Modernity and its Futures Past : Recovering Unalienated Life 3031321073, 9783031321078

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Modernity and its Futures Past Recovering Unalienated Life n i sh a d pat n a i k

Modernity and its Futures Past

Nishad Patnaik

Modernity and its Futures Past Recovering Unalienated Life

Nishad Patnaik Department of Social Sciences and Humanities Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology New Delhi, India

ISBN 978-3-031-32106-1    ISBN 978-3-031-32107-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32107-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

In memory of Anil Bhatti

Acknowledgments

A work is never finished. It is an ongoing conversation with oneself and with many others, both living and dead, proximate and distant. At some point however, it acquires a definitely bounded shape, a ‘final’ form, which is deliberately created, and also to an extent, the result of many contingent factors—a reflection of one’s intellectual journey. This is true of the present work, as much as any other. This book took shape only gradually, over a number of years, and its ‘final’ form is quite different from the one I had initially envisaged. This is due, in large measure, to the discussions and debates I have had with friends, teachers and colleagues over the years. For comments, criticism and advice on the manuscript, I owe a debt of gratitude to Anil Bhatti, who carefully and methodically read every chapter, and suggested revisions where needed. I would also like to thank Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, for their unstinting personal support, and as experts to whom I could turn whenever I needed clarification concerning economic concepts, and Marxist economics in particular. I am indebted to Akeel Bilgrami, both for his intellectual output and his friendship— which have had a deep influence on this work. Indeed, the title is inspired by his essay on Gandhi and Marx. I am grateful to my teachers, K. P. Shankaran, Rishi Nanda, Vijay Tankha, James Dodd, Ágnes Heller, Jay Bernstein, Simon Critchley, Yirmiyahu Yovel and Claudia Baracchi, who at various points, opened up philosophical ideas and approaches to vii

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me that have shaped my understanding and are therefore, reflected in this work. I owe a special debt to Meghant Sudan—my friendship and philosophical conversations with him go back much further than the inception of this book, but they have undoubtedly left their imprint on my understanding. Franson Manjali, Harjinder Singh, Swargajyoti Gohain, Manohar Kumar and Praveen Priyadarshi read parts of the manuscript, and I am grateful to them. This book would not have been possible without the constant support and encouragement of Smita Sirker. Smita has been my sounding board for many of the arguments presented here, and her suggestions have helped me formulate my own thoughts more clearly. More than that, she has been my spiritual rock through the ups and downs associated with the inevitably isolating experience of writing. I wish to thank Brendan George, Ruby Panigrahi, and Pushpalatha Mohan at Palgrave for their patience, understanding and support, and the anonymous reviewers who commented on the draft. I am grateful to the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, for their financial and logistical support. It goes without saying however, that the limitations of this work reflect my own limitations, and mine alone.

Contents

1 I ntroduction  1 Bibliography 29 2 Nationalism  and Its Other 31 2.1 The “Society of Perpetual Growth” and the Unreconciled Tension Between Universalistic and Particularistic Tendencies in Gellner’s Analysis  36 2.2 The “Imagined Community” and ‘Modularity’  49 2.3 The Critique of Modularity: The Division Between the ‘Spiritual’ ‘Inner’ World and the ‘Material’ ‘Outer’ World; and the Problem with This Division When Understood Non-Dialectically  75 2.4 Summary of Our Critical Arguments, and the Task Ahead: The Main Contours of the Problematic  87 Bibliography 91 3 Genealogies  of Modernity: Disenchantment and the Form of Unalienated Life 93 3.1 Gandhi, Marx, and the Critique of Modernity  98 3.2 The Emergence of the Alienated World-­View in the Establishment of the Private Economy: Early Dissenters and Theoretical Critique 104 ix

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3.3 The Problem of History: Contingency, Necessity, and the Notion of Historicity 113 3.4 The Secular Reenchantment of Nature: Its Limits, and Rearticulation Through the Experience of Negativity 128 Bibliography145 4 Historicity,  Negativity and Nature147 4.1 Kant, Hegel and Negativity 150 4.2 “Force and Understanding” 156 4.3 Methodological Distinctions Between Kant and Husserl; and the Sense of ‘Crisis’ 168 4.4 ‘Crisis’, Negativity and Historicity 179 4.5 Urstiftung, Nachstiftung, Endstiftung 192 Bibliography204 5 Heidegger’s  Modernist Critique of Modernity: The Recovery of Negativity and Finitude205 5.1 ‘Ontological Difference’, the Temporality of ‘Care’ and ‘Being-Towards-Death’207 5.2 The Question of Metaphysics 234 5.3 The Question of Technology 248 5.4 The Question of the Environment 266 Bibliography278 6 The  Impasse of the Political: Rethinking the Universal281 6.1 Transition to the Political 281 6.2 The Possibility of Unalienated Existence in Relation to Historical Becoming: Evolutionary Versus Repetitive History285 6.3 The ‘Other’ Vision of History: The Communal Form and Its Repetition in the Asiatic, Ancient and Germanic Modes of Production 308 6.4 The Problem of the ‘Asiatic Mode’ and the Possibility of Evolutionary History 321

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6.5 Marx’s Analysis of the Commodity Form as a Critique of ‘Presence’ 329 6.6 The Generalization of Commodity Fetishism in the Money Commodity: Circulation, Temporality, and the Proliferation of Symbols 340 6.7 How Marx ‘Invented the Symptom’: Alienation and Therapeutic Response 350 Bibliography357 7 Dialectics  and the Universal in Process359 7.1 On the Possibility of Proletarian ‘Universal’ Class Consciousness362 7.2 The Generalization of the Commodity Form and the Reification Inherent in It: Lukács and the Possibility of Proletarian Class Consciousness 366 7.3 Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, and the Political 385 Bibliography431 8 Unalienated  Life and Negative Dialectics433 8.1 The Realization of Unalienated Life in Post-Capitalist Society: Political-Economic Relations 434 8.2 The Realization of Unalienated Life in Post-Capitalist Society: The Ethical Basis of Political-Economic Relations449 8.3 The Realization of Unalienated Existence in Post-­ Capitalist Society: The Relation to ‘Nature’ 457 8.4 The Extension of Ethical Considerations Beyond the Human: Non-­Anthropocentrism Without the Reduction to Naïve Positivism 464 8.5 The Emancipatory Promise of Enlightened Modernity and Its Distortion in a ‘Determinate Negation’ 479

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8.6 Negative Dialectics as the Problem of Maintaining ‘Determinacy Without Affirmation’: The Form/Content of Freedom in Noncoercive Identity/Equality 493 Bibliography504 B  ibliography505 I ndex511

1 Introduction

Why are we witnessing today—when capitalism seems to have finally broken free from its moorings in the nation-state and has transformed into what, in a sense, was always pre-figured in its abstractive movement, namely, globalized finance capital—a renewed tendency towards a closing of borders, a return to earlier forms of parochialism, to xenophobic nationalism?1 The contextual specificity of this question—its restriction to the contemporary situation—belies the possibility of discerning this tension between ‘globalization’ and ‘parochialism’ characteristic of the present, as part of a general pattern that is implicit in the issues indicated by it. Moreover, this pattern, I am suggesting, is not confined to the present, as its abstract ‘static’ representation, but shows itself retrospectively and recursively, in cycles of historical transformation.  These tendencies are evidenced by the rise of right-wing populism, shading into neo-fascism, in many countries around the world. This is not to say that the representatives of these forces necessarily occupy positions of power, or have remained in office, wherever they have come into power. Rather, the resurgence of these forces in Europe, North and South America, and South Asia, indicates a growing polarization between progressive (liberal-democratic in some parts, more left-­ leaning and social-democratic in others) and regressive (right-wing populism, nationalism based on religious and ethnic majoritarianism), tendencies. This polarization has been characterized by sudden shifts, or ‘reversals’ of power between these starkly opposed tendencies. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Patnaik, Modernity and its Futures Past, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32107-8_1

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If, however, we initially restrict ourselves to the contemporary situation, and think of the ‘pattern’ as its abstract representation, then what this tension indicates is the process of reification, whereby the original critical, universal impulse of enlightenment modernity, comes to acquire a specific content or shape in its capitalist figuration. The latter then, generates a series of tensions, polarizations and impasses in relation to the interconnected social, political, economic, and normative spheres, constitutive of our modern sense of alienation. These impasses flow from an overly strict separation and reification of the ‘universal’ and ‘particular’, ‘necessity’ and ‘contingency’, ideality and materiality (or the ‘real’) etc., leading to their conception in an oppositional, mutually exclusive sense. The latter conception comes to infect the realm of theory and praxis within (capitalist) modernity. Our task therefore, is to renew the promise once held by modernity, by rearticulating its critical-universal rational impetus, in the face of its reified figuration in contemporary capitalism. The return or reestablishment of universality in a transformed, non-reified sense, amounts to the (re) articulation of a non-reified conception of modernity, through the recovery of an unalienated mode of existence. This task of renewal requires, first and foremost, an analysis of contemporary modernity, to bring to light the pattern of reifications that gives rise to the series of interconnected impasses in question, and which set the basic coordinates of the problematic I am addressing. To see this pattern, it could be helpful to situate our initial question in relation to two similar questions that arose from their specific contexts— one posed by Benedict Anderson, in his celebrated 1983 book, Imagined Communities, and the other by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their no less celebrated, Empire, published in the year 2000. The time-­ frames within which these two books were written are of some significance. The immediate background of Imagined Communities, Anderson writes, was formed by the wars of 1978–79 between Vietnam, Cambodia and China. For the first time, independent socialist countries were in open, armed conflict with each other, with no attempt to pay even

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lip-­service to Marxist ideas in order to justify their actions.2 This was a clear outward sign of a basic transformation occurring within Marxist movements, stemming from the recognition that the long-held belief in the supranational character of socialism, and in the ‘temporariness’ of existing national boundaries and divisions (even among the communist nation-states), was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Anderson, citing Eric Hobsbawm, points out that ever since their inception, Marxist revolutionary struggles and the political states emerging from them, have been national not only in ‘form’ but also in ‘substance’, that is, they have been inherently nationalist.3 Further, “there is nothing to suggest that this trend will not continue”4—indeed, if anything, it has only gained in strength. The conflicts in Indo-China bore testament to this trend, but the examples can be multiplied.5 With the break-up of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia along old ethnic and religious fault lines in the years following the first publication of Anderson’s work, its fundamental claim concerning the persistence of the idea of the nation, and nationalism—the claim that the ‘imagined community’ in modernity is inevitably restricted to, and figured in, the territorially bounded nation (which in turn, is only a few steps away from its ‘re-corporealization’ in pre-modern forms of community based on traditional religious or ethnic identities), seems to have been borne out with remarkable accuracy. The closed unit of the ‘nation’, in its imagined and territorial existence, has emerged as one of the main sources of modern identity. The similarity of form between Anderson’s point of departure and ours is clear; the historical context, and thus content, however, is vastly different. With the fragmentation of communist countries along pre-existing, well-worn ethnic, cultural and religious lines, and the retreat of socialism  Anderson writes: “While it was still just possible to interpret the Sino-Soviet border clashes of 1969, and the Soviet military interventions in Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1980) in terms of— according to taste—’social imperialism,’ ‘defending socialism,’ etc., no one, I imagine, seriously believes that such vocabularies have much bearing on what has occurred in Indochina”. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London, New York: Verso, 2006, p. 1. 3  Cf. Ibid. pp. 2–3. 4  Ibid. 5  Anderson lists the Sino-soviet conflicts (1969), the Soviet intervention in Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1980). Cf. Ibid. p. 1. 2

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and the internationalism to which it laid claim (which in turn had its normative source in a universal humanism), the idea of ‘internationalism’ that comes to acquire complete and exclusive dominance has its roots in globalized finance-driven capitalism. And it appeared that while neo-­ liberal finance capital was in its ascendency, (from roughly the 1980’s onwards, following the end of the post-war era of Keynesian dirigiste welfare capitalism), it would sweep away not only economic, but even cultural and ethnic barriers. Its promise of rapid and ‘inclusive’ economic growth and prosperity (however illusory), along with the social and geographical mobility it would engender (however exaggerated6) would have a homogenizing effect, and give rise to a new ‘internationalist’ world-order. The latter perspective is the one taken up by Hardt and Negri. Writing in the pre-2008-financial crisis heyday of globalized capitalism and the neo-liberal economic policies followed by virtually every nation-state (with a few exceptions, such as Cuba and North Korea), they see in this new international order, the emergence of a transformed, deterritorialized sovereignty—which they call “empire”. The globalization of capital leads, on this account, to a strong distinction (though not an absolute separation) between the economic and political spheres. Economic processes seem to attain a certain self-sufficient, ‘technocratic’, and thus, ‘neutral’ or ‘objective-universal’ character. Under the dominance of this ‘economic logic’, not only is political-economic (if the two domains were not sharply distinguished) intervention by the state rendered increasingly ineffective, but it is actively discouraged (by ‘supra-national’ bodies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization). This leads to a systematic attenuation of the political sovereignty of nation-states. Thus, Hardt and Negri claim, the “free flow of money, commodities, technologies and people” across national borders entails “[…] that the nation-state has less and less power to regulate these flows and impose its  Neo-liberal economic policies (along with wars, sometimes fought on its behalf ) do engender some geographical mobility in the form of economic emigration/immigration, or refugees fleeing conflicts in certain parts of the world. But the national borders remain in place, along with the strict restrictions and control they entail over peoples movements. Thus, the vast majority continue to have the status of ‘illegal’ immigrants. Globalized capitalism therefore, is increasingly marked by the loosening of restrictions for cross border capital flows, and tightened restrictions for the flow of people, particularly unskilled or semi-skilled workers. 6

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authority over the economy. Even the most dominant nation-states should no longer be thought of as supreme and sovereign authorities”.7 However, as the authors underscore, this does not mean that sovereignty as such has diminished; instead, it now takes a new form. The territorial sovereignty of nation-states is replaced by the deterritorialized sovereignty of ‘empire’—comprising a system of supra-national institutions and mechanisms governed by the economic logic of globalized finance on the one hand, and the juridical system of ‘right’ that constitutes the normative legitimacy of ‘Empire’ (global capital), on the other. The economic and the juridical, although interconnected, must be distinguished as two aspects of sovereignty in this transformed sense. The larger claim of their book is that such deterritorialized sovereignty is entirely distinct from the traditional sovereignty of nation-states and its earlier imperialist political projection and imposition. ‘Empire’ is distinct from ‘imperialism’ precisely because there is no longer a territorial “center” of imperial power, as Europe was throughout the “age of imperialism”, nor a “periphery” of colonized foreign territories. Countering the view that with the decline of the old European powers, the United States has simply filled the power vacuum and taken over as the new global imperialist power, the authors state categorically, “The United States does not, and indeed, no nation-state can today, form the center of the imperialist project. Imperialism is over”.8 Territorial boundaries, and the explicit projection of sovereign political power, were essential to the very possibility of imperialism—to the relation between colonizer and colonized, center and periphery. In contrast, the passage to the “age of Empire” in contemporary modernity is marked by the absence of a territorial center and the diffusion of sovereignty to a “[…] decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers”.9 Whereas Hardt and Negri emphasize the supranational tendencies of capital (captured in the de-territorialized sovereignty of ‘empire’), Anderson emphasizes the continued existence of nations and territorial  Hardt and Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. xi  Ibid. pp. xiii–xiv. 9  Ibid. pp. xii–xiii. 7 8

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boundaries. Yet, as our initial question indicates, the present juncture is simultaneously marked by both these tendencies, that is, both universalism (in the economic, political and normative domains) and particularism (nationalist tendencies, parochial interests). Further, I am suggesting that thinking of these universalistic and particularistic tendencies as contradictory and mutually exclusive, rather than being mutually (dialectically) constitutive, leads to a series of impasses in the overlapping economic, political, normative, and theoretical spheres, within capitalist modernity. It results in a dialectically ‘one-sided’, or reified conception of modernity, as dominated by either universalist (global capitalism) or particularistic (nationalistic) tendencies, where its ‘other’ can be understood only in an oppositional, contradictory sense. This dialectical one-­ sidedness, in various contexts and in various forms, becomes the source of contemporary alienation, which can then manifest itself in the wholesale adoption of neo-liberal economic policies by the state on the “economic” front (which appears ‘objective’ universal etc.), and the resurgence of narrow, exclusionary solidarities on the “political” front (which appears independent of the ‘economy’). The political realm (conceived independently of the economic, that is, of political economy) then becomes the focal point, or the domain in which our alienated existence finds concentrated expression, and therefore, appears in opposition to the homogenizing, universalizing forces of globalized capital. The universalistic and particularistic tendencies inherent in contemporary capitalist modernity, must however, be seen as mutually constitutive; that is, dialectically related. Yet, how is this constitutive relation to be explicated, given that they appear precisely, as opposed movements? Contrary to the movement towards capitalist homogenization and universalism that Hardt and Negri emphasize with their conception of ‘empire’, it seems that the contemporary resurgence of various shades of nationalism signals a reaction against the ‘deterritorialized sovereignty’ of ever-expanding capital. However, what this reaction indicates is an inkling, a presentiment, of the ‘universal’ (qua determinate) as necessarily and constitutively contaminated by particularity. The juridical order that underpins capitalist expansion is now recognized as being selectively invoked within an asymmetric international power dynamic, or simply ignored when it impinges on the sovereignty of the dominant

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nation-­states. Both on the economic and political fronts, the rise of (premodern) forms of right-wing populism of various shades (blending into outright fascism), along with xenophobic nationalist tendencies around the world, constitute an immediate, unreflective expression of disillusionment, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis, with neo-­liberalism and its promise of rapid, ‘inclusive’ and ‘endless’ economic growth. It is this disillusionment, that contains a nascent awareness of the particularity which infects the ‘universal’, that is (as Judith Butler puts it), of the exclusions that are constitutive of the claims to universality. Most appeals to identity, however regressive or misplaced, arise from such exclusions— from a lingering sense of resentment, of being unfairly treated, not recognized, etc. I will return to this point below. Our response to the problematic (of the inherent tension/relation between the universal and particular) therefore, calls for a revised understanding of the contemporary world—one which does not merely emphasize one set of processes (universalistic tendencies), to the exclusion of the other (particularistic tendencies), but can account for their simultaneous co-existence. That is, it calls for an approach that, while taking into account the deterritorializing tendencies of capital, and the pressure it exerts on nation-states,10 also considers the modes of resistance to, and complicity with, this movement—of which xenophobic nationalism is an immediate, reified expression. Further, I am claiming that this account must be elaborated in terms of the mutually constitutive co-dependence of these tendencies. The latter however, can be understood in several ways that are not necessarily, or rather, obviously, dialectical. For instance, it can be understood through the idea of (historically contingent) hegemony. The notion of hegemony, provides an initial explication of this co-dependence, by showing how the nation-state does not always stand opposed to the neo-liberal economic order, but, insofar as it is hegemonized by the latter, forms the very condition for its wide-spread implementation. Just as neo-liberal capital, in

 This pressure is exerted by a seemingly ‘international’ regime, but in which the United States has a privileged place owing to the power of the dollar as the new ‘gold standard’, replacing the British pound from the imperial era. 10

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turn, needs the policy backing of the state, in order to make inroads into pre-capitalist or non-capitalist countries or regions. Thus, the persistence of the territorially bounded nation-state and the resurgence of ‘nationalisms’ (whether regressive or progressive) need not be understood always and exclusively, as a sign of resistance, or a counter-­ movement to the inevitable tendency of capitalist expansion, and the imposition of its normative and juridical order. Rather, with Anderson one can maintain that territorially bounded nation-states will continue to persist, and yet, they persist not only as a bulwark against the homogenizing effects of capitalism, but as facilitators of globalized capitalism in its present form. As Samir Amin, in his critique of Hardt and Negri notes, the nation-state, in its political, juridical and economic capacity, comes to constitute the ‘condition of possibility’ for the imposition of neo-liberal economic policies.11 This implies that instead of conceiving the sovereignty of the territorially bounded nation-state as always opposed to the “deterritorialized sovereignty” of globalized capital (Empire), such that the latter replaces’ or transforms, the former, it would be more fruitful to understand the sense of sovereignty that Hardt and Negri invoke, in terms of hegemony in the old Gramscian sense. It is then possible to argue that once neo-liberal economic ideas become the dominant, hegemonic force, they acquire a kind of ‘universality’ that tends to appropriate nation-states within their hegemonic logic, such that all resistance, in the form of alternative economic and political paradigms, is marginalized. The ‘hegemonic consensus’ then, comes to stand for, or represent, ‘universality’ (or the ‘fullness’, ‘identity’, ‘meaning’ etc. of a particular polity), while in actuality being merely a historical, and contingent hegemonic formation. Thus, it remains a necessarily provisional representation of the universal dimension of political, economic and social discourse. The power of such provisional hegemonic formations can wane, as cracks appear in their ‘universalistic façade, and the resistance that was marginalized can reemerge with greater force and stake its claim to a ‘universality’ that can take both progressive and regressive forms.  Cf. Samir Amin, “Contra Hardt and Negri”, Monthly Review, Vol. 66, Issue 6 (November), 2014.

