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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

crisscrossing Marx and Heidegger « Previous | |Next »
November 02, 2006

Michael Eldred says in his Capital and Technology: Marx and Heidegger that the questions concerning the essence of capital and its relationship to the essence of technology need to be explored and that Marx and Heidegger touch each other in their respective thinking most intimately. Each of these thinkers has answered one of the two questions concerning the essence of capital and the essence of technology, but in different languages. The task is thus posed as a kind of labour of translation.

Eldred gives a very Heideggerian reading of Marx when he says that:

According to Marx, the essence of capital is the endless, limitless valorization of value, an essence which sets itself up "behind the backs" of people, as Marx often puts it (e.g. Gr.:136, 156). Setting-up and valorization are the respective essential actions of the respective essences, whereby action here cannot be thought in terms of human action, but as destiny that prevails over everything. To think valorization as attributed to destiny goes against the grain of Marxian thinking, of course, for which something destinal would have to be treated as a fetishism which could be dissolved by deciphering value and valorization as a "social product just like language" (MEW23:88). Nevertheless, just as the essence of technology is nothing technical, the essence of capital is nothing economic; the valorization of value cannot be thought ultimately as an economic phenomenon. Marx's critique of political economy is not a theory of the capitalist economy with the appropriate specialized concepts; rather, it is a questioning and a presentation of the essence of capital which — now expressed in Heidegger's language — is not a human machination.

The capitalist world gathers itself in money; in the thing 'money', the world worlds capitalistically, as soon as the movement of valorization of everything achieves an absoluteness. Everything that is (exists) has a direct or indirect relation to money; the totality of beings passes through money.

Eldred brings Heidegger into the picture by linking capital and technology thus:

The value-forms analyzed by Marx, such as commodity, money, (productive, circulating and interest-bearing) capital, wages and ground rent, cover the totality of beings: things, humans, earth and sea. There is hardly anything, not even the sky, that cannot be valorized, even in a narrow economic sense (e.g. air traffic corridors). The circuits that Heidegger describes in various texts are in truth, i.e. in their full uncoveredness, circuits of capital, without him ever bringing this to light. Most importantly, the restless snatching away of everything into some circuit or other can be concretized with reference to the intertwining of circuits of capital in the form in which it appears in everyday life, e.g. as the activity of huge, global stock companies networked with their suppliers. Because everything can be valorized, capital penetrates into every ontic nook and cranny. Everything obtains a price in the circling of value as capital, if only indirectly.

Then we have the contrast between Marx and Heidegger. First Marx:
The Marxian critique of capitalism is only superficially a critique of private property insofar as the latter is still thought as in the hands of subjects. On the deepest level of essence it is even less a critique of one class by the other. We must finally take leave of such readings of Marx's writings if they are still to be able to open up an historical future. The critique of political economy shows that all the subjects, including the ruling class subjects, are dragged into the circling of valorization, so that all of them can and must be regarded as mere "character masks", as personifications of value-forms. Marx however remains dominated by metaphysical thinking insofar as he leaves the human essence located in subjectivity — albeit an alienated subjectivity.

Secondly Heidegger:
In Heidegger, by contrast, the gaze is fixed on thinking that calculates and sets up representations, i.e. on the modes of thinking that decide how beings are unconcealed as real. This includes in the first place the modern sciences which cast the reality of everything real as measurability and calculability and accordingly do research into a reality thus set up, uncovering beings and making them accessible to knowledge and, more essentially, to the grip of the grasp. Heidegger wants to promote another type of thinking counterposed to thinking that sets up representations and calculates, whereas Marx is for a practical revolution of social relations in which a conscious (and still calculating, positing) sociation of production is to be set up. The two thinkers are thus in this regard historical worlds apart from each other.

