second, or the second for the fourth. Sometimes too we qualify the metaphor by adding the term to which the proper word is relative. Thus the cup is to Dionysus as the shield to Ares. The cup may, therefore, be called ‘the shield of Dionysus,’ and the shield ‘the cup of Ares.’ Or, again, as old age is to life, so is evening to day. Evening may therefore be called, ‘the old age of the day,’ and old age, ‘the evening of life,’ or, in the phrase of Empedocles, ‘life’s setting sun.’ For some of the terms of the proportion there is at times no word in existence; still the metaphor may be used. For instance, to scatter seed is called sowing: but the action of the sun in scattering his rays is nameless. Still this process bears to the sun the same relation as sowing to the seed. Hence the expression of the poet ‘sowing the god-created light.’ There is another way in which this kind of metaphor may be employed. We may apply an alien term, and then deny of that term one of its proper attributes; as if we were to call the shield, not ‘the cup of Ares,’ but ‘the wineless cup’." (Aristotle, Poetics, XXI)