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However, I noted that the relation between the economic and the political, is more complicated than it might first appear, insofar as they are closely intertwined, yet distinguishable. On the one hand, something like a regressive return to pre-modern solidarities, primarily along the lines of ethnicity and religion, is clearly resurfacing within the political terrain of the present, as the hegemonic, ‘universally inclusive’ façade of neo-liberalism begins to appear increasingly fragile. On the other, as we know, finance capital (whether national or international) has historically been complicit with (pre-modern) forms of fascism, since investing in its war economy (for instance, in Germany, in the years immediately preceding the second world war), or in its extraction of natural resources, along with the curtailment of democratic resistance that accompanies such extraction, has proved to be highly profitable. Yet, with respect to the first point, resistance to the hegemonic understanding of globalized capitalism does not always take the political form of nationalism, in the pre-modern, narrowly religious or ethnic sense. For, nationalism itself need not take a regressively communal form; it can manifest itself in the economic sphere through a delinking and withdrawal from multinational conglomerations via protectionist policies, public spending etc. that constitute measures to combat the deleterious effects of neo-liberal economic policies (such as free trade and economic austerity, based on the idea that the fiscal deficit must be curtailed). Thus, even if, for example, the promise of protectionist economic policies was partially responsible for bringing Donald Trump to power, this does not obviously entail that protectionism itself is ‘nationalistic’ in the narrow sense.12 The political and the economic spheres, while closely interconnected, are certainly not identical or reducible to each other. The same economic policies can have multiple political valences,13 while the same political position (particularly in the case of the fascism and right-­ wing populism), can give rise to the pursuit of vastly different economic policies. This irreducibility leads, for instance, to protectionism in the case of the United States and the pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies,  Indeed, under the liberal-centrist regime headed by Joseph Biden, many protectionist measures continue to be in place, particularly in relation to the agricultural sector. 13  It is not surprising that at certain points the right and the left converge on the issue of protectionist policies in the economic sphere, but for vastly different political reasons. 12

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by way of inviting foreign direct investment to extract and exploit material and human resources (cheap labour reserves), in the case of underdeveloped countries in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In relation to the second point, that is, the link between globalized capitalism and the rise of various shades of xenophobic nationalism, as a corollary to this initial revision in the diagnosis of the present state of affairs (which takes both Anderson’s particularist and Hardt’s and Negri’s universalist diagnosis into consideration without subscribing to either), I am suggesting that there can be no strict theoretical demarcation between ‘Imperialism’ and ‘Empire’. Once the basic structural features of the continuity (despite obvious differences) between traditional imperialism and ‘neo-imperialism’, under the contemporary regime of globalized capitalism, become explicit, the structural link between neo-liberal, finance-­ driven capitalism and the contemporary emergence of xenophobic modes of nationalism/fascism, will also become perspicuous. Hardt and Negri argue that the emergence of ‘Empire’—of free trade and a world market—results in the transformation of the old divisions of imperialist geography. Even the spatial divisions of the world into the ‘first’, ‘second’, ‘third’ that emerged in the post-colonial era, become intermingled and blurred. Capital encounters a “smooth world”, or at least, a world with “hybrid identities, and flexible hierarchies”. The related thesis that Hardt and Negri defend in their conception of Empire, concerns the “transformation of productive processes” (that leads to this hybridization of identities), which attributes a steadily diminishing role to the proletariat, as the nature of labour supposedly changes from traditional factory labour to “communicative, cooperative and affective labor”, in this new “post-modern”, “post-industrial” economic terrain.14 In contrast to such an understanding, the processes by which hegemonies (involving historically contingent, provisional claims to universality) are formed, and the historical becoming that is visible in it, bring to light the constitutive role of geographical and spatial distinctions in the process of the globalization of finance driven capital. In keeping with one strand of Marx’s analysis, I will argue that capitalism is not a closed, self-­ sufficient system but requires a contingent ‘outside’, which is constitutive for  Cf. Hardt and Negri (2000, p. XIII).

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its functioning. This ‘outside’ is both constitutive and contingent, and as such, must be understood as an empty place-holder, without any fixed content, but which is ‘filled in’, in various ways. However, understood in this way, contingency is not antithetical to dialectical systematicity, closure etc., but is the very ground for dialectical interdependence and reciprocal determination. Therefore, this reading of Marx (and Hegel), confined not just to his analysis of capitalism but extended to his conception of historical becoming (as a dialectical process), implies that unlike what many post-Marxist critics claim, the notion of ‘hegemony’, as a contingent historical formation, is not antithetical to dialectical structural necessity. This implies that the notion of hegemony, and the contingency inherent in it, can be understood within a dialectical logic, without reducing contingency to necessity, that is, appropriating it within the closure of dialectically unfolding reason. Rather, just as the closure or systematicity of the system is founded on a ‘contingent outside’, the latter can show itself only from within the former, as its ‘differential limit’. One of the places Marx locates this contingent, yet constitutive ‘outside’ is in the ‘absolute difference’ that living labour introduces with respect to dead labour (capital), leading to the apparently ‘magical’ appearance of surplus value within the sphere of (proportionately) ‘equivalent’ exchange of commodities. In the latter, this absolute difference is again re-appropriated and quantitatively represented as a ‘relative difference’, with respect to the prices of all other commodities. Yet, this constitutive outside of capitalism that on the surface, appears as a closed system (of proportionately equivalent exchange), can also be identified in the everyday dirigisme of the state in most advanced capitalist countries (in the form of subsidies to agriculture, trade barriers and protectionism, tax breaks to corporations etc.), and in its direct intervention in the economy in times of ‘crisis’.15 The constitutive outside can also be located in geographical differences between regions, and the resulting differences in climate. These  The 2008 financial crisis was only the most recent occasion for such ‘intervention from outside’, where the state took over the ‘toxic assets’ of banks and insurance companies, and provided massive bail-outs to these corporate giants, since they were “too big to fail”. 15

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differences allow, for instance, a greater diversity of crops in tropical regions, along with a longer growing season (year-round in many places, permitting multi-cropping, hence greater cropping intensity), and the greater bio-diversity that makes a plethora of natural products available in these regions. Mineral deposits and oil reserves are also not equitably distributed around the world, or distributed in a manner that is not always economically conducive to their extraction. These material facts/contingencies were not only the primary reason for traditional imperialism in its quest for raw materials16 (and markets), but are also the source of its current mechanisms in the form of neo-liberal economic policies. And yet, there is an obvious difference between the present world-order and the past—advanced capitalist countries no longer exert direct political control, or directly impose their sovereignty, on third-world countries. How then, can I maintain that traditional imperialism and economic neo-liberalism share a certain continuity? This continuity, I said, is based on a systematic relationship,17 founded on a contingent ‘outside’. I can perhaps, best elucidate this structural aspect in term of the closely interconnect divisions of ‘place’ and ‘space’.18 The absolute difference of ‘place’ (geography) between the tropics and temperate regions contradicts a fundamental premise of neo-liberalism, namely that free trade is always mutually advantageous to the trading countries. This idea has its roots in David Ricardo’s claim concerning the ‘comparative advantage’ of each trading country in producing specific goods. However, if one (tropical) country or region can produce both goods, while the other (temperate) country or region can produce only one of the goods (or produces the other in much smaller quantities), then  The argument that the motivation for imperialism lay in procuring raw materials located in the third world, was put forward by Harry Magdoff in his The Age of Imperialism (Monthly Review Press, 1969) Magdoff also refuted the counterclaim that the declining ratio of the value of raw materials to the ‘gross manufacturing output’ value, implied the lack of such dependence on third world resources, by pointing out that without raw materials no manufacturing would be possible. Cf. Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, “Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End”, Monthly Review, Vol. 71, Issue 3, 2019. 17  Cf. Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, p. 5. 18  Here ‘place’ refers to a specific location, whereas ‘Space’ has a relational meaning. Thus, ‘space’ is nothing but the socially constituted, meaningful sphere of economic exchange, and ‘spatial differences’ are therefore necessarily relative and not absolute, since they stem from relative differences of exchange-value of commodities, including labour-power. 16

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13

trade is necessarily asymmetrical, and the question of comparative advantage does not arise.19 Consequently, the demand for tropical goods, raw materials etc. from the temperate regions of settlement does not suddenly vanish in the post-­ colonial era. However, in the absence of direct political control, their extraction must take an indirect, more implicitly ideological form, through the constitution of a hegemonic consensus around neo-liberal economic ideas and policies, which are then implemented by each nation-state.20 The latter imposes an income deflation on the petty producers and peasantry in the tropical ‘periphery’, structurally analogous to the one (directly) imposed by the imperial powers on its colonies. This results in a shrinkage in domestic demand, thereby freeing up tropical goods for export to temperate regions.21 During the colonial period, such income deflation was necessary in order to maintain a constant supply of raw materials, at non-increasing supply prices, for meeting the expanding demand generated by industrial capital in the metropole.22 This demand for tropical goods and raw materials has not changed in the post-colonial era, nor even the basic economic mechanism based on income deflation, for ensuring that it is met. Yet, the manner in which the economic mechanism is imposed must change with the transition to the post-colonial period. Since, despite land and yield augmenting techniques, the tropical landmass is fixed, this puts an absolute limit on the possibility of further augmentation. Thus, income deflation is both the sufficient and necessary condition for the constant supply of tropical goods at non-­ increasing prices.  Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik (2016, pp. 9–10).  In the case of tropical countries, this hegemony of neo-liberalism embodied in, and operating through the state, allows multinational companies to extract natural resources. These companies are moreover, state subsidized, since in order to attract foreign investment various tax incentives are put in place. India is a case in point, with the ‘make in India’ (as opposed to ‘made in India’) campaign launched by the present government. Similarly under the rightwing government headed by Jair Bolsonaro until recently, Brazil was pushing for privatization, opening up a hitherto protectionist economy, and thus opening up the Amazon to exploitation by logging companies, agri-business, and ‘development’/infrastructure projects. 21  Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik (2016, p. xxvii ff). 22  Cf. Ibid. pp. 7–8. 19 20

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The modality through which such income deflation is imposed shows up the closely interconnected aspects of the differences of ‘place’ and ‘space’ constitutive of ‘globalized’ capitalism, characterized by the internationalization of finance—just as these differences were constitutive of the capitalism of the colonial period, when finance was still tied to nationstates. Even within the quantified sphere of commodity exchange, neoliberal capitalism depends on spatial differences of the ‘first’ and ‘third worlds’. For, without these relative differences it would not be able, on the side of production, (supply side), to exploit the seemingly unlimited reserves of cheap labour (along with the ‘absolute’ material differences of resources and raw materials) available in the third world. The exploitation of cheap labour reserves in the ‘third world’, in turn, results in the stagnation of worker’s wages in the first world. It is the latter phenomenon that in part, leads Hardt and Negri (and others, such as David Harvey23) to claim that in the post-colonial age of ‘empire’, the spatial distinctions between the first and third worlds are blurred, as first worlds appear in pockets of the third world, and third worlds reappear in pockets of the first. However, from a macro-economic perspective, this ‘blurring’ is firstly, only partial, since increase in ‘Gross Domestic Product’ (GDP) as a result of ‘foreign direct investment’ (FDI) that constitutes the dominant conception of economic development under neo-liberalism (particularly in the hegemonized third-world countries), is perfectly compatible with rising unemployment, given the inevitable tendency towards rising productivity of labour under capitalism. Secondly, I am suggesting that such blurring, where it occurs, is a consequence of spatial divisions, not of their obliteration. On the side of consumption (demand side), the availability of foreign markets has always been the ‘safety valve’24 that allowed metropolitan  As Harvey writes, “Those of us who think the old categories of imperialism do not work too well in these times do not deny at all the complex flows of value that expand the accumulation of wealth and power in one part of the world at the expense of another. We simply think the flows are more complicated and constantly changing direction. The historical draining of wealth from East to West for more than two centuries, for example, has largely been reversed over the last thirty years.” (“A Commentary on A Theory of Imperialism” in A Theory of Imperialism, Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, p. 169). 24  Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Netherlands: WordBridge Publishing, 2011. 23

1 Introduction 

15

capital to escape the stagnation of demand in its own domestic markets. This is as true today, with a burgeoning upper middle-class elite emerging in the third-world (even if it represents a miniscule proportion of the population), as it was during the industrial revolution, which was fueled by, and in turn fueled, the ‘age of imperialism’. For, I noted, without access to raw materials such as cotton from tropical regions, (which constituted a ‘drain of surplus’ as they were appropriated through taxation and extracting rent from the colonized peasantry, and therefore, in effect, appropriated for free), the mills of Manchester, Catalonia and New England, could not have been sustained. And without access to third-world markets (which, it is well documented, ruined petty production in those countries, and in turn, made cheap labour available by adding to the labour reserves), the domestic demand would soon have been exhausted, as the effects of industrialization in the metropolis—the tremendous displacement from traditional occupations and the unemployment it caused, leading to the mass exodus to the ‘new world’, in waves that continued into the early twentieth century—were fully felt. It is these spatial differences that translate to differences in perspective, depending on one’s location in the first or the third world that are perhaps the source of Hardt’s and Negri’s two interrelated claims (and that of western Post-Marxism in general) that 1) we are entering a phase of ‘hybrid identities’, where the traditional proletariat is disappearing as the nature of labour changes, and 2) we are entering a phase of ‘hybrid spaces’, where the traditional, world division of space and labour is disappearing, since the ‘third world’ can be found in the ‘first’, and vice-versa. Against the conception of ‘hybrid identities’, I am claiming that the traditional identity of the ‘proletariat’ is indeed gradually disappearing today; but only in the first-world, as industries and jobs migrate to the third-world. As capitalism entered its current neo-liberal phase, capital became free to migrate to the ‘periphery’ in a manner unprecedented in its history. In the past, both during its colonial, and then explicitly dirigiste phases, while metropolitan capital was free, in principle, to move to the ‘periphery’ (either to the colonies, or to the erstwhile colonies that constituted the newly formed, underdeveloped nations of the post-­ colonial period) it did not in fact do so. That is, capital remained tied to

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the nation-state, except when it invested in traditional areas such as cotton plantations or mines. It thereby maintained the ‘international division of labour’, where it primarily extracted raw materials from the periphery, while the majority of the manufacturing activity (hence value addition), was located in the metropolitan center. Consequently, the wages of metropolitan workers were relatively insulated from the low wages of workers in the periphery, due to immense labour reserves that arose there.25 This situation changes with capitalism entering its neo-liberal phase. Thus, against Hardt’s and Negri’s conception of ‘hybrid spaces’, I noted that as capital increasingly flows to the periphery, it does not blur spatial differences, but precisely, exploits those spatial differences—both in a ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ sense. The relative spatial differences consist of cheap labour and emergent markets in the countries of the periphery, whereas absolute spatial differences, that is, differences of ‘place’, lie in the availability of specific raw materials, agricultural products etc. Without these relative and absolute spatial divisions (differences of space and place) there would be no reason for capital to flow to the periphery. In exploiting these spatial differences, neo-liberal capitalism works its inherent logic, leading to the rolling back of the welfare state, to the expropriation of a range of petty producers from their traditional occupations, and consequently, to rising unemployment, as the high levels of technology, and thus, labour productivity of new, modern industries cannot absorb the labour they displace or supplant. This has a knock-on effect in the metropolitan regions, as the wages of metropolitan workers become increasingly linked to those in the periphery. The excess supply of labour in the periphery results in increasing unemployment and stagnation of wages in the metropole, since the traditional international division of labour no longer holds. However, in contrast to the period of the industrial revolution, or even the dirigiste phase of Keynesian welfare capitalism, the present state of affairs, characterized by the global shrinkage of demand (or equivalently,  Cf. Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Monthly Review, 2016, Cf. Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Monthly Review, 2019. 25