I'm puzzled as to why practice is left out, because it is revoluttionary practices in Marx and marginalised practices (as opposed to thinking) that Heidegger counterposes to a technological mode of being.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:17 PM | | Comments (1)
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Comments

But I suppose the difficulties, if not impassibilities, of Marx' transposition of "dialectical" thinking into a materialist frame lie precisely in the entanglements of his notion of "praxis",- (which is simply the German word for "practice", as well as, carrying the Greek Aristotelian connotations). In wrenching the Hegelian notion of labor out of its idealist and conceptual meaning and framework,- (in which transitions/transformations are tied to the process of emergent consciousness of "substance becoming subject", which is to say, tied to metaphysical teleology of substance, in however innovative a form, as an implicit controlling norm for thought),- Marx wants to retain the notion that, in transforming the material conditions of the world, practice qua labor transforms the laborer himself, that is, by forming/transforming the natural world labor forms/transforms human "nature" itself. But not only does this imply that material labor is still to be tied to and mediated by thought/conceptuality, but it implies that material labor, in fact, has a culture-forming role, as well as, being the central locus underpinning human social relations. And not only does the ideal of "Bildung" retain an essential normative role in the prospect of Marx' thought, but in popping it out of idealism, so to speak, into a materialist framework, Marx seems to appeal to a Schillerian aesthetics of production, as embodying both labor and world in the publicness of works. In sum, a model of labor as praxis is accorded a quasi-foundational role for both world and "subject", nature and society. And this model provides the normative and conceptual basis in the young Marx for deriving his notion of alienation, as the diremption of need, activity, and object/product embodied in property relations, which forms the basis of his critique.

But there are several problems with this set-up. For one, material labor as instrumental-technical activity does, indeed, transform material conditions and result in the production of objects, but that does not of itself result in the "internal" transformation of conceptions, needs, and social relations. (To speak of "value" as "a social product just like language" probably reflects an Hegelian-Humboltian view of the relation of language to thought, but language is not a product of voluntary or intentional action in the same way that the products of labor are). Rather a prior socio-cultural context must be presupposed if the investments/objectifications of labor and the alterations of the material world they bring about are to be returned to and impinge upon the awareness of "subjects" and transform their sense of possibilities. Anthropological relations of (symbolic) exchange and not just activities directed at external nature must be taken into account, if the effects of the latter are to have formative implications for the former. If the acting/producing human being is not just reducible to the representing/reflecting subject, nonetheless the priority of external nature implicated in the materialist turn is not a transparent condition of such acting/producing, nor would it be directly available for their self-formative conceptions. Rather the priority of nature would weigh down upon and overshadow any such self-conceptions, while obstructing the direction of their activities. The laboring "subject" is not realized in its object by virtue of the fact that the "subject" is itself conditioned by the very "objectivity" it works upon. (That is one radical implication of the abandonment of "absolute idealism": the "subject can not return to itself in the end and "sublate" external reality because the "subject" is not "there" at the origin.)

But that is more or less the situation that Marx moves into when he applies his early critique of alienation manifested in property relations, based on the "expressive" model of praxis as self-formative labor, to the full-fledged development of his analysis of the capitalist value-form. The real illusion of bourgeois ideology is also the necessary structure of capitalist commodity production, and the model of the laborer and his object/product is dispersed into a collective, systemic reality. At that point, the notion of praxis as material labor becomes reduced to its instrumental/technical dimension and the consciousness of labor as the production of value/formation of self and world becomes split off: the degradation of real material labor is meticulously elaborated. At the same time, Marx imports into his analysis his retention of the main message/claim of Hegelian absolute idealism, (which, to paraphrase Kant, is an objective realism), that the world as such is rationally intelligible as a whole, and, correspondingly, that any normative order is anchored in the actuality of the social world, that is, the actuality of the "ought" is embedded in the social recognition(s) of what is. Hence there are two problems here: not only is material labor, reduced to a commodity, shorn of its normative implications, but, at the same time, praxis, which has been embedded into the notion of labor, must, in fact, be the carrier of the normative, must be fit to supply its own rational standard for the world. And this central role for praxis as the bearer of the rationality of the world "as a whole" confronts not just the artificial naturalization of the social world under capitalism, but also the fact that the latter is pre-determined indirectly by the actual priority of the natural world, since both the priority of nature and the priority of praxis belong to Marx' original conception, out of his critique of Hegel.