1 Introduction 

17

global overproduction) under neo-liberalism, has no mitigating circumstances that can avert a global economic slowdown. The global character of the shortage in demand means that unlike the colonial period, there are no new markets to tap. Further, the advanced capitalist countries can no longer “export their unemployment” either directly, to the ‘new world’ (North America, Australia, New Zealand) or indirectly, to the colonies. Finally, while capital becomes ‘global’, and moves to the periphery, (resulting in greater global unemployment and shrinkage of aggregate demand), there is no corresponding possibility of a mass migration of the expropriated, displaced, and unemployed people (from petty producers to factory workers) from the periphery, either to the metropole, or to the “new world”. The possibility of the migration of people from the colonies was never historically realized, except as slave and indentured labour— which may thus, be again thought of as another ‘constitutive outside’ of capitalism, that is, as part of its process of primitive accumulation. In other words, in the imperialist era, the colonies of the global south could never ‘export their unemployment’ en-masse, in the manner in which the imperial powers did. Under neo-liberal capitalism, this possibility is closed off not only for the former colonies that now constitute underdeveloped countries, but also for the former imperialist powers that today constitute advanced capitalist countries. The contemporary global state of affairs therefore, represents an impasse for the political economy of neo-liberalism, from which there appears to be no immediately foreseeable way out, that is, no way to increase global aggregate demand, at least from within the system.26 Given this impasse, it is not entirely surprising that we find a resurgence of right-wing populism, and of neo-fascist xenophobic forms of nationalism in both the ‘first’ and ‘third worlds’. In the case of advanced capitalist countries, such regressive nationalism, which is tied to rising unemployment, is directed against groups that are immediately visible and  It can be increased within the system only through occasional speculative asset price bubbles. But as we saw with the 2008 financial crisis, when these bubbles collapse, they tend to plunge the economy into a deeper crisis. The other mode of increase lies outside the system, namely government spending, but this is opposed by those representing the interests of international finance capital. 26

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identifiable; namely the ‘illegal’ (and sometimes legal) immigrants and refugees who are pushed out from their countries for economic reasons or due to war.27 However, the nationalist rhetoric, both on the economic and political fronts, need not always be in conflict with, or a sign of resistance (however distorted) to, the supranational hegemony that neo-liberalism continues to enjoy. On the contrary, nationalism in the era of globalized finance capital, particularly in the underdeveloped countries of the global south (born out of the former colonies of the imperial age), can come to be associated with neo-liberal economic policies, through the rhetoric of ‘inclusive development’ (understood entirely in terms of the growth of GDP), job creation etc., to foster a hegemonic consensus on the domestic front. Thus, nationalism in this sense, with its rhetoric of economic growth based on attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) through tax subsidies and various other concessions to multinational corporations, reflects the continuing hegemony of neo-liberalism, grounded in the asymmetric power relations (along with the contingencies of the distribution of material/natural resources) between the advanced capitalist countries and the underdeveloped countries of the global south. Thus, neo-liberal nationalism both facilitates, and is facilitated by, the supranational hegemony of globalized finance and neo-liberal economic policies. The phenomenon of competition between ‘developing’ nations (and among states within these nations), to attract FDI, cut subsidies for  On the economic front, the deleterious effects of globalization of capital manifest themselves in quite different forms in the first and third worlds. In the advanced capitalist countries (in North America, and increasingly in Europe), pervasive high unemployment, and stagnation of wages, as a result of outsourcing and the influx of cheap foreign goods, leads to the tendency towards greater protectionism. Yet, since there can be a multiplicity of possible correlations/valences between the economic and political domains, depending on the geo-political context, in our present scenario the same political tendencies of right-wing nationalism can be associated with very different, even contrary, economic policies. Thus, the former colonies comprising the underdeveloped countries of the global south, such as India, first under a liberal-democratic and then right-wing regime, have opened up their ‘borders’ to capital inflows (FDI or ‘foreign direct investment’), through privatization, and providing tax and other subsidies to multinational companies. At the same time, the Indian state has increasingly adopted protectionist policies when it comes to trade. The protectionist measures in this case, tend to fit well with the rhetoric of nationalism in the narrow sense, which on the political front, accomplishes a shift in the center of gravity of the polity from a secular normative stance that is equidistant from all religious groups, to a religious majoritarianism. 27

1 Introduction 

19

domestic agriculture and manufacturing, cut public spending on healthcare, education etc., bears testament to the processes of neo-imperialism I have been discussing.28 On my revised picture of the contemporary state of affairs, we find an ongoing dialectical movement between the ‘hegemony’ of international finance capital and the various progressive or regressive modalities of nationalism that emerge, both as complicit with the hegemonic consensus, and as forms of resistance. In the latter case, this resistance is a reaction against (in a manner that is often spontaneous and distorted) neo-imperial tendencies arising from asymmetries of economic and political power, along with geographical differences (of both absolute ‘place’, and relative ‘space’), within a neo-liberal political-economic context characterized by a sustained fall in global aggregate demand due to income deflation. If this revised picture is correct, then it must also take into account a further complication that has been glossed over in the analysis so far, namely, the obvious tension between the concept of hegemony and dialectics. Can this tension be reconciled? How is the relation between the concept of hegemony and that of dialectics, with regard to the relation between universality and particularity, to be understood? To elaborate this issue, we must keep in mind that the various political-­ economic and social forms that neo-liberalism takes, both in advanced capitalist and in underdeveloped countries, shows how the ideological hegemony its processes come to acquire can render the operation of ideology itself invisible. In other words, hegemonic formations do not wear  In Brazil’s case, for example, the country entered the most severe recession in its history in 2014, as its export driven trade with China slowed (owing to the U.S recession and the slowing down, in turn, of the Chinese economy). The economic crisis, which I have been arguing, is the crisis of neo-liberalism itself, brought the hard right government of Jair Bolsonaro to power. Yet, the Bolsonaro government’s policies again reflected the asymmetric (imperialist) power relations between advanced capitalist countries and tropical regions. On the one hand, despite the experience of recession, the hegemony of neo-liberalism, along with the ‘international’ juridical order that backs it, has led to the (hegemonized) state becoming the instrument of neo-liberalism. Bolsonaro has promised to amend the constitution in order to increase privatization, cut the deficit, and open up the economy to FDI in order to create jobs. And yet the Brazilian economy still remains a heavily protectionist economy. Bolsonaros’ anti-environmental stand, which promised to open up the Amazon rainforests to exploitation by logging companies, agri-business, and ‘development’/infrastructure projects, was also aimed at domestic big business. 28

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their status as contingent hegemonic formations on their sleeves. They are, for the most part, not recognized as such, since they involve a process of reification that makes them appear ‘objective’ or ‘universal’, and therefore, part of the very fabric of (naturalized and/or rationalized) ‘reality’. This claim to (non-contingent) ‘universality’ entails that the notion of hegemony, and thus, the political itself, must be understood in a transformed sense. The domain of the political is not constituted merely on the empirical plane, as an endless series of conflicts and contestations in the quest for hegemony (although de-facto, this is what transpires). Rather, it is fundamentally oriented by the claim to (normative) universality, and it is the invocation of the latter that constitutes the source of legitimacy for the various struggles, claims to recognition etc., within it. Yet, how this claim to ‘universality’, which becomes explicit in modernity,29 is to be understood has always been a point of debate. One systematic, specifically modernist understanding of universality is, of-­ course, articulated by the Marxist theory of the ‘inner’, dialectical logic governing socio-historical transformation. However, the standard interpretation of universality in terms of this dialectical logic of contradiction within Marxism leads to an apparently irresolvable tension between the structural-universal and the political-normative aspects of thought and praxis. On the one hand, according to Marx’s theory, ‘universality’ signifies objective structural-dialectical processes, expressible in the language of (historical) forces and (dialectical) laws, analogous (though not identical) to those of the natural sciences. These forces, and the laws governing them, seemingly escape the conscious grasp of individual actors, and operate beyond the ambit of even collective human volition. On the other, the aim of such critical analysis of the laws governing capitalism, its historical emergence etc., is to instigate the revolutionary  Although this universalistic orientation is overtly at work in modernity, as Charles Taylor has pointed out, it is inherent, in an implicit sense, to the normative (and the moral ontology of the ‘human’ that articulates it) as such, throughout history; even if in the past, the scope of this universality was conceived in a narrowly circumscribed manner, that is, primarily restricted to members of one’s religious, ethnic and cultural community (Cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989). 29

1 Introduction 

21

transformation of society. The latter requires an engagement with politics—with social movements based on the intentions and wills of individuals and groups. This appears to set up an inherent tension, bringing into question the very possibility of ‘critique’, let alone political praxis. For instance, in The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello go so far as to characterize this tension as a ‘contradiction’, ‘antimony’, and even ‘aporia’. On this reading, the Marxist ‘scientific’ approach can resolve the ‘aporia’ only by reducing the political-normative and intentional aspect to the underlying universal-structural or ‘scientific’ dimension. With this reduction, the former becomes ‘mere ideology’—a mask that hides the ‘real’ of universal structure and laws.30 As a description of bad theory on the part of some ‘Marxists’, who unreflectively take over certain concepts (such as the distinction between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’), and understand it in a rigid sense, this characterization is perhaps somewhat plausible.31 However, as we shall see, this reading of Marx (shared by some post-Marxists), which draws a strict line of demarcation between the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, necessity and contingency etc. is overly schematic, and therefore, enacts the very reduction/reification it projects unto Marx’s theory. Moreover, the problematic is an old one, and has instigated debate both within and outside the Marxist fold.32 In response to the problematic, the challenge is to show how necessity and contingency are thought together in Marx’s     Now in our view, this dual orientation comes up against the problem of values and in particular, moral values and ideals. Because it aims to dig beneath the consciousness of actors and unveil structures, laws and forces that are beyond their control, the scientific approach can deal with moral values and ideals only as ‘ideologies’, that is to say, in this conception, as more or less hypocritical cover for relations of force (invariably without explaining why such masks are necessary). Contrarywise the critical impulse presupposes reference to ideals, with which the reality to be criticized can be compared (Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London, New York: Verso, 2017, p. X). 31   Boltansky and Chiapello indicate this descriptive element insofar as they introduce the problematic of the two ‘incompatible’ orientations in the context of developments in French academic discourse, particularly in sociology, as an explanation for its turn away (beginning in the 1980s), from the Marxist paradigm to questions of political action and its ethical-normative sources. 32  For instance, from within Marx’s theoretical paradigm, it has been addressed in a non-reductive, dialectical sense by thinkers such as Lukács, Adorno and Horkheimer, among others; and outside it, by Laclau and Mouffe. 30

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discourse. That is, the challenge lies in thinking the interrelation between dialectics and “political” hegemony. I will take up a fuller discussion of this problem and the response to it in the course of this study. Here I am concerned with a tendency (which takes a specific form in modernity) that is in a sense contrary (though dialectically related), to the one emphasized by Boltanski and Chiapello, namely, the tendency towards the inevitable reification of ideology. Marx’s recognition of the processes of reification, I shall argue, also entails a recognition of the manner in which ideology itself functions. For Marx, ideology is not merely a ‘mask’ that hides the ‘real’, but comes to constitute ‘reality’ itself in an ‘objective’, ‘universal’ sense. Thus, Boltanski and Chiapello are correct in raising the question of the very need for ‘masks’, vis-à-vis a Marxist discourse that merely presupposes the dichotomy of the ‘real’ (universal-structural, necessary) and the ‘apparent’ (ideological, hegemonic, contingent), in a naïve and unreflective manner. They rightly point out that given this presupposed distinction, there is no further explanation, within Marxist discourse, of why ‘reality’ is inevitably hidden or distorted through its ‘appearance’—why does ‘reality’ operate behind the backs of actors, and not directly manifest itself as reality? Yet, this question misses its mark, or does not retain its critical force, once we no longer understand Marx’s ‘critique’ as directed towards uncovering the ‘real/universal’ behind the ‘mask of ideology’ (where the latter signifies the illusory character of anything that has to do with values, intentions and volitions). Instead, Marx’s theoretical aim is precisely to explicate (and thus, find institutional modes of acknowledgement for), the necessity and inevitability of reification (of ‘masks’), or so I shall argue. Thus, his aim is to show (in a dialectical sense), how the moment of universality cannot exist completely independently, but must be realized/ represented, with some determinate content (as a “concrete universal”), which can thereby, accommodate the moment of contingency without reducing it to dialectical-structural necessity. Founding contingency, or the ‘constitutive outside’ therefore, shows itself only indirectly from within the ‘closure of the (relational) system’, as its ‘differential limit’. This implies that on the one hand, Marx’s theoretical critique is aimed at explicating the manner in which the moment of ‘universality’ (both in

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its structural, and normative sense), is built into contingent ‘ideology’ (and the political in general). And on the other, the political/practical fall-out of such critique/explication consists in the constitution of social-­ institutional mechanisms through which the necessity and inevitability of reification is reflectively acknowledged, (which involves a certain reflective distance vis-à-vis the system, while being situated within it) and thus, the deleterious effects flowing from the reified representation, taken at face-value, are rendered ‘harmless’ (in the sense in which Kant uses the term in the Transcendental Dialectic). It is this normative-universal claim intrinsic to ideology that legitimates its claim to ‘objectivity’; and prevents it from being understood as one hegemonic formation in a historical series of hegemonic formations, or as one ‘ideology’ vying for hegemony among other equally viable candidates. The latter conception, would in effect empiricize the political, rendering it a wholly contingent domain of endless contestations and hegemonic formations that come into being and pass away. In contrast, the former, ‘scientific’ conception of universality, which Boltanski and Chiapello claim, constitutes the standard Marxist understanding, would eternalize the political, tying it to ‘objective’, ‘automatic’ historical processes, beyond the pale of human intention and intervention that therefore, tend towards a final, determinate telos, or end-state of historical becoming. Put in terms of these stark, mutually exclusive alternatives, the ‘antinomy’ that the authors indicate, does indeed render Marxist critical analysis of capitalism as the dominant ‘ideological’ paradigm in modernity, ‘meaningless’.33 However, if we keep the shift in perspective I just indicated in view, then it opens up an alternative reading of Marx. The textual basis for this alternative reading, requires detailed elaboration. However, if this thesis concerning the legitimating claim to ‘universality’ as intrinsic to the 33

    The same antinomy recurs at the level of action. Stressing historical structure, laws and forces tends to minimize the role of intentional action. […] Yet, the critical approach becomes meaningless if one does not believe that it can serve to inflect human beings’ action, and that this action can itself help to change the course of things in the direction of further ‘liberation’. […] But if, in the final analysis, all relations are reducible to conflicts of interest, and relations of force, and this is a law immanent in the order of the social, then what is the point of unmasking them in the indignant tone of critique, as opposed to registering them with the dispassion of the entomologist studying ant societies? (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2017, p. X).

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political, is correct, then in the context of our present predicament, it prompts further, more overtly political-normative questions. These questions concern the very possibility and scope of political action in general, given the hegemonic-universalistic figuration of modernity in globalized capitalism. On the one hand, politics in its modernist sense, that is, understood in its universalist dimension, is the project of human emancipation from all forms of subjugation and exclusion. Politics gains its legitimating force, not from representing and entering into conflict over this or that set of interests (‘identity politics’, narrowly conceived), but from its invocation of a universality that in principle, remains empty in modernity, that is, devoid of specific content. It is the ‘pure’ form of universality that is constitutive of our ideas of justice, equality, impartiality etc. Thus, ‘identity politics’ itself, if it is to have any normative force or traction, involves an implicit appeal to ‘universality’ in this empty, formal sense, peculiar to modernity. That is, it asks questions of those institutions and practices that symbolize the normative legitimacy of the existing socio-economic order in a way that shows up the exclusionary, hence limited, and ultimately ‘particular’ character of the ‘universality’ claimed by that order. It asks questions of the type: how is it that you can claim equality, universal human rights, democracy etc., while excluding the poor, the rights of women, ethnic and religious minorities etc.?34 On the other, if politics is never wholly empirical, but has this claim to normative universality built into it, then the political-economic ideas that acquire hegemony at any given time do not present themselves as one contingent formation that happen to win out against other equally viable possibilities. Rather, they come to occupy the whole space of the (empty) universal. That is, they come to realize/represent the necessarily empty universal in a specific way, by giving it a specific content, or determinate figuration. Yet, in a dialectical manner, the determinate representation of universality—the universal qua particular, necessarily entails exclusions. These  Cf. Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes Please!”, in Contingency, Hegemony Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London, New York: Verso, 2000, p. 102. 34

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exclusions are constitutive of its ‘concrete universality’, and thus, reified hegemonic status. However, cracks can begin to appear in this determinate, reified universality, and therefore, its status as a contingent hegemonic social formation, can also become increasingly visible. In other words, the exclusions constitutive of (concrete, contentful) universality, qua hegemonic formation, can come to ‘haunt’ it, and thus, instigate its possible expansion (but also contraction) and re-articulation. This sets up a dialectical movement between the ‘particular’ and the ‘universal’, along with the ever-present possibility of its distorted, reified representation in a dialectically one-sided, or immediate manner, within the domain of the political. In the present context, we are witnessing how, once cracks in the universalistic façade of neo-liberal political-economic ideas begin to appear, through its failure to keep its promise of inclusive growth, growing unemployment etc., they create the conditions for its particular, contingent, hence, hegemonic character to become visible. This process does not happen all at once, nor does it lead, in an automatic, linear fashion, to a progressive socialist revolution. Not only is actual politics messier, but from a theoretical standpoint, the fragility of the universalist position, stemming from its very emptiness under conditions of modernity, means that more often than not, the disaffection within the social takes a distorted and regressive form. It is misdirected at an externalized, imagined and constructed other, such as immigrants, or religious and ethnic minorities, who are seen as the root cause of all the ills of society. The externalization of disaffection preserves the appearance of internal unity and coherence—the legitimating, seemingly substantive universality, fullness etc. of the socio-economic order. Thus, not only is the (empty) universality of the social, its legitimating claim or promise of universal inclusion that constitutes its (apparent) fullness, impossible to represent, (for to represent it is to particularize it), but even its inherent negativity, its fundamental non-closure (or radical antagonism, to use Laclau’s terminology) is invariably represented in a distorted, reified fashion. If therefore, despite the fact that the hegemony of international finance capital results in a systematic undermining of democracy, through a

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whole range economic and political mechanisms,35 the logic of reification works both ways, then one may ask, what remains of the promise of universalist emancipatory politics? Are we not ‘condemned’ (to transmogrify Sartre’s formulation of our sense of freedom qua negativity) to oscillate between these two modes of reification, namely, ‘universality’ and ‘particularity’, as the two modes of ‘dialectical one-sidedness’? If we resituate this theoretical question concerning the universal, emancipatory dimension of the political, and what shape it could possibly take, within the concrete socio-historical and economic context of the present, conditioned by the basic political-normative unit of the nation, then it is clear that under the hegemony of neo-liberalism, large sections of the population are excluded from the ‘universal’ promise that the nation (embodied in the state) is supposed to hold out for its citizens.36 Thus, on the one hand, the distinguishability of the economic and political spheres, and the intrinsic claim to ‘universality’ inherent in the political, implies that not all forms of nationalism are necessarily narrowly parochial in their outlook—such that it is only with contemporary globalized capital that the possibility of traditional parochialisms, narrow solidarities ‘melting away’, arises. The nationalist consciousness that emerged in colonized people around the world through anti-colonial emancipatory struggles in the first half of the twentieth century, was based on a broad internal and external sense of solidarity that continued through the cold war. Despite the inevitable emergence of ideological differences concerning the shape that the newly  These processes include the systematic disinvestment by the state from various public services such as education, health care, banking etc., and greater spending in the name of internal and external ‘security’. Even if we ignore the phenomenon of ‘corruption’ or ‘crony capitalism’ (that inevitably arises under capitalism and is partially legitimized within it), and focus on ‘economic’ processes, it is clear how the latter results in the concentration of wealth in the hands of the corporate class, either indirectly, as private corporations step in to provide the goods and services formerly provided by the state; or directly, through various defense and other contracts that the state enters into with private firms. In either case this leads to the attenuation of democracy. 36  Often the citizens excluded belong to specific religious, ethnic minorities, and in the Indian caste hierarchy, to the “lower castes”. In the Indian context, this process plays out both through the economic expropriation of a range of petty producers, and the deliberate political (and economic) disenfranchisement, particularly of minority groups (Dalits, Muslims), through increasing privatization of educational and other social institutions (which do not need to follow affirmative action policies for instance, and/or demand much higher fees, making higher education inaccessible). 35

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independent sovereign states would take, this underlying sense of solidarity managed to unite and galvanize people under a ‘common cause’ that made a claim to ‘universality’. This claim to universality, essential to politics, was staged not merely as a unity constituted in the face of a common imperialist ‘enemy’, which would be subject to dissolution when the external enemy disappeared— but in the very conception of nationalism and the ‘nation’ that emerged immediately following independence. The ‘nation’ was a symbolic representation, a place-holder, for the unrepresentable, ‘empty place of power’ (as Claude Lefort puts it) that constitutes the normative-universalistic foundation of modern democratic societies. This enabled large groups to shed their primary allegiance to particular religious, cultural identities and feel like they had a stake in the ‘nation’. Thus, as Anderson’s conception of the ‘imagined community’ suggests, the dimension of universality is built into the idea of the nation, and becomes explicit under conditions of modernity (however the scope of this universality has, and will continue to vary). With the advent of xenophobic forms of nationalism, and the identification of the ‘nation’ with a particular religious, cultural or ethnic majoritarian identity, an advent that is not incompatible with modern capitalism (though not reducible to it), it seems that the historical moment, when the symbolic meaning of the ‘nation’ was cathected by ‘universal tasks’, is past. Nor, it is possible to argue, should we be too surprised by this retrogression to the ‘particular’, since the concept of the nation seems to be more susceptible than most others arising within Enlightenment modernity (such as rights-based discourses), to the logic of ‘substantive’ and narrow cultural, religious and ethnic determination. However, our main concern here is not to salvage ‘good’ nationalism (based on an empty or negative universality) in the face of ‘bad’ nationalism (based on a narrow or concrete universality), although this is undoubtedly an important political and conceptual task in our present situation. Rather, our aim is to underscore the logic of the dialectical relation between the particular and the universal (that constantly provides renewed political impetus to the question of national ‘identity’ and identification, and creates hegemonic discourses, again, ‘good’ or ‘bad’,

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around the concept of the nation), in order to reopen and rearticulate the possibility of universal emancipatory politics. Such a politics, (insofar as it is inseparable from political economy) would entail reimagining an inclusive society that goes beyond the present capitalist one, based on a ‘universality’ that is constituted in and through exclusions. Yet, if this imagined society is not to turn into yet another reified, exclusionary mode of ‘universality’, then the very notion of universality must be understood in an open ended, negative sense, that is, as a universality in constant becoming. A society, whose institutional forms are based on ‘universality’ conceived in this sense, would also imply the realization of unalienated existence. However, the latter is to be understood neither as a pre-modern nostalgia for some posited primal unity with (sacralized) ‘nature’, God etc., nor in the modern sense of a posited, ‘unmediated’ unity with ‘universal’ objective laws of society (governed by a ‘metaphysics of presence’). I will develop this position by, on the one hand, tracing its roots to Marx’s analysis of capitalist society and the modes of reification and alienation in relation to nature and society that stem from it. In returning to Marx (as well as Hegel and Adorno), I hope to elaborate an alternative reading compared to the standard teleological one, that supposedly culminates in unmediated universality (metaphysics of presence) where, as the story goes, the subject and object of history finally coincide in the figure the proletariat, and result in a ‘classless society’, that is, a society fully transparent to itself (in reflective self-coincidence). On the other hand, I will also show how the idea of the negative movement of universality or ‘reason’, can be found in a variety of thinkers (such as Husserl and Heidegger) in the phenomenological tradition, broadly conceived, with which Marx’s thought shares a structural affinity. By drawing on these affinities I will make a case, against the standard interpretation, for understanding Marx’s dialectical conception as a ‘universal in becoming’, that is, as a ‘negative dialectics’ in Adorno’s sense, and therefore, argue that Marx’s conception of ‘unalienated (co)existence’ in society (mediated and realized through social institutions), amounts to an acknowledgement of such negativity, non-closure etc. The animating thesis of this book then, is that the recovery of unalienated existence under the conditions of ‘disenchanted’ modernity, implies

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an acknowledgement of our finitude and dependence, both with respect to each other and to nature. This reflective realization of our finitude amounts to the recovery of an alternative, non-reified conception of modernity, covered over in the course of the historical emergence of contemporary modernity and the capitalist form it takes.

Bibliography Amin, Samir. 2014. Contra Hardt and Negri. Monthly Review Vol. 66, Issue 6 (November): 25–36. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso. Boltanski, Luc, and Chiapello, Eve. 2017. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London, New York: Verso. Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2011. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Netherlands: WordBridge Publishing. Magdoff, Harry. 1969. The Age of Imperialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Patnaik, Utsa, and Patnaik, Prabhat. 2016. A Theory of Imperialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Patnaik, Utsa, and Patnaik, Prabhat. 2019. Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End. New York: Monthly Review Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes Please!. In Contingency, Hegemony Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, eds. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 90–135. London, New York: Verso.

2 Nationalism and Its Other

Two important and influential books—Nations and Nationalism by Ernest Gellner, and Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, arrived on the intellectual scene more-or-less simultaneously, in the year 1983. While the two books treated their subject matter—the emergence of nationalist consciousness and the processes of its transformation into the nation-state—from different perspectives, their basic approach was similar. Both located the emergence of nationalism within a specific historical context, brought about through the dissolution and transformation of the old order. For both, nationalism is not some indispensable ‘natural reality’ in any essentialist sense—a pre-existing, ahistorical ‘latent force’ awaiting its ‘awakening’ under favorable socio-historical conditions. Rather, it is a new form of social organization arising from modern industrial society and the processes of social homogenization it instigates. The ahistorical, essentialist view, which understands nationalism as a ‘natural’ form of social organization, is based on the idea that there are many ‘cultural nationalisms’, which have not yet been realized and therefore, only need to be ‘awakened’. However, the anti-essentialism of both Gellner’s and Anderson’s positions does not, in turn, imply that nationalism is to

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be understood as a wholly contingent phenomenon; as if, it “sprang from the heads of certain philosophers”, and was imposed “by sheer will, […] on hapless humanity”.1 Rather, for both authors, the rise of nationalist consciousness (and its political expression in the state) represents a fundamental historical shift, a break with the past and the advent of a ‘new’ historical epoch that we now commonly characterize as (enlightenment) modernity. Being of the order of an advent, this historical shift is neither wholly necessary nor wholly contingent. For, on the one hand, not only could this shift not have come about, but as a matter of fact there are many pre-modern forms of community, belief systems etc. that continue to co-exist, despite tensions and frequent conflicts, with modernist forms of society. On the other, the historical conditions and processes that result in the advent of modernity are not dependent on the will of human ‘agents’; they occur ‘behind their backs’ (as many, including Hegel and Marx, recognized), such that once these processes of change are underway, they possess an irresistible inertia, and the movement of history confronts humans as an “objective” force beyond their control.2 However, despite certain surface similarities, both Gellner and Anderson do not follow the Hegelian and Marxist traditions in understanding historical change. Further, they do not understand modern forms of society as primarily organized in terms of the capitalist mode of production, i.e., as capitalist modernity, with its own inner dynamic, expansionist logic and inherent contradictions that bring to light ‘universal’ (i.e., trans-situational, and to that extent, socially ‘objective’) structures and processes.3 In this chapter, I will argue, initially through a critique of Gellner’s position, that the phenomena of nationalism and the nation-state, both as it emerged historically, and in its various modalities of existence in the  Cf. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983, p. 133.  For instance, Gellner understands the origin of industrial society, and the enormous social transformation it brought about, as a unique event, which was imitated elsewhere, but was in-itself unrepeatable. Further, the ‘original’, unique ‘event’ of industrialization “[…] was perpetrated by men who knew not what they did, an unawareness which was of the very essence of the event”. (Ibid. p. 19). 3  Cf. Gellner, Ibid. pp. 19–20. 1 2

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contemporary world, cannot be understood independently of this structural aspect of the movement of capitalist modernity. Further, I will explicate how the emergence of capitalist modernity, understood as this structural movement with its intrinsically expansionist logic (hence, the emergence of the nation-state, not just in the ‘West’ but also in the ‘East’), is inseparable from its basis in colonialism. The origin and spread of capitalism, and of nationalist consciousness and the formation of nation-­ states around the world in and through the ‘colonial encounter’ is therefore, not merely a historically ‘contingent’ fact (which Gellner, for the most part, ignores even as a ‘fact’, and at most, emphasizes its ‘contingency’ with respect to the origin of modern industrial society)4, but must be understood in this structural sense. This is not to say, of course, that the phenomenon of nationalism is reducible to that of capitalism; rather, that the historical and structural processes that give rise to both are closely interconnected. If this contention holds, then as I will begin to outline here, and elaborate further in the following chapters, capitalist modernity, despite its contemporary, seemingly deterritorialized and supranationalist character (as the movement of capital, apparently unrestricted by physical or political boundaries, and the universalistic normative-juridical order associated with it), not only comes to acquire hegemony through the (territorially bound) nation-state, but is tied in myriad ways to differences of ‘space’ and ‘place’. In order to make this case, at least in a preliminary manner, I will turn to Anderson’s analysis. I will argue that Gellner does not take this ‘universal’ (both in its ‘structural’ and ‘normative’) dimension inherent in capitalism seriously, and therefore, does not see the close interconnection between the emergence of capitalist modernity and the rise of the modern ‘nation-state’; preferring instead to restrict his analysis to the level of the ‘real’ (that borders on positivism). Anderson however, does take at least the normative dimension of ‘universality’ into account in his idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, only to rigidly fix its  Where he does fleetingly mention colonial expansion, he sees it unidirectionally, as an ‘effect’ of industrialization, not as a bidirectional, mutually constitutive relation. Moreover, he makes the rather surprising and historically inaccurate claim that Britain and Europe acquired their colonies by accident, “in a state of absence of mind”. Cf. Ibid. pp. 42–43, cf. p. 40. 4

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structural aspect in terms of a ‘modular’ form first arising in Europe, which can then be transposed without major modifications to different historical contexts in other parts of the world. Here Partha Chatterjee’s critique of Anderson’s conception of ‘modularity’ serves in preliminary fashion, to put the colonial encounter center-­ stage with respect to the problematic of the origin of ‘nationalist’ consciousness. Further, his critique underscores some of the processive differences, along with the distinct normative conceptions of nationalism(s) to which they give rise, as rooted in specific historical contexts. However, insofar as Chatterjee’s position falls back on the traditional contrast between ‘community’ and ‘society’ (reproducing the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft), it faithfully (if unwittingly) adheres to a deeper Hegelian structural dialectic. These incremental critiques of Gellner’s, Anderson’s, and Chatterjee’s positions, will clear the decks for rethinking the possibility of unalienated forms of co-existence under conditions of modernity, that is, without immediately taking recourse to various, ultimately pre-modern, sacralized conceptions (even if in a diluted romanticized sense) of ‘community’ as modernity’s suppressed ‘other’. The question of the recovery of an alternative conception of modernity within the modernist tradition, through a genealogical approach, constitutes the theme of Akeel Bilgrami’s essay on Gandhi and Marx. The latter provides the point of departure for further analyses concerning the notion of hegemonic socio-political formations, and thus, the domain of the political itself, as making ‘universal’ claims. However, I noted, how this universality is to be understood in the context of the contemporary figuration of modernity, gives rise to further conceptual issues that force a dialectical understanding—one which becomes aware of the constitutive interdependence and constant movement between the moment of particularity and universality, inherent to the ‘universal’. More concretely, in relation to the question of the formation of modern nationalist consciousness and identity, it will become clear that, contra Hardt and Negri, this dialectical understanding implies that capitalist modernity, despite its deterritorializing, ‘universalistic’, homogenizing tendencies, is intrinsically dependent on political and territorial delimitations constitutive of the nation-state. And contra Anderson, it implies

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that despite their historical origin in, and restriction to, the form of the nation-state (which seems to belie their claim to internationalism), and despite the modes of reification to which they are subject, socialist societies inaugurated the political possibility of conceiving an alternative form of universality and an alternative mode of ‘internationalism’. This possibility was of course, in turn distorted in its realization, and therefore, needs to be reimagined, particularly with respect to the political organization of society. Thus, the ever-present danger of reification intrinsic to the socialist project of ‘staging universal claims’ (in the historical, political/normative and economic registers), in ‘self-reflective transparency’, calls for a rethinking of the very form of ‘universality’. As many analysts have argued, it is the teleologically posited possibility (even if this possibility is infinitely deferred) of reflective self-coincidence, or transparent ‘self-­ presence’ of the social that is intrinsic to the claim to ‘universalism’ of socialist and communist organizations of society that constitutes a mode of reification—that is, falls prey to a ‘metaphysics of presence’. Yet, it is this very movement towards ‘self-coincidence’ or the ‘transparent closure’ of the social that at the same time, I am suggesting, opens up the possibility of reconstituting the emancipatory potential of the political, through a reimagining of its universal dimension as a ‘universal perpetually in becoming’. The phrase coined by Butler, finds resonance, I will argue, with what Adorno calls a ‘negative dialectic’. In relation to the critiques of both the capitalist and socialist organization of society, and the distinct types of nation-states to which they give rise, the argument, at least initially, is that the phenomenon of nationalism (as embedded in modernity), can contain a ‘universal’ dimension. That is, modern nationalist consciousness can, at least in a potential sense, be oriented towards ‘staging universal claims’, but only when the latter is rethought in ‘negative’ terms, as a transcending movement that negates all delimitations—shows them up precisely as historically constituted, provisional delimitations. Nationalism can therefore be ‘reimagined’ as a ‘universal in becoming’. However, such a conception of the universal is not restricted to the phenomenon of nationalism, since the latter, in all its historically extant variants—narrowly xenophobic, religious, ethnic, or capitalistic,

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liberal-­ democratic, socialistic, communistic etc.—reveals the manner in which the lines demarcating ‘identity’ citizen/non-citizen, ‘insider’/‘outsider’ etc.—are repeatedly redrawn, in a now narrower, now broader sense. The conception of the ‘universal in becoming’ articulates the political, as such. As I will elaborate, the more general conception of the political as ‘staging the universal’ rests on the insight, systematically articulated by Hegel, that it is impossible to isolate a ‘pure’ universal, which is not constitutively contaminated by particularity (for instance, by the particularity of religious or ethnic identity). To begin fleshing these claims out, I now turn to Ernest Gellner’s work.