At that point, Marx' notion of praxis splits apart between the degraded instrumental/technical activity of material labor under the "tutelage" of capital and the organizational activity of praxis "proper" as social action upon social action, as the rhetorical appeal to the transformation of social relations. Of course, one basic intention of "Capital" is to unfold the capitalist value-realization process and the "stamp" of the capitalist value form on society- and perhaps the world,- as a whole in terms of its disequilibriating, self-undermining tendencies, as the objective correlate of the potential transformation of advanced society into a wholely new form. Correspondingly, another basic intention is to demonstrate the prevalence of bourgeois ideology as a reflex, a necessary illusion, of the capitalist value-form. And, thirdly, the two combined are intended as a kind of template for the rhetorical appeal to the self-organization of the laboring masses to penetrate the fog of bourgeois mystification and activate their motivations for the revolutionary transformation of bourgeois/capitalist society in terms of its own suppressed/distorted norms. But not only is part of that suppressed normativity rooted in the non-transparency of prior nature- (and perhaps human "nature", as well)-, but there is an Hegelian laying-on-of-hands here, a supposition of identity conditions that belies the very priority and normative generativity of praxis that is prospectively appealed to.

One upshot here is that Marx, by identifying praxis exclusively with labor, failed to conceive the transformative dimension of praxis "proper", displacing it rather onto its conditions. (I find Levinas' conception of the modal relation to the other useful here, as a transformation of "attitudes" and correlated relationships, without an obsessional/polemical searching after motives.) Another upshot is that Marx becomes caught up in a terrifying paradox: the most impoverished, least educated, most excluded and alienated class, whose very laboring activity not only occurs under, but increases the burden of its and society's reification, fragmenting its experience all the more, is precisely the class "elected" to gather together, renew and transform the relations of society as a whole. (That paradox infects Lukacs all the more, with his phenomenology of proletarian class-consciousness leading to the frankly idealist postulate of the proletariat as the "subject-object identical" of history, with the reproduction of the "antinomies of bourgeois consciousness", in terms of the impossible alternative between Luxemburg's mass spontaneism and Lenin's party-state). But perhaps the main excavation should focus on the issue of the possibility of praxis providing its own rational-normative criteria. Leaving aside that that can only be an immense collective prospect and the large issues of demarcating and limiting the roles of science, technology and social theory, I think the key to Marx' understanding of the normativity of praxis lies in his underlying Aristotelianism. As with Aristotle, for Marx the good of human life lies in fruitful self-activity, something which "in the end" would bridge the distinction between techne/praxis/theoria, as well as perhaps, the distinction between need, object, and desire. It was partly for that reason that Marx' vision of revolution was of a producers' revolution, rather than an emancipation of consumers into endless plenty. It was the emancipation of labor from the capitalist value-form into fruitful self-activity that constituted the reconciling prospect for Marx, which would help to explain why he saw such a prospect as self-limiting and socially generative. Whether that vision implies a "still calculating, positing sociation of production", which would be the mark of a continuing subjectivist/technological imposition on natural and human reality, or whether such a prospect might enter into the non-technological "essence" of techne/poesis is either an historically moot point or an open question.

Of course, that does not fully address the question of whether rationally normative criteria can be derived from praxis alone. And it leaves aside a whole other line of excavation and criticism of Marx' work/thinking: namely, that by beginning with a critique of Hegel's theory of state as a "false" idealist reconciliation and postulating a socio-economic revolution as an overcoming of political alienation, Marx constitutively failed to conceive the relative independence of the political, both as sovereign power/violence and as publicness, which, historically became the Achilles' heel of the effective history of his work, in the forms of Leninism, fascism and Keynesianism. But at least I think I've gone some way toward limning the problematic "depths" of Marx' thinking.

Maybe later I'll comment on the Heideggerian counter-position, but I'm going to bed now.

 
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