2.1 The “Society of Perpetual Growth” and the Unreconciled Tension Between Universalistic and Particularistic Tendencies in Gellner’s Analysis For Gellner, the ‘age of nationalism’ is ushered in with the transition from agrarian to industrial society. The latter, as Gellner puts it, is the “society of perpetual growth”,5 marked by its greater social homogenization arising from ever-increasing social and economic mobility, determined, for the first time in history, by the ideal of ‘endless progress’. This transformation of society with the advent of the industrial age is reflective of the new, pervasive spirit of rationality that Max Weber describes.6 For Gellner, such social homogenization arising from the greater socio-economic mobility that breaks with age–old hierarchies prevalent in agrarian society,7 is based on a reconfigured, non-naturalized division of labour, which is thus open to the possibility of internal and intra-divisional mobility. The latter forges the modern conception of the nation.  Cf. Ibid. p. 24ff.  Cf. Ibid. p. 20. 7  For Gellner, agrarian society consists of a literate minority at the top of the hierarchy that includes “horizontally segregated” layers of the clerisy, military, administrative and commercial strata, often in conflict with each other, and a vast ‘under-class’ of illiterate, vertically segregated, insulated communities of agricultural producers. Cf. Ibid. p. 9. 5 6

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“Nationalism is rooted in a certain kind of division of labor, one which is complex and persistently, cumulatively changing.”8 In contrast to traditional feudal-agrarian societies, the high productivity of modern industrial society requires a division of labour that is not only complex, but highly fluid. People no longer occupy the same social positions and roles throughout the course of their own lives, let alone staying in them across generations—as was the case for instance, with traditional occupations of particular communities (weavers, artisans, blacksmiths etc.), handed down from generation to generation within the family and community.9 Elaborating this claim, Gellner writes: The immediate consequence of this new kind of mobility is a certain kind of egalitarianism. Modem society is not mobile because it is egalitarian; it is egalitarian because it is mobile. Moreover, it has to be mobile whether it wishes to be so or not, because this is required by the satisfaction of its terrible and overwhelming thirst for economic growth.10

Here Gellner takes a position that deemphasizes the normative dimension of the transformation brought about by (capitalist) modernity. This position represents, perhaps despite appearances, a reorientation of Marx’s insight concerning the normative significance of wage-labour under capitalism. Marx, of course, recognized the historical ‘reality’ of the origin of capitalism via ‘primitive accumulation’, initially through the enclosures and later through colonial expansion and the resources, both material and human (through slave labour), it made available. And yet, Marx also recognized that the emergence of the depersonalized category of the ‘worker’ (qua seller of ‘labour-power’), who receives wages for his/her work, represents a principled shift that differentiates capitalism from all pre-existing forms of society/production. For, the normative category of the ‘worker’ constitutes the social recognition of the worker as the owner of his/her labouring activity. The money-commodity (wages, in this case), as the ‘objective’, quantified expression of labour qua exchange-value, that is, of  Ibid. p. 24.  Cf. Ibid. 10  Ibid. pp. 24–25. 8 9

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the labour-power as a ‘commodity’ that the worker sells on the market, is possible only on the basis of treating all types of concrete labour as equivalent. Thus, historically, as Marx emphasizes, the commodity form cannot come into being, “[…] until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of popular prejudice”.11 This normative transformation in capitalist modernity is equipollent with the origin of capitalism, since it is impossible to determine ‘which came first’, and therefore, a specific vector of causality. This idea, and perhaps the neutrality with respect to causal orientation (if not historical causality as such), is also captured, as we shall see, in Claude Lefort’s characterization of modern democratic societies as representing a ‘mutation in the symbolic order’. Gellner’s account emphasizes the possibility of social mobility that is opened up in principle in modern industrialized society, since the division of labour is no longer understood as constituting a ‘natural’ division, giving rise to a ‘naturalized’ hierarchy. And insofar as his account underscores this process of the immanentization to the social, it does touch upon the normative aspect (how can it not?) of the breaking up of the old agrarian, feudal order. However, the absence of a structural conception of capitalism restricts his understanding of the normative to the negative moment of this transformation—to the tearing asunder of the old forms. It prevents him from seeing the reconfiguration of these forms, in a transformed sense, in the emergent capitalist-industrial order. Thus, it prevents him from seeing how the dialectical character of the movement leads to new forms of social ossification (for instance, in the bourgeois and proletarian ‘classes’), lack of social mobility etc. that, as Marx had elaborated, come to characterize capitalist industrial society. In other words, Gellner does not recognize all the ways in which the old order is both transformed, and reconfigures itself in the new order through a dialectical movement of determinate negation. As a consequence, while Gellner admits the existence of inequality and social hierarchy in modern society, their existence is understood in a provisional, empirical-factual sense, since the possibility of overcoming such  Karl Marx, Capital (3 Vols.) Vol. I, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978, p. 65 (My italics. All references here, unless otherwise noted, are to this edition). 11

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inequality is always necessarily open in modern society. Thus, for Gellner, even if social mobility may be illusory, “That illusion is essential, and it cannot persist without at least a measure of reality”.12 What is consciously sidelined in this emphasis on the ‘negative moment’ (the break with previous sets of norms), is precisely the ‘structural/dialectical’ dimension of ‘economic growth’ under capitalism and the types of social divisions, inequalities and (seemingly non-naturalized, ‘transparent’) hierarchies it again puts in place. For instance, in connection with Max Weber’s famous essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and its emphasis on the formation of a modern ‘rational’ bureaucracy, Gellner writes: In fact, although the (entirely salutary) shift of concern from the origins of capitalism to that of the origins of industrialism only occurred after Weber, and as a consequence of the emergence of non-capitalist industrial societies, nevertheless this reformulation of the crucial question is already implicit in Weber’s preoccupation with bureaucracy, alongside his concern with the entrepreneurial spirit. If a centralized bureaucracy exemplifies the new Geist just as much as does the rational businessman, then clearly, we are concerned with industrialism rather than with capitalism as such.13

Such an understanding of the emergence of industrial society, as distinct from the origins of capitalism, is ahistorical, and in fact, goes against Gellner’s own claim that industrialization was a ‘unique’ event, which could only be emulated elsewhere, but not ‘repeated’ in exactly the same manner. For, if it was unique, then it must have been rooted in the particular historical soil of its origin, and since industrialization in Europe was inseparable from its capitalist ‘form’ (indeed, I am further contending that it was constituted in and through the expansionist logic of capitalism, hence through imperialism, based on the search for raw materials and markets), then it seems inconsistent to make a distinction between “the origins of capitalism and the origins of industrialism”. Moreover, while a conceptual distinction may be drawn between capitalism and non-capitalist ‘industrialism’ (since, as Gellner points out, non-capitalist industrial societies did come into being), there is no 12 13

 Gellner (1983, p. 25).  Ibid. pp. 19–20.

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‘industrialism’ as such, devoid of a political, economic and normative understanding through which it is constituted. It follows that we can only speak of capitalistic or socialistic, communistic industrial societies (and perhaps a few variants in between), and that these are qualitatively different in their organization and underlying understanding. While these forms of industrial society (and the historical, economic and normative-­political understanding underlying them) are subject to their own modes of ‘reification’,14 the fundamental difference between them, we know, lies in the manner in which surplus value is distributed. For instance, it may be distributed either as ‘profit’ which accrues to the capitalist, who owns the means of production, or as added ‘income’ to the workers, either directly or indirectly—mediated through the state (through subsidized housing, education, health-care etc.), which owns the means of production. This qualitative difference between the various types of ‘industrial’ societies is inseparable from the corresponding types of ‘political economies’, in and through which they are constituted. And these political economies in turn, rest on a difference in the understanding of the nature of the ‘dependence relation’ between the worker and the ‘owner of the means of production’. The modes of reification inherent in capitalistic industrial economies lead to a blind-spot, where the bourgeoisie thinks of itself as the ‘agent’ of production, ‘in control’ of the production and exchange of commodities, and therefore, not fundamentally dependent on the worker or the ‘laws’ that determine the movement of the whole. In other words, it is precisely the constitutive (dialectical) character of this dependence that goes unthematized under capitalism. And it is the absence of any mechanism for the acknowledgement of this dependence that constitutes the inherent contradiction within capitalism that manifests itself through its cycles of growth and recession, sometimes culminating in crises that require  For Marx, under capitalism reification takes the basic form of the commodity, specifically its money form, leading to the well-known image of bourgeois society having “[…] conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (Cf. Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, United Kingdom: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd. 1968, p. 40). Under communism, reification consists in the constitution of a new politically dominant class (which includes the ‘bureaucracy’) that becomes totalitarian. 14

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interventions that are external to the ‘system’. In contrast, socialist economies (and to an extent any welfare state) understands this dependence as constitutive in a dialectical sense—a sense that Hegel for instance, spells out in the master-slave dialectic. Thus, Gellner’s contention of perpetual mobility within modern ‘industrial’ society, based on a ‘new division of labor’ (compared to agrarian societies), misunderstands the rationale for the division of labour that arises within capitalist industrial society. The need to constantly increase the productivity of labour—which becomes a ‘need’ only under capitalism—leads not to greater mobility, as Gellner contends,15 but to greater specialization. However, such specialization is quite distinct from the type of specialization we find in pre-industrial agrarian societies. In the latter, as Gellner rightly emphasizes,16 specialization meant a life-long pursuit of traditional crafts passed from generation to generation, which required highly skilled, labour-intensive work. With capitalistic mass production, oriented towards minimizing the costs of production and maximizing output (through the influx of technology and the ‘rational’ division of labour, to increase the productivity of labour), ‘specialization’ requires the simplification and repeatability of tasks. Each worker works on a subassembly, or on a specific process, which results in the work becoming simpler and more repetitive (while retaining its specificity), and therefore, in the ‘deskilling’ of the worker (or in ‘skill’ being measured in terms of ‘efficiency’, speed etc. in keeping with the repetitive nature of the work). It also makes the work amenable to mechanical and/or digital substitution. The true source of ‘mobility’ under capitalism therefore, is not the possibility of occupying different positions as a consequence of greater homogenization (which might continue to exist as a normative ‘possibility’). Rather, it is unemployment, arising from the stagnation in particular positions within the production process for the vast majority (the proletariat), and the ever-increasing productivity of labour through the introduction of new technologies—which may come to replace the human worker altogether. 15 16

 Cf. Gellner (1983, p. 24).  Cf. Ibid. p. 26.

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It is the combined effect of these two processes within capitalist industrial society that results in the swelling of the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed, and thus, always ensures the existence of a ‘highly mobile’ ‘reserve army of labour’. For, these processes lead to the creation of a vast proletarian class (which does not own the means of production), and parallel to it, a class of agrarian workers (who do not own land), within the modern, large scale ‘agricultural industry’, along with the constant systemic drive to increase the productivity of labour. It is clear how, left unchecked (through political-normative interventions from ‘outside’ the system), these processes constitute a recipe for increasing unemployment. The ‘mobility’ arising from unemployment remains largely confined within the borders of the nation-state, although globalized capitalism entails the emergence of highly restricted and controlled modes of cross-border mobility. What is the link, according to Gellner, between the birth of industrial society and the coming into being of the ‘nation-state’? The homogenization of industrial society based on the mobility ushered in by a non-­ naturalized, ‘ever-changing’ division of labour, is coupled with standardized modes of communication useful for accomplishing organized collaborative technical tasks. In other words, for Gellner, not only does the ‘form’ of work change but also its ‘content’—for work is “[…] no longer the manipulation of things, but of meanings”.17 In industrial society, the technically mediated relation between human beings and nature reaches a point where we no longer deal with ‘things’ directly, through expending our own physical labour, but indirectly, through the operation of machines. The latter type of activity requires technical understanding and the ability to communicate and coordinate with others in a “standard idiom intelligible to all comers”.18 The homogenization of both the ‘form’ and ‘content’ of work therefore, perpetuates, and is perpetuated by, the formation of a centralized and standardized education system that is possible only under a centralized state. The educational system is either directly run by the state, or when it is privately run, the state assumes the function of overseeing and  Ibid. pp. 32–33.  Ibid. p. 33.

17 18

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ensuring the ‘quality control’ essential to the standardization of education. In industrial society such generic education continues up to a fairly late stage before ‘specialization’ takes over. Ordinarily, ‘specialization’ in this sense is also relatively generic—the time required for specialist training is short and the individual may even ‘learn on the job’. Moreover, given their homogenized, standardized ‘educational base’, the individual can easily be retrained for a different job. The proportion of highly specialized jobs is relatively small, since, on Gellner’s account, industrial society, with its specific type of division of labour and the greater ‘mobility’ it ushers in, requires the interchangeability of personnel. For Gellner, these two factors, namely, the ‘instability’ of the division of labour in a society of ‘perpetual economic growth’, which in turn calls for standardized and ‘universal’ education system, come together to produce the nation-state, as the political institution capable of organizing and administering modern, homogenized industrial society. For, the requirements of such a society simply cannot be met by pre-modern agrarian society, with its form of tight-knit communities and internal cultural differentiations, hierarchies and ‘specializations’. In the latter, typically the task of ‘education’ is internal to the community. Communities socially reproduce themselves through the education/socialization of their young, who are trained to fulfill their preordained social roles and participate in community life etc., by the family, village, monastery, or similarly local institutions. In contrast, homogenized, ‘highly mobile’ industrial society requires a centralized education system, and is therefore, marked by an ‘exo-socialisation’, where the burden of socially reproducing itself no longer falls upon specific cultural communities, but is ‘outsourced’ to the centralized ‘state’. For Gellner, the phenomena of ‘constant mobility’ based on perpetual economic growth, and the emergence of a ‘universal high culture’ (in contrast to its restriction to the class of clerics and priest in pre-industrial society), that is, standardized, universal education, are mutually constitutive. As I mentioned, a highly mobile workforce, arising from the transformation in the ‘form’ of work in industrial society, along with the transformation of the ‘content’ of such work, calls for ‘generic training’ up to a fairly late stage (and quick and easy retraining for specific jobs, founded on such generic training). And such generic education, no longer

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restricted to diverse and culturally specific communities reproducing themselves internally, but centrally organized and overseen by the state, in turn allows for greater mobility. Together these two factors constitute the cultural homogenization necessary for the emergence of a nationalist consciousness, and the nation-state as its objective-­institutional form. Gellner emphasizes this point several times. For instance, contrasting his position with Elie Kedourie’s, he writes, “it is not the case [as Kedourie holds] that nationalism imposes homogeneity; it is rather that a homogeneity imposed by an objective, inescapable imperative eventually appears on the surface in the form of nationalism”.19 Or again; “It is not the case that nationalism imposes homogeneity out of a willful cultural Macht-­ bedürfniss; it is the objective need for homogeneity which is reflected in nationalism”.20 This claim, which attempts to establish a unidirectional (‘functionalist’) causality, is not, I mentioned, sufficiently sensitive to the re-­ configuration of the normative dimension of the social in a ‘positive’ and transformed manner in modernity, following the negation of the normative basis of the old agrarian order. It is insensitive to the ‘determinate negation’—the restaging of ‘universal’ legitimacy at work in the modern imaginary of the ‘nation’ that imposes its own obligations. However, we shall see that this restaging of the ‘universal’ is of a peculiar kind; for, in modernist societies, it cannot in principle have any substantive or determinate ‘content’. The break-up of the old order involves a de-corporealization of the social, the loss of its ‘substantive body’ (symbolically represented, for example, in the ‘body’ of the king, who was considered at once ‘human’ and divine) that was constitutive of its normative legitimacy. Yet, its reconfiguration in modernity, in the social imaginary of nationalism for instance, does not imply a re-­corporealization of the social, even if such re-corporealization is always a not-too-distant possibility (particularly, I noted, in times of socio-economic ‘crisis’). Rather, it is the symbolic staging of the ‘empty universal’, bereft of any particular ‘content’—the very emptiness of the (symbolically) ‘empty place of power’ (to use Claude Lefort’s expression), in modern  Ibid. p. 39.  Ibid. p. 46.

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democratic polities that is constitutive of their legitimacy. For, in modern democratic societies, the place of power is merely provisionally occupied by an elected representative, and thus remains symbolically empty. In this sense, modern nation-states are marked, among other characteristics, by their democratic, secular institutions, respect for human rights—specially the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, the possibility of citizenship through naturalization, and so forth. In the absence of such a dialectical understanding of this transformed normative reconfiguration (which derives its legitimacy from the symbolic representation of the very emptiness of the universal), Gellner’s conception of nationalism, when it is forced to confront the normative aspect of modern nationalism, can only deploy the conceptual vocabulary of ‘cultures’. Thus, Gellner distinguishes varieties of ‘wild’ and ‘cultivated’ cultures, in describing the formation/crystallization of a universal ‘high culture’, constitutive of the nation. In other words, Gellner’s conception of nationalism can only conceive of ‘universality’ with content. This leads to an inherent unreconciled tension in Gellner’s work, between ‘homogenization’ as a movement towards universalization devoid of specific cultural content (the basic movement of modernity), and its determination or ‘filling out’ in terms of some specific cultural content. This inherent tension, the manners in which it is articulated, and its various attempted modes of reconciliation, is one of the central themes of this work, as it informs the possibility of politics as an emancipatory project. Apropos Gellner’s analysis, the unreconciled character of this tension manifests itself in the way in which, on the one hand, he rightly dismisses the essentialist idea of ‘potential nationalisms’, based on determinate cultural and linguistic identities. The latter, following the ‘precedent’ of (cultural) nationalisms which were in fact historically realized (and those that are struggling for realization/recognition), are not dormant nationalisms simply waiting to be awakened, awaiting that is, the realization of their ‘inherent political destiny’. In the course of empirical history not only, in many instances, does this moment of political efflorescence never arrive, but it is not even on the agenda of many overtly identifiable cultural-­ linguistic communities. Consequently, as Gellner again emphasizes, nationalist consciousness and nations emerge from the process of industrialization and the new homogenized social order to which it gives rise.

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This homogenization is not ‘imposed’ as an ‘alien culture’, on otherwise disparate cultural communities”.21 On the other hand, this homogenization resulting from the ‘objective need’ of industrial society, which gives rise to modern nationalism—the very movement of modernity towards (empty) universality—is again thought of in terms of the formation of a universal ‘high culture’. In other words, it is understood as a ‘universal’ with determinate content. Thus, Gellner’s analysis once again invokes the notion of dominant ‘cultural pools’, and the possibility of inclusion or exclusion from these pools.22 In the very passage in which he denies the imposition of nationalism as a kind of a “cultural Macht bedürfniss”, Gellner claims: If it is the case that a modern industrial state can only function with a mobile, literate, culturally standardized, interchangeable population, as we have argued, then the illiterate, half-starved populations sucked from their erstwhile rural cultural ghettoes into the melting pots of shanty-towns yearn for incorporation into some one of those cultural pools which already has, or looks as if it might acquire, a state of its own, with the subsequent promise of full cultural citizenship, access to primary schools, employment, and all.23

Or again, almost in the same breath in which he rejects the essentialist conception of nations as potentially pre-existing cultural-linguistic identities waiting to be awakened, and therefore, rejects the possibility that the homogeneity inherent in nationalism (“universal high culture”), is itself a cultural imposition on existing cultural-linguistic communities, Gellner writes: Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which  Ibid. p. 46.  For Gellner, a universalized high culture and willing identification with such a culture is the definition of nationalism and the ‘nation’. (cf. Ibid. p. 55) See in particular, pp. 53–58. 23  Ibid. 21 22

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sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality, for better or worse, and in general an inescapable one (my italics).24

The tension, indeed, the ‘contradiction’, insofar as the (dialectical) ‘middle’ is excluded, is readily apparent in these passages. What must be emphasized here is that it is not a matter of gainsaying, with the emergence of modern nationalism, the formation of ‘high’ or elite ‘cultures’, classes etc. that is, the formation of a ‘universality’ with content, which therefore, sets up the logic of inclusion and exclusion that Gellner points out. For, in the first instance, de-facto inequalities, hierarchies etc. either as remnants of the past or as newly emergent forms, continue to exist in modernist societies—a point that Gellner also emphasizes. Secondly, as I have been arguing, against Gellner, there are also de-jure structural reasons for certain types of inequalities to emerge and indeed become exacerbated, if ‘modern industrial society’ is understood as primarily capitalist industrial society and as embedded in capitalist modernity (hierarchies also emerge in socialist and communist states, but for different reasons). And thirdly, in continuity with, and as a generalization of, the second point, I am emphasizing the structural-dialectical reasons due to which every ‘empty’ universal, must inevitably be ‘staged’ or symbolically represented in political and social institutions, and practices; and through such ‘staging’, come to acquire a certain determinate content. The latter then leads to the movement of ‘exclusions’ and ‘inclusions’, and the reemergence of hierarchies. My critique therefore, does not consist in denying the continuity and emergence of inequalities and hierarchies in modernist societies, both at the empirical and structural levels of analysis. Rather, I am claiming that Gellner does not have a way of reconciling the inherent tension between two opposed movements—one towards homogenization, universalization, and the other towards the formation of ‘cultural pools’, hierarchies and exclusions etc. that he identifies within modern industrial society. Gellner does comes close to a ‘dialectical’ conception, when he suggests that the modern nation involves a mode of self-deception. Having arisen from the break-up of pre-modern cultural communities, it 24

 Ibid. pp. 48–49.

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‘worships itself ’, and ‘invent[s] new cultures’.25 This claim hints at the movement towards the immanentization of the social on the one hand, and the formation of transformed modes of reification (and ‘false consciousness’ arising from it), through a determinate negation, on the other—that I have been describing in relation to capitalism. However, he does not provide any mechanism for this movement, nor clarifies why it is that nations ‘deceive themselves’. What constitutes the possibility of a reconciliation, in modernity, of the two movements Gellner identifies, is that in contrast to pre-modern societies, the hierarchies that form in modern democratic nations, have their provisionality built into them de jure, and their ‘de facto’ reality can therefore, be challenged precisely by appealing to their de jure provisionality. The de jure, ‘built-in’ provisionality here indicates the institutional representation of the negative movement of transcendence, which is always possible with respect to any (including structurally produced) ‘concrete universality’ (universality with content), towards an ‘empty’ universality. I shall develop the latter point through the analysis of the debate between Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek. This debate opens up the possibility of articulating a ‘negative dialectic’ in the sense in which Adorno first introduces it, in relation to the political possibilities inherent in modernity. Such a negative dialectical movement is, I will argue, at the heart of contemporary, specifically ‘modernist’ political struggles and social formations. Moreover, it provides the basis for reimagining the notion of ‘community’, that is, the possible forms of co-­existence, in their socio-economic and political organization, that realize an unalienated form of life. Here, as a first step towards developing these possibilities, I will turn to Benedict Anderson’s work, and his immensely suggestive and influential conception of nations as ‘imagined communities’. The latter conception captures something of the emptiness of the ‘universality’ inherent in the transformed social formation of the nation and of nationalism. I noted that Gellner does not locate the emergence of industrial society and the transformations it brought in its wake, within its capitalist context, and therefore, his analysis falls short on several counts. First, it cannot accommodate the colonial encounter and the ways in which it was  Cf. Ibid. p. 57.

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constitutive of the nationalist consciousness of the global south, while giving rise to post-colonial nationalisms distinct from Europe. And second, it fails to perceive the different processive, and often reactive modes of nationalism that can form, and indeed are forming in our contemporary globalized context, through persistent and growing economic inequalities. In contrast, Anderson highlights the capitalist underpinnings of industrialization and the formation of (most) nations, through print capitalism, the mass displacements and movements of people, and through colonialism. However, while Anderson takes the colonial encounter seriously, he understands it as the imposition of a ‘modular form’ of nationalism that first arises in Europe and then spreads to the colonies. The ‘modularity thesis’, as Partha Chatterjee’s critique makes clear, does not do justice to the complex processes of the formation of nationalist consciousness in the ‘colonies’, nor to the differences, with respect to European nationalism, of the post-colonial nationalisms that emerged from the anti-colonial struggle. Chatterjee’s critique provides the initial basis for a more ‘dialectical’ conception of nationalism in relation to modernity, which can then shed light not only on the contemporary state of affairs, characterized by the hegemony of capitalism, but also clear the decks for questions concerning the possibilities and limits of current and future political emancipatory projects in the context of such hegemony. Let us then, first elaborate Anderson’s analysis of the emergence of modern nationalist consciousness and the nation-state, before turning Partha Chatterjee’s critique and alternative interpretation.

2.2 The “Imagined Community” and ‘Modularity’ Benedict Anderson, in his well-known definition of what constitutes a ‘nation’, asserts; “[…] it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”.26 The ‘imagined’ element, in the sense of the identification and identity constitutive of 26

 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6.

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nationalist consciousness and the political entity called the ‘nation’, stems from the initial, seemingly obvious observation that even in ‘the smallest nations’ most members “will never know their fellow-members”, or “even hear of them”, and “yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”.27 This ‘imagined’ character of the community has both a spatial and temporal dimension of identification. The identification extends in a ‘horizontal’ (spatial) direction, to the other unknown contemporaneous co-existing members of the community, and in a ‘vertical’ (linear-temporal) direction, to forge a common past and envisage a common future. However, at first glance, this formulation seems too broad, since it would include both pre-modern cultural-linguistic communities and modern nation-states. The definition holds true for any ‘community’ larger than a small village, where the inhabitants do not know every other inhabitant face to face. Moreover, the occurrence of the term ‘community’ in the definition seems to go against the familiar distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft that, ever since it was introduced by Ferdinand Tönnies, has become a familiar analytic tool for demarcating pre-modern and modern social formations. Anderson allays some of these concerns by qualifying his definition. Discussing Gellner’s claim that nationalism, ‘invents the nation’ (as opposed to the essentialist idea that it ‘awakens’ potential nations to their self-conscious political realization), although Anderson concedes that Gellner makes a ‘comparable point’ (to his own), he caricatures Gellner’s argument by attributing to him the idea that nations are ‘fabrications’, or forms of (self ) ‘deception’. According to Anderson, Gellner thereby implies the existence of ‘true’ communities, which can be “advantageously juxtaposed to nations”. With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist. The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that Nationalism masquerades under false pretenses that he assimilates ‘invention’ to ‘fabrication’ and  Ibid.

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‘falsity’, rather than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. In this way he implies that ‘true’ communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations.28

Against such a reading, it is quite clear from our preceding discussion that when Gellner speaks of invention and ‘self-deception’ in relation to nations and nationalism, he is contrasting the ‘objective’ processes (industrialization, homogeneity etc.) responsible for the emergence of nations (and not some ‘true’ pre-existing communities) and the ‘subjective’ self-­ understanding which projects a continuity with the past, sees it as essentially rooted in some pre-existing community, awaiting its political awakening etc. Such ‘imaginings’ are therefore ‘invented’ insofar as they take themselves at face-value, and not, precisely, as imaginings. Thus, although Anderson’s critique of Gellner’s position is rather over-­ stated (since Anderson shares the same anti-essentialist understanding of the origin of nations that Gellner articulates), what must be emphasized here is the contrast that Anderson draws between ‘invention’ qua falsity and ‘invention’ qua imagination/creation. Qualifying his definition, Anderson indicates that it is the manner in which community is imagined in modernity, that constitutes the distinguishing feature of ‘the nation’. Anticipating the objection that I just raised concerning the ‘broadness’ of the definition, Anderson writes: In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be ­distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.29

It becomes clear that Anderson’s analysis, unlike Gellner’s, displays a certain sensitivity to the structural (dialectical) aspect of the movement of history. The style in which ‘community’ is imagined in modernity, that is, as nation, involves a transformation of the traditional, pre-modern

28 29

 Ibid.  Ibid.

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conception of community. It involves an (at least implicit) awareness of the ‘emptiness’ of the ‘universality’ (identity, closure etc.) of the nation. In order to see the peculiar emptiness at the center of nationalist imaginings, it is important to note, firstly that for Anderson the ‘universality’ constitutive of the ‘nation’ is a ‘closed’ universality; or as he puts it, “the nation is imagined as limited”,30 since each nation has a definite boundary, which separates it from other nations. Secondly, the nation is “imagined as sovereign”, for, as a product of enlightenment modernity, it comes into existence with the demise of the transcendent, divine order which constituted the source of normative legitimacy of the pre-modern social world. In other words, it comes into existence when religion, along with its (symbolic) manifestations in the realm of human affairs, loses its absolute grip on human consciousness.31 In contrast, in pre-modern, feudal societies, ‘sovereignty’, while mediated through the monarch, flowed from the ‘transcendent-sacralized’ order; and therefore, the social itself, with its hierarchical structure, was imagined radically differently—as grounded in a domain that transcends the human realm. And thirdly, Anderson emphasizes, the ‘nation’ is imagined as a ‘community’ because it results in the formation of “deep horizontal comradeship”32 and it is these bonds that “[…] make it possible over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings”.33 Perhaps, writes Anderson, there are no better illustrations of what he calls the ‘modern culture of nationalism’, than cenotaphs of the ‘unknown soldier’. The public ‘ceremonial reverence’ accorded to such tombs stems precisely from their being kept “deliberately empty”, or because their occupants remain anonymous.34 Amplifying the point, he writes, To feel the force of modernity here one has only to imagine the general reaction to the busy-body who ‘discovered’ the Unknown Soldier’s name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange,  Ibid. p. 7.  Cf. Ibid. 32  Ibid. 33  Ibid. 34  Cf. Ibid. p. 9. 30 31

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contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings”.

These ‘ghostly’ apparitions called forth by ‘nationalist imaginings’ are a manifestation of the sense of community, but now without specific content. That is, they are manifestations of the ‘empty’, though limited, universality that constitutes the distinctive feature of modern nations. This spectral haunting—the after-image of ‘community’ that appears in modernity—faithfully conforms to the movement of ‘Aufhebung’ and ‘determinate negation’ (or, “the return of the repressed”). Without naming this process, Anderson nevertheless says as much, in explicating it in terms of the emergence of enlightenment rationality and the waning of religious consciousness. The loss of the religious mode of life brings in its wake the loss of ‘meaning’—the ‘metaphysical comfort’ that religious belief provided, and which immured human beings from overtly confronting the ultimate contingency of their existence. The deep void that is left behind, calls for some form of ‘meaning’ or purpose that would fill it. However, what fills the void cannot be qualitatively the same as religious meaning, for, once the critical-reflective turn is affected in modernity, there is no going back, at least to the all-pervasive style in which religion dominated the consciousness of human beings and provided the moorings for society in an earlier age. ‘Nationalism’ is what fills the void in modernity, but in a manner that provides meaning and purpose to lives wholly within the social realm, that is, the ‘social’ understood as immanent to itself. […] in Western Europe the eighteenth-century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought. The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness. With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end

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than an idea of nation. If nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ‘historical’, the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past and, still more important, glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny. With Debray we might say, ‘Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal’.35

Anderson sees the reconfiguration of (religious) community into nation in modernity, as a secular response to the experience of human suffering and the fundamental sense of contingency to which it gives rise. The great strength of religion, and the reason for its persistence even in contemporary times, lies in its capacity to address this suffering, to provide metaphysical succor in the face of the vagaries of life. In modernity, the ‘imagined community’ of the nation serves the same function, since it affords identification with a cause greater than oneself or one’s immediate family, a sense of belonging to a larger whole. Anderson makes this point in contradistinction to “all evolutionary/progressive styles of thought” including Marxism, which are impervious to the need for such belonging, which meet all questions of contingent ‘personal’ suffering— “disease, mutilation, grief, age, and death”, with “impatient silence”.36 While there is some intuitive truth to Anderson’s analysis here, what it overlooks is the reconfiguration of ‘meaning’ and human-worth in the very critical-reflective stance that enlightenment rationality inaugurates. ‘Nationalist imaginings’ do not emerge simply as a way to ‘fill the void’ created by secular enlightenment rationality, but in the Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, constitute its very manifestation. For, on the one hand, this new critical rationalism precipitates the tremendous growth of the natural sciences (and the human sciences, following the same model)—indeed, it leads to a veritable ‘explosion’ of human knowledge that claims to grasp nature and society ‘in itself ’, that is, “objectively”, beyond all ‘mythical imaginings’. On the other, in and through such knowledge formation, enlightenment rationality, in its own dominant self-understanding, reinstalls human beings at the ‘center’,  Ibid. pp. 11–12.  Cf. Ibid. p. 10.

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though not, to be sure, in the naïve anthropocentric sense prevalent in earlier times, but in their ‘rational will to mastery’. The point here is not to extoll the virtues of the rationality that emerges and establishes itself with the Enlightenment. For, as we know, it is the reconfiguration of meaning and worth in and through the ‘critical’ rationality of the Enlightenment that ends up re-enacting an uncritical dialectical ‘one-sidedness’, which has very real deleterious political, social and economic consequences. This reified conception of worth (scientific, technological, cultural etc.) provides a criterion, a “universal” standard, by which other people, cultures etc. are judged as ‘primitive’, ‘irrational’, ‘inferior’ etc. These consequences of the reification of the ‘critical’ stance inaugurated by the Enlightenment in Europe are by now quite familiar to us given the long and bloody history of imperialism and slavery that has characterized much of modernity. Put in more abstract, structural terms, the uncritical reification of the ‘critical’ rationality of the Enlightenment results in a ‘determinate universality’, which sets up the ‘objective’ criterion for exclusions (and possible inclusions, or appropriations). However, to say this is not to immediately endorse the opposite pole of cultural relativism, or anthropological multiculturalism. Rather, our aim is to articulate, here and throughout this study, a non-reified conception of critical rationality, along with its emancipatory potential for reshaping the ‘imagined community’. In other words, it is to recover the critical stance in its negativity that the Enlightenment both uncovered, and covered over. Anderson’s analysis is more sensitive than Gellner’s to these processes of transformation and reconfiguration (that lead, for example, to the peculiar spectrality of nationalist imaginings) at work in the transition from the pre-modern religious imagined community to the modern imagined community of the nation. However, it falls short of fully grasping the structural significance of this transition. Consequently, some of the unresolved tensions that, we saw, were inherent in Gellner’s analysis return in Anderson’s. Tracing the transition from the pre-modern to the modern imagined community, Anderson notes that the imagined religious community was united by a ‘sacred language and text’, and not primarily by a territorially bound region. This allowed it to spread across the world, across

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non-­contiguous territories and different local cultures, in a manner that is in stark contrast to the territorially, (and culturally) bounded conception of the ‘nation’. It is scarcely possible to imagine today a ‘trans– national’ nationalism, as was possible in the Middle Ages, to imagine a trans-­regional ‘Christian world’ or ‘Islamic world’. Central to the possibility of imagining a world community of Christendom or Islam, was the sacred written text, which carried an ‘ontological’ or metaphysical significance. The texts were based on the idea of the ‘non-arbitrariness of the sign’, since the signs themselves were “emanations of reality”, or “divine manifestations” and not “randomly fabricated representations of it”.37 For instance, Anderson points out, “In the Islamic tradition, until quite recently, the Qur’an was literally untranslatable (and therefore untranslated), because Allah’s truth was accessible only through the unsubstitutable true signs of written Arabic”.38 This ‘confidence’ of the religious imagination in the sacredness of its texts, as the only ‘true’ language—the idea that its system of signs provides direct and privileged access to divine ‘reality’, again sets up a ‘universal’ criterion that determines exclusions, but also opens up the possibility of inclusions within its fold through ‘conversions’.39 This structure that I have been emphasizing throughout our discussion, prefigures, and indeed, shows a remarkable parallel with the reified critical-­ rationality of modernity and its claim, through the natural sciences, to privileged access to ‘objective’ reality. On the one hand, this sets up the universal criterion through which all that lies ‘outside’ the manner in which ‘reality’ is constituted in and through its mode of access—either as divine or as mathematized nature—is viewed with suspicion. It is viewed as ‘sin’, insofar as it breaks with the divine order of things within the religious imagination, or as merely ‘subjective’, within the scientific mathematized conception of nature. On the other, it also opens up the possibility of appropriations, by which for instance, the social sciences, psychology etc. emerge as ‘objective’, quantified, data driven ‘sciences’, along the metaphysical-ontological lines of the natural sciences.  Ibid. p. 14.  Ibid. 39  Cf. Ibid. pp. 14–15. 37 38

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I will take up this reconfigured positivistic conception of knowledge in the natural and social sciences, and its import, both for our conception of ‘nature’ and the political-economic organization of human society, in subsequent chapters. To return to Anderson’s analysis, he points out that the remarkable stability and spread of the religious imagined community cannot be fully explained by the sacred text that bound them. After all, the readers and interpreters of these texts—primarily the clerisy, constituted a miniscule minority—“tiny literate reefs on top of vast illiterate oceans”.40 The source of this stability, which made unification of the community through a ‘sacred text’ possible, lay in the ‘place’ that the clerisy occupied in the divine “cosmological hierarchy” that subtended the religious imaginary. The latter, in turn, was articulated via the sacred language and text that bound the religious community and gave it content. As Anderson puts it, “the astonishing power of the papacy in its noonday” emanated from “[…] a conception of the world, shared by virtually everyone, that a bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated between earth and heaven”.41 This conception of the world in the late middle-ages, its “unselfconscious coherence”, underwent a gradual but steady transformation, over the next several centuries. Anderson emphasizes two contributing factors: the explorations of the non-European world and resulting exposure to the ‘grandeur’ of non-European cultures, their religions and belief systems, that led to an awareness of “other possible forms of life”, and with it, the implicit sense of the territorial limits, and relativization, of the Christian world view; and the steady decline of the sacred language, with the emergence and exponential growth of print capitalism. The latter, in tapping into the hitherto untouched vast vernacular ‘markets’, ensured the steady decline of the hegemony of Latin, both as a sacred language, mediating between the divine and the human, and as the language of thought and intellectual discourse. The two processes—the erosion of the hegemony of Latin and the relativization of the Christian religious imaginary—were interconnected. “In a word, the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred 40 41

 Ibid. p. 15.  Ibid. pp. 15–16.

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languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized.”42 By the seventeenth century, the relativization of the sacred religious community and the decline of its unifying sacred language, was also accompanied by a decline in the absolute legitimacy accorded to the sacral monarchy.43 The rich historical and regional detail that Anderson provides to illustrate these points need not detain us here. What must be emphasized, as central to Anderson’s analysis, is that the transformation of the religious community that leads to the emergence of the ‘new’ imagined community of the nation, involves a fundamental transformation in the ‘apprehension of time’. Christian religious consciousness was governed by ‘messianic time’ which, in essence, took over the telic temporality of the Greeks, represented for instance, in Aristotle’s thinking. In messianic time, there is no notion of historical distance with respect to past events— just as the sacrifice of Abraham is understood as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ, the latter prefigures his second coming, such that the past and the future inhere (potentially, with respect to the future) in the present.44 Messianic time is therefore, ‘omnitemporal’ since it is inherently teleological, where the present (or the future) is seen as the ‘fulfillment’ of events ‘set in motion’ in the past. The ‘inner purposiveness’ of the temporal unfolding of events implies a fateful view of history, that is, history as destiny that must be, therefore, “[…] linked to divine providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding […]”.45 Such a conception is far removed from the modern notion of homogenous ‘empty’ time, comprising an endless series of ‘nows’ that flow (from the perspective of the ‘subject’ located in time), from the open horizon of the future into the irredeemable oblivion of the past. Each self-standing and self-contained instant or ‘now’, as unique and irreducibly distant from the past and the future, sets up a conception of ‘simultaneity’ quite distinct from the ‘simultaneity’ of messianic time (where, I just noted, the  Ibid. p. 19.  Cf. Ibid. p. 21. 44  Cf. Ibid. 24. 45  Ibid. 42 43

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past and the future are understood as ‘contained’ in the present, which therefore, becomes omnitemporal, eternal). The transformation of the messianic conception and the emergence of the modern conception of ‘simultaneity’ in the present, as Anderson indicates here in passing, (and as I shall elaborate at greater length in the next chapter), is inseparable from the ‘development of the secular sciences’ and the disenchantment of nature. That is, it is inseparable from the transformed conception of nature that emerges in the natural sciences, where ‘nature’ is no longer understood as inherently teleological or purposive, but merely as ‘matter’ subject to a series of causally connected (law governed) processes and transformations. The modern (secular) version of simultaneity is, on Anderson’s account, the basis for the mode of imagination constitutive of nationalist consciousness. It is marked by “[…] temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar”,46 which therefore, opens up the possibility of conceiving the ‘co-existence’ of many unknown people ‘at the same time’. In other words, the possibility of apprehending existence in the ‘now’ of empty homogenous time, is inseparable from the possibility of imagining co-existence in the ‘here’ of ‘empty’ homogenous space. The transformation of the ‘eternal’ present into an infinite succession of ‘nows’ is equi-­ primordial with the transformation of the absolute ‘here’ of place into the infinite spread of relative ‘heres’ of space, that is, the conception of space (formalized in Newtonian mechanics) as an infinitely extended ‘container’ of ‘places’ (spatial positions), hence, as the domain of simultaneous co-existence. Although Anderson does not emphasize the spatial dimension of this transformed conception of (temporal) ‘simultaneity’ in modernity, which constitutes the ground for the formation of nationalist imagination, it informs his analysis of the structure of the novel (and the transformation it undergoes), and the newspaper, which emerged in Europe, and in other cultures, in the eighteenth century. For Anderson, both the novel47 and

 Ibid.  Anderson discusses ‘Noli Me Tangere’ (1887), written by the ‘father of Filipino nationalism’, Jose Rizal. (Cf. Ibid. pp. 26–28). 46 47

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newspaper, in their very ‘form’, “[…] provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation”.48 Yet, the idea of the nation, both in its simultaneous (spatial) co-­ existence, and “[…] conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history”,49 that is, in homogenous empty time, is, I noted, subject to the possibility of a reconfiguration, amounting to reification. Thus, on the one hand, each particular national imaginary invariably projects itself back in history, and therefore conceives of itself as ‘eternal’, or pre-existing in a nascent form, awaiting its ‘fulfillment’ etc. On the other, and closely connected with the first point, it conceives of itself as an ‘eternally existent’, territorially and culturally bounded ‘whole’ (with perhaps a few acknowledged changes, or divisions along the way that do not however, affect the sense of its ‘unified core’). Perhaps this explains the particularly ‘venomous’ reaction by the state and the (linguistic, ethnic) majority towards even peaceful demands for autonomy or the right to self-determination (let alone secessionist movements), on the part of a cultural minority. Thus, although a product of modernity and the processes of evisceration of the ‘content’ of traditional religiously imagined communities that modernity brings in its wake, the nationalist imaginary invariably tends towards reconfiguring itself along pre-modern temporal and spatial lines, that is, in terms of messianic time and divine, unified ‘place’. Anderson (but also Gellner) is sensitive to the possibility of such reconfiguration through reification, but does not however, abstract and explicate the structural aspect of its movement. Thus, his analysis, centered around the demise of sacred communities, the rise of print capitalism and its role in the formation of national consciousness as a consciousness in/ of simultaneity (of which reading the morning paper is perhaps an exemplary manifestation – a ritual that Hegel remarked, is the modern substitute for morning prayers), remains, in the final analysis, a descriptively rich interpretative exercise. It does not reach the level of political ‘theory’ that would open up predictive and ‘practical-transformative’ possibilities.  Ibid. p. 25.  Ibid. p. 26.

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This is visible in his articulation of the link between “official nationalism” and imperialism, and the contention of the ‘modularity’ of the nationalist idea that results, that is, where it becomes available as a ‘model’ to be followed and implemented in diverse parts of the world. For Anderson, ‘modularity’ plays a crucial role in the emergence of modern, twentieth century nationalism (even if they are not all alike) all over the world. Tracing the origins of twentieth century nationalism in the ‘dynastic’ period, primarily in Europe (but with parallels drawn from other parts of the world, such as the period of the Meiji restoration in Japan, which was “consciously modelled on the Hohenzollern Prussian Army”), Anderson identifies a transitory phase, which (following Seton Weston) he calls “official nationalism”. The latter signifies a reaction to ‘popular nationalism’—the manner in which European dynasts in particular, adapted to the ‘winds of change’ already blowing across Europe, by paying obeisance to emerging nationalistic-­linguistic identifications, while ‘retaining dynastic power in order to rule over vast polyglot populations’.50 In other words, ‘official nationalism’ was a means “[…] for stretching the short, tight, skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire”.51 Yet, Anderson points out, this constituted a double edged sword—if “Romanovs discovered they were great Russians, Hanoverians that they were English, Hohenzollerns that they were Germans […]”,52 they were merely ‘first among equals’, and that meant that they were answerable to the “nation”, could be branded ‘traitors’ etc. According to Anderson, this intermediate phase, where the dynasts clung to power by throwing in their lot with the newly emerging nationalist idea, (rather than invoking the old divine order) for strategic-­ pragmatic reasons, can be clearly seen in the early phase of imperialism, which coincided with it—for instance, in the manner in which ‘India’ became a ‘British’ colony. The early expansionary period of the seventeenth century, with London as the ‘metropolitan center’, was  Cf. Ibid. p. 86.  Ibid. 52  Ibid. p. 85. 50 51

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‘pre-­ nationalist in spirit’, and driven by commercial concerns. As Anderson writes, “[…] until after the 1857 Mutiny, ‘India’ was ruled by a commercial enterprise—not by a state, and certainly not by a nationstate”.53 It was only in 1858, following the “mutiny”, that India came under the direct control of Queen Victoria and thus became a ‘British’ colony. Official nationalism, in this case the nationalism emanating from dynastic empire, needed to consolidate its vast territorial holdings and rule over a vast indigenous population by augmenting its local administrative capacity. In order to set up a functioning administration, it needed to introduce a standardized, (Western) education system that would produce official functionaries and bureaucrats—those who could mediate between the imperial state and the local population, to ensure its smooth functioning. Thus, Anderson points out, “[…] when the East India Company’s charter came up for renewal, in 1813” (well before the “mutiny” of 1857), “[…] parliament mandated the allocation of 100000 rupees a year for the promotion of education, both ‘oriental’ and ‘western’”.54 However, in 1834, when Macaulay became the president of the committee set up for this purpose in Bengal, he had scant regard for indigenous knowledge systems, and interpreted the mandate exclusively as prescribing a thoroughly westernized and anglicized education system. His infamous “Minutes on Education” written the following year, had the avowed aim of producing a class of persons “Indian in blood and in color, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect”.55 ‘Macaulayism’, and its project of a thoroughly English education system was intended both as a practical expedient and as a means of mental miscegenation and appropriation (from a decidedly one-sided position of “superiority”). It was immediately put into effect and actively pursued throughout the British empire. As Bipin Chandra Pal, a century after Macauley’s ‘Minutes’, writes of Indian Magistrates returning home after  Ibid. p. 90.  Ibid. 55  Ibid. p. 91. 53 54

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completing their education and passing the bar exam in England, “in mind and manners he is as much an Englishman as any Englishman” and “as much a stranger in his native land as the European residents in the country”. And yet, this class of persons, “Indian in blood, English in taste”, were decidedly second-class citizens of the empire, who despite all the exams they passed, and all the requirements, on par with their English compatriots, they met, were permanently barred from the upper echelons of power under the Raj, and thus, permanently confined to its periphery.56 On Anderson’s argument, ‘official nationalism’, provided a blueprint that was realized not only in Europe, but through imperialism, in colonies across the world ruled by various European (dynastic) powers. In the latter, it operated (in some respects continuous, and in others, discontinuous, with its mode of operation in Europe), through the introduction of a standardized European education system, and the consequent creation of, and reliance upon, an indigenous, ‘educated’ and westernized bilingual class of official functionaries, who could act as intermediaries between the imperial state and the colony. Yet, official nationalism contained an inherent ‘contradiction’, a “[…] discrepancy between nation and dynastic realm”57, that also manifested itself everywhere, creating a similar pattern of movement, where the local educated class remained confined to the ‘periphery’ (since they were permanently barred from occupying positions of power at higher levels at the metropolitan ‘center’). Further, Anderson also shows how, in addition to dynasts in Europe, dynasts in the East—in Japan and Siam, which were not directly colonized, self-consciously emulated these models—in some instances, as they emerged in the colonies. In other words, the ‘blueprint’ provided by dynastic or ‘official nationalism’, although at times mediated through imperialism, was not immediately connected to it either as its cause or effect. Anderson simply points out that the First World War marked the end of ‘high dynasticism’, and  Anderson indicates points of continuity and contrast with Uvarovian russification under the Czar Alexander III, 1881–94. Cf. Ibid. pp. 88–89. 57  Ibid. p. 110. 56

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the beginning of the post-dynastic period of the modern nation-state. Yet he provides no explanation for this transition—what the links were, either with the Great War or with the events leading up to it. Further, he contends that the newly emerging nations, particularly the non-­European nations that came into being after the Second World War—the highwater mark of twentieth century nationalism—were, consciously modelled on European and American nation-states. Yet, again there is no analysis of why the era of imperialism was, within a short time-span, decisively at an end; why the ongoing independence struggles of many colonies were ‘suddenly’ successful. Indeed, apart from the attempt to establish ‘modularity’, there is, rather surprisingly, no detailed socio-economic and cultural analysis of the independence struggles of the various colonies (with only passing references to the writings of individual ‘colonial subjects’). This is surprising because the anti-colonial struggles were the most explicit, and the most historically proximate instances of ‘nations in the making’. The new states of the post-World War II period have their own character, which nonetheless is incomprehensible except in terms of the succession of models we have been considering. One way of underlining this ancestry is to remind ourselves that a very large number of these (mainly non-­ European) nations came to have European languages-of-state. If they resembled the ‘American’ model in this respect, they took from linguistic European nationalism its ardent populism, and from official nationalism its Russifying policy orientation. They did so because Americans and Europeans had lived through complex historical experiences which were now everywhere modularly imagined, and because the European languages-­ of-­state they employed were the legacy of imperialist official nationalism.58

Thus, ‘modularity’, once it is formulated as a thesis, seems to preclude the need for any analysis of the formation of nationalist imaginaries in the (erstwhile) colonies. And it is here, as Partha Chatterjee points out, that Anderson’s analysis begins to appear somewhat one-sided. For, despite the descriptive richness with which he deals with non-European  Ibid. p. 113.

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histories, particularly of the early modern, dynastic period (such that his account cannot be termed obviously Eurocentric), his analytical frame remains indexed to European (and more broadly, ‘western’) histories, in terms of which he understands the historical processes of the non-­ European world. This is not to say that the nationalist imaginary does not, as a matter of ‘historical fact’, first arise in Europe, or that it is then available as a precedent to other societies. Rather, my contention here, initially in line with Partha Chatterjee’s argument, is that the ‘modular conception’, even if it takes contextual contingencies into account, which give different nationalist imaginaries “their own character”, is too theoretically simplistic—it does not capture the inner movement and ‘complexity’ of historical processes. ‘Complexity’ here carries at least two distinct, though interconnected meanings, and therefore, may be understood at two different levels. And both valences are of-course, open to debate and alternative interpretations. First, by historical ‘complexity’ we may understand the empirical history of a particular region and the specific details and nuances of its development. It is this empirical understanding that I suspect, drives both Anderson’s ‘models’, which constitute descriptive generalizations, and Chatterjee’s resistance and counter-arguments to those generalizations. As I will argue, the objections of the type Chatterjee raises, follow the same empirical pattern of argumentation. For instance, one that might insist that notwithstanding the ‘complexity’ of the history that ‘Americans and Europeans had lived through’, the lived histories of the of anti-colonial struggles, particularly in the tropical regions (something to which Anderson does not pay enough attention) responds to their own set of complex socio-economic and cultural conditions. Therefore, these histories manifest their own modes of development, that is, modes of ‘imagining’ the nation, which cannot be captured by the notion of ‘modularity’—at least as a ‘pre-finished’ model available merely for ‘imitation’. As I will elaborate in the next section, this type of objection, while hinting at more basic structural processes at work, remains, at the same level of empirical description and generalization as the thesis of modularity it opposes.

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However, even at the level of empirical history, we may direct other objections to Anderson’s thesis in general, and the succession of ‘models’ he descriptively identifies. For instance, although the East India Company came to acquire dominance in the Indian subcontinent in the early phase of English colonial conquests, the idea that these conquests were ‘pre-­ national in spirit’ is debatable. The East India Company, though a private enterprise, was closely overseen and controlled by the British parliament. The latter had the power (not unlike the situation with ‘multinational’ companies in contemporary capitalism, which are still subject to the laws of the nation-state in which they originate) to renew its charter, impose various conditions, and partake in its surplus through taxation, and, as it turned out, assume direct control over the company and its territories, in the immediate aftermath of the sepoy rebellion. Anderson himself attests to these conditions, underscoring the fact that it was when East India Company’s charter came up for renewal in 1813, well before the “mutiny”, that the British parliament mandated the introduction of a program for ‘native education’, paving the way for the imposition of Macauley’s system of education in the Indian subcontinent and other territories controlled by ‘British interests’. Nor can one agree, without hesitation, with Anderson’s claim that the ‘official’ takeover of the territories of the ‘Company’ by the British crown under Queen Victoria in 1858, a year after the sepoy uprising, was specifically ‘dynastic’ in character, representing therefore, ‘dynastic nationalism’, as mediated through colonialism. The events of the English revolution (1640–1660) that led to the execution of King Charles I in 1649, were already two centuries old by the time ‘India’ came under the ‘crown’. And although, as we know, the monarchy was restored following a brief interlude (1649–1659) of bourgeois-republican government, as Christopher Hill has argued, some of the lasting effects of this interlude included the weakening of the idea of the ‘divine right of kings’, the expansion of parliamentary powers, and the provision that the rule of the monarchy was limited by a constitutional agreement, that is, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. All these factors contributed to the birth of the idea of a ‘nation’, where the monarchy had a reduced symbolic function, rather than absolute authority.

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And yet, the tendency to cling to the old order (precisely to its symbolic value) in the face of an unfamiliar, newly emerging order is readily discernible throughout periods of historical upheaval. India coming under the direct control of the British, symbolically mediated through the crown, is analogous in some respects to the manner in which the sepoy uprising of 1857, tried to symbolically represent itself through the old Mughal order (what was left of it). Once it spread from its point of origin in the regiments in Meerut and captured large parts of the Northwestern Provinces and Oud (Awadh), the rebellion sought to organize and orient itself by naming the ailing 81-year-old Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last in the line of Kings of the Mughal empire, whose sun had long since disappeared below the horizon, the ‘emperor of Hindustan’. If these types of historical phenomena, where the old order remains as the outer husk dissembling the emergence of the new, are termed ‘dynastic nationalism’, then of course, the term must be construed in a sense entirely different from the one Anderson insists upon. In any case, the pan-nationalist sentiment of the rebellion, its patriotic fervour, and sense of unity born out of a common feeling of resentment in the face of perceived injustices perpetrated by the British, meant that the import of these events went far beyond mere “mutiny” within the ranks, as the British imperial historians (the Cambridge school) viewed it. Anderson, somewhat surprisingly, yet suggestively, follows these historians, in calling the 1857 ‘uprising’ a “mutiny”, rather than a “revolt”, or the “first war of independence”, as the Indian historians of nationalism did. In this respect, Anderson, however implicitly, approaches the question of imperialism from the (Eurocentric) perspective of the colonizer, rather than that of the colonized. It is this limited perspectival locus that prevents him from seeing the processive character of the constitution of nationalistic consciousness in the colonies, and leads him to posit a (reified) modular concept of nationalism, after it first arose in Europe. More precisely, if we keep in mind Anderson’s analysis of the formation of nationalist consciousness in Europe (and the Americas), then we may say that in positing a static, ‘modular’ explanation for its emergence in the non-European world, he forgets its dynamic, interdependent

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dimension, which his own analysis had unearthed in the European context. Recall that one of the points Anderson’s makes in this connection, is the gradual demise of the ‘absolute’ character of the Christian religious order (along with the demise of the inherent hierarchy or ‘verticality’ of its ordering), due to the rapid growth of print capitalism and the vernacular press, the relativization of the Christian world in the late Middle Ages, through travel and exposure to other ‘grand’ cultures, religions and civilizations. To a large extent this ‘forgetting’ of parts of his own analysis (and its implications), whether of the processive, dynamic character of the emergence of nationalism (in Europe), or the fact that the East India Company was controlled by the British parliamentary system, has it basis in Anderson’s mode of analysis, which, I noted, never goes beyond empirical generalization. Questions such as how is it that the East India Company’s territorial assets, though reflecting a ‘pre-national’ phase of colonial expansion, were always subject to the British parliament, and could be so easily appropriated in the name of the ‘crown’, do not trouble Anderson, and find no place in his analysis. For, that would require an analysis at a different, structural level—one that would bring to light how the expansionary ‘commercial interests’ of the Company and the specific capitalist-industrial form that the nation-­ state took in Europe, were constitutively interdependent. In other words, it would require an analysis of the mutually constitutive character of the relations between capitalism, the nation-state, and colonialism. The absence of such a ‘non-empirical’ mode of analysis, prevents Anderson from abstracting the universal-structural dimension of the processive emergence of nationalist consciousness, first in Europe, and then elsewhere in the world. Against Anderson’s conception of modularity (but also against Chatterjee’s critique of it), I am contending that ‘modularity’ is not to be understood as a finished paradigm, that is then emulated in various ways and to various degrees elsewhere. Rather, it must be conceived as the universal, generalizable structural process inherent in historical becoming that is, for the most part, unconsciously enacted, although at times may also be consciously, actively striven after. The latter in turn, as I shall argue, should not be thought of in terms of telic finality awaiting its

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realization, since that would retain the static, reified modular form, and simply situate it within the ‘essential’ unfolding of history, as its inherent telos. For the moment, however, it is important to emphasize that historical ‘complexity’ can also signify something more than merely ‘empirical complexity’, namely, the dialectical-structural movement of ‘becoming’ that inheres in the empirical, and leads to the formation of nationalist imaginaries. Thus, we can speak of the ‘same’ movement, seen from an empirical-descriptive and from a structural-dialectical stand-point. From the latter perspective, nationalist consciousness is formed in and through the colonial encounter, not simply by ‘emulating available models’, but through, as Frantz Fanon argues so forcefully, an open, often violent confrontation with, these “models”.59 The latter in turn, cannot remain unaffected by this encounter, and this process is constitutive in an ongoing sense, of the nationalist imaginary, both for the colonizer and colonized.60 Further, as I shall elaborate, at bottom this dialectical movement is governed by the idea of (unreified, ‘empty’) universality, and it is the ‘limited imaginings’ of the universal (determinate universality or universality with content) in its concrete, historically extant forms (that of the  Cf. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1963, p. 35.  Fanon hints at the dialectical-historical character, both at the conceptual and ‘material’ level, of the relation between the colonized and the colonizer, that is, the process of mutual constitution through confrontation/being pitted against each other, by which nations are imagined and, in the case of the colonizers, projected. 59 60

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together—that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler—was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing “them” well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system (Ibid. p. 36).

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nation, for instance) that calls for its transcendence. The latter therefore, sets up the universal not as a finished model to be emulated, but as a ‘universal in becoming’, and the movement towards ‘its realization’, as an ‘infinite movement’, where this ‘realization’ is infinitely deferred. From the theoretical perspective, the notion of a ‘universal in becoming’ entails the idea of a negative dialectic. Irfan Habib captures something of the processive, mutually constitutive aspect of ‘nationalist imaginings’ within the framework of colonialism, where such imaginings, both for the colonizer and the colonized, are no longer understood as ‘finished products’, but as always ‘in becoming’. In connection with the emergence of Indian nationalist consciousness through the colonial encounter and the struggle for independence, he writes, “the idea of the nation […] has an impeccable European genealogy, with the French Revolution as its fountain-head, and so also the ideas that defined the contours of what the nation should be like when freedom was won”.61 And yet, unlike Anderson, he does not arrive at a ‘modular’ conception of nationalism in his analysis of the nationalist consciousness, along with the newly formed nation-states that emerged through the independence struggles of the colonized in the territories of the global south. Rather, as Habib puts it, what is “[…] to be emphasized is not, of course, the ancestry of the concept of [Indian] ‘nation’, but the struggle which went into creating it”.62 As Habib points out, Anderson’s ‘modular’ conception of nationalism stems from a failure to understand the fundamental difference between the nature of colonial expansion that ushered in the age of imperialism (inaugurated by Columbus’ landing on the shores of north America in 1492 and Vasco da Gama’s landing on the shores of ‘India’ in 1498), and ‘foreign conquests’ from earlier historical epochs. Earlier conquests resulted in foreign rulers simply taking the place of native rulers, and settling in the conquered lands, such that their extraction of surplus from the native population remained within its territorial limits. Habib points out that the ‘Norman conquest of England’ (1066 AD), the ‘Ghorian  Irfan Habib, “Nationalism in India”, Social Scientist, Vol. 45, No. 3/4, 2017, p. 6.  Ibid.

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conquest of northern India’ (1200 AD), and the Mongol empire that at its height, stretched over most of Eurasia (1300 AD), all followed a similar pattern.63 In stark contrast, since the phenomenon of colonialism was inextricably tied to the emergence and expansion of capitalism, its distinctive feature was the “[…] continuous huge transfer of wealth and resources from the enslaved countries to the conquering countries”.64 This was the process of primitive accumulation of capital through colonialism that, as Marx so vividly articulates, was intrinsic to the emergence of industrial capitalism in Europe. The discovery of Gold and Silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the original inhabitants, the beginning of the conquest and looting of East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for commercial hunting of black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.65

As I noted, primitive accumulation through colonial expansion and exploitation, marks the ‘constitutive outside’ that is appropriated ‘inside’ the seemingly ‘closed and self-contained’ logic of the capitalist system, such that once it has been appropriated, it appears as if it was always a part of the system. This ‘constitutive outside’ manifests itself in the differences of ‘place’ and ‘space’ (that is, absolute and relative differences) that set up the colonialist (and now, neo-liberal) expansionary and exploitative logic of capitalism. Habib hints at this understanding of primitive accumulation at the heart of capitalism as the process of the appropriation of its constitutive outside’, and its link with colonial expansionary tendencies. Explicating the passage from Marx above, which he quotes, he writes, Let us remember that to Marx, primitive (or primary) accumulation meant expropriation of non-capitalist sectors or classes for ultimate conversion to  Cf. Ibid. p. 3.  Ibid. 65  Marx, Capital Vol. I (1978, p. 703), Quoted in Habib (2017, p. 4). 63 64

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capital—in other words, expropriation of non-capitalist economies. It thus included the exploitation of conquered countries or colonies, a process whose early stages were so strikingly described above by Marx, which was followed by a long subsequent phase of ‘expropriation’, on an ascending scale, as the colonial powers turned into industrial capitalist countries, which sought raw materials in tribute from the colonies and simultaneously deindustrialized the latter into becoming their markets.66

Anderson does not see the constitutive dimension of the ‘outside’ of primitive accumulation through colonialism, for the capitalist system (even in the case of Latin America, which he discusses extensively). As a result, he does not register the collective sense of suffering, in the face of the exploitation (and violence) perpetrated on the part of the colonial powers that (much more so than Macaulayism), proved instrumental in forging a common nationalist consciousness. Again, Habib’s reading is instructive here—of the events of 1857–58 he writes: It is only with the British conquest that the notion grew of common suffering and common resistance within India as a whole. We see its explicit expression in 1858, when the rebels of 1857–58 framed their reply to Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858: they began by recalling the British destruction of Tipu Sultan’s Mysore, and their subsequent acts of aggrandizement in India and ended with the annexation of the Punjab and the deposition of Duleep Singh.67

These were merely the first stirrings of nationalist consciousness, arising from a common, unifying sense of loss and suffering, following the British conquests of independent states. Against Perry Anderson, Habib argues that while the territorially bound sense of a ‘country’ existed from ancient times, the modern sense of this region as a ‘nation’ began to emerge with the theoretical articulation of this sense of suffering by the ‘economic nationalists’, who brought to light the structural processes of economic exploitation under British colonialism.

 Habib (2017, p. 4).  Ibid. p. 5.

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The burden placed on India’s poor by colonial exploitation, the heavy tribute and de-industrialization through free trade were analyzed by the ­‘economic nationalists’ […], such as Dadabhoy Naoroji and R C Dutt, in major works at the beginning of the twentieth century, so that an increasingly large number began to see the very existence of English rule as the source of India’s impoverishment.68

This processive ‘complexity’, both at the empirical and theoretical level is, needless to say, missing in Anderson’s analysis and the static conception of modularity resulting from it. With respect to the latter, what Habib in effect cautions against, is the tendency, determined by the empirical/descriptive approach, of attributing primacy to ‘origins’—to ‘historical firsts’, whether factual, as in the case of Europe, or mythologized, as with the contemporary Hindu religious right in India, which posits the idea of a ‘Hindu rashtra’ (Hindu nation) back into ancient texts. Yet, since the empirical and the structural-dialectical, though analytically distinguishable, are intertwined in the same phenomena, in different ways, both Anderson and Chatterjee unwittingly bring to light this processive–constitutive character of nationalism and its inherent appeal to a sense of ‘universality’, while at the same time succumbing to the pull of the reified ‘finished product’. For instance, Anderson cites Javanese-­ Indonesian nationalist Suwardi Suijaningrat, who in 1913, protested the decision of the Dutch colonial administration in Batavia (following directives from the Metropole) to publicly celebrate the independence of Netherlands from the French. Suwardi Suijaningrat wrote an article in his own Dutch language newspaper, in the ‘voice of a Dutchman. The title of the article is ‘Als ik eens Nederlander was’ (If I were for once to be a Dutchman). In my opinion, there is something out of place - something indecent — if we (I still being a Dutchman in my imagination) ask the natives to join the festivities which celebrate our independence. Firstly, we will hurt their sensitive feelings because we are here celebrating our own independence in 68

 Ibid.

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their native country which we colonize. At the moment we are very happy because a hundred years ago we liberated ourselves from foreign domination; and all of this is occurring in front of the eyes of those who are still under our domination. Does it not occur to us that these poor slaves are also longing for such a moment as this, when they like us will be able to celebrate their independence? Or do we perhaps feel that because of our soul-destroying policy we regard all human souls as dead? If that is so, then we are deluding ourselves, because no matter how primitive a community is, it is against any type of oppression. If I were a Dutchman, I would not organize an independence celebration in a country where the independence of the people has been stolen.69

Again, Anderson interprets this passage from the standpoint of empirical history, indicating how, under ‘imperial official nationalism’, standardized European education spread to the colonies and with it, brought increasing awareness of the ‘European national histories’ to “the consciousness of the colonized”; thereby of course, substantiating his claim of modularity. As if, the sense of injustice that the colonized felt vis-à-vis the colonizers could only arise through being exposed to European ideals of the Enlightenment, and the contradiction between it and what was actually practiced in the colonies! Clearly however, an alternative explanation is possible—which takes the growing sense of resentment felt under the colonial regime, as already containing an implicit appeal to a universal notion of justice, and with it, an awareness, perhaps inarticulate at first, of the ‘limited’ form of ‘universality’ embodied in the colonial state. In other words, what is ‘universal’ in this sense is the human capacity for freedom, which finds expression initially, in an inarticulate dissatisfaction with the status quo, before it is articulated in various ways, based on a ‘universal’ sense of justice. Its explicit articulation can manifest itself via an appeal to the conscience of the colonizers, which brings to light the inherent contradiction between their claim to universality (of the enlightenment ideals of justice, equality etc.), and the ‘reality’ of colonial subjugation and exploitation, which amounts to an exclusion of the colonized from the ‘universal’. Yet it can, and does eventually, manifest itself on its  Anderson (1983, p. 117).

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own terms, through the formation of a new nationalist self-identity—a new ‘concrete universal’. However, from a theoretical perspective, as I will elaborate, this sense of universality can be sustained only as a transcending movement, that is, as a movement of negativity, thus, a universality always in ‘becoming’. Before moving to this more abstract, structural notion of negativity, that is, of a ‘negative dialectic’ and how it articulates the political, let me turn to Partha Chatterjee’s analysis, in order to bring to light its concrete manifestation in the colonial encounter (in the Indian context), and the formation of a nationalist consciousness.

2.3 The Critique of Modularity: The Division Between the ‘Spiritual’ ‘Inner’ World and the ‘Material’ ‘Outer’ World; and the Problem with This Division When Understood Non-Dialectically Chatterjee notes that it is with Benedict Anderson’s influential book that the question of nationalism was rescued from the domain of ‘area studies’, dominated by the arcane debates of ‘area specialists’, and once more (after its initial resurgence in the victories of the anti-colonial struggle) placed within the ‘framework of a universal history’.70 Anderson’s central thesis, I noted, is that while historically nationalism (and the nation-­ state) is a ‘cultural artifact’ that came into existence in seventeenth century Europe as the result of various and complex historical forces and institutional mechanisms, “[…] once created, it became modular, capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly large variety of political and ideological constellations”.71 Central to the modularity thesis, and thus, the possibility of the spread of  Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993, pp. 4–5. 71  Anderson (1983, p. 4). 70

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nationalist consciousness to diverse social terrains, is the idea that nationalisms are not reducible as concrete products of particular regions and cultures, even though they doubtless arise in the historical soil of a particular time and place. Rather, as we saw, they constitute an ‘imagined’ political community—as the mise-en-scène, or symbolic representation of ‘meaning’ for a particular people. This symbolic representation attains an explicitly political character that takes a specific form, in the wake of the attenuation and dissolution of religious and dynastically ordered communities that the Age of Enlightenment brings about.72 However, the theoretical concept of the ‘nation’ qua ‘imagined community’, that Anderson arrives at by abstracting it from the concrete historical circumstances and processes of its birth in Europe, and the resultant idea of ‘modularity’ that enables this concept to be ‘applied’ to vastly different places and histories, contains the danger of a static, hegemonic homogenization that overlooks differences, at the interconnected levels of ‘process’ and ‘product’. That is, it runs the risk of overlooking differences in the manner in which the nation was imagined in and through the colonial encounter, and continues to be (re)imagined in the post-colonial world. Therefore, it appears oblivious to the insight that ‘nations’, and all ‘universals’, which necessarily inhabit a domain between the concrete and the imagined, are always ‘nations/universals in becoming’. Chatterjee begins to voice these concerns when he writes: I have one central objection to Anderson’s argument. If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them from Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem has decreed that we in the post-colonial world only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf, not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation but also that of our anti-colonial resistance and post-­ colonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.73

 Cf. Ibid. p. 7.  Chatterjee (1993, p. 5).

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As Chatterjee clarifies, the objection is not based on some immediate emotional or sentimental ‘reaction’, but on the ground that he cannot reconcile the ‘modular’ view with the historical evidence on anti-colonial nationalism in Asia and Africa (and one might add, Latin America). “The most powerful and the most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not on an identity but rather on a difference with the “modular” forms of the national society propagated by the modern West.”74 This difference however, is doubly obfuscated, since not only the colonizer but the colonized understand themselves (though from different perspectives) in terms of the history of the modern nation-­ state in the West.75 The last point might seem to corroborate Anderson’s thesis of ‘modularity’. What Chatterjee (in a manner similar to Habib) hints at here, however, is a more subtle theoretical point. While Western concepts of nationalism might well be available as reified categories (which I have argued, remain at the level of empirical generalizations in Anderson’s analysis) both for the colonizer and the colonized, allowing for their ‘modularity’, this is not what actually transpires in the processive emergence of anti-colonial national consciousness.76 Chatterjee’s alternative analysis points to an ‘inner conflict’ or tension in the formation of anti-­ colonial national consciousness, rather than a straightforward ‘modular’ appropriation. By my reading anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains—the material and the spiritual. The material is the domain of the ‘outside’, of the economy and of state-craft, of science and technology, a domain where the West had proved its  Ibid.  Cf. Ibid. pp. 5–6. 76  As we shall see, this ‘gap’ between the implicit though potentially infinite phenomenal domain of ‘sense’ (through ‘passive synthesis’), and its explicit, though narrow reflective articulation and determination (through active synthesis i.e., judgment) in concepts (meaning) that classical phenomenology brings to light, can be recast in the political domain. I will elaborate this movement in its political modality, in terms of Ernesto Laclau’s notion, following Gramsci, of ‘hegemony’, and the possibilities of political intervention it opens up in the transformation of these hegemonic articulations. 74 75

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superiority and the East had succumbed. In this domain then, Western superiority had to be acknowledged and its accomplishments carefully studied and replicated. The spiritual, on the other hand, is an ‘inner’ domain bearing the essential marks of cultural identity. The greater one’s success in i­mitating Western skills in the material domain therefore, the greater the need to preserve the distinctness of one’s spiritual culture. This formula is, I think, a fundamental feature of anti-colonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa.77

The book goes on to trace this tension and interrelation between the ‘material’ and the ‘spiritual’, the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’, in the formation of a nationalist consciousness in the historical context of middle-class Bengal. The book can perhaps be faulted for its narrow focus on Bengal, not to speak of the absence of any discussion with respect to Asian and African anti-colonial movements. Yet, the tension that it articulates, between the material/outer and spiritual/inner, and the manner in which this plays out, is rich in its theoretical potential. As Chatterjee elaborates, it is in the ‘inner’, spiritual domain of ‘national culture’, which is already sovereign, where all incursions of colonial power are resisted. However, this domain cannot remain static; unaffected by the provocations of the ‘external’ ‘material’ world, where colonial power and its dominant conceptions, its science and technology, and the manners in which it perceives the colonized, reign supreme. It is in the ‘inner’ sphere that anti-colonial consciousness instigates its “most powerful, creative and historically significant” nationalist imaginings, in the search for a non-western, indigenous modernity.78 Chatterjee traces, with a historian’s eye, this new emergent nationalist self-consciousness in the ‘inner’ cultural domain, in the transformations in Bengali literature, in aesthetic sensibilities through drama and art, the status of women, the peasantry etc., where ‘modular’ western genres and categories—the influences of the outer colonial world of western modernity, were taken up and often self-consciously reconstructed. According to Chatterjee, it is this modular conception of ‘nationstate’ that is imposed from above, particularly under the regime of a  Chatterjee (1993, p. 6).  Cf. Ibid.

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colonial-­state that “[…] sought to fashion the conceptual instruments of its control over an alien population […]”.79 These imposed ‘conceptual instruments’ transform the earlier ‘fuzzy’ communitarian solidarities, with their multi-layered modes of significance, into quantified, enumerated communities, castes and religions. This leads to the ossification of identities for the purposes of administrative control. For Chatterjee, this mode of reified categorical imposition on the part of the modern colonial-­state was resisted from ‘within’ by the anti-colonial nationalist imagination, which attempted to fashion an alternate conception of ‘modernity’ based on communitarian solidarities. Gandhi is the exemplar of this alternative conception—of the community conceived in terms of “love, kinship, austerity and sacrifice”. In this sense, Chatterjee notes, Gandhi is thoroughly ‘anti-modern’, that is, anti-individualistic and anti-capitalistic.80 What is implicit here, and what I shall make explicit in the next chapter, is that Gandhi and many other anti-colonial nationalists clearly recognized (unlike both Gellner and Anderson) that colonialism was inseparable from capitalist modernity and the industrial society to which it gave rise. Perhaps the most prominent early nationalist economist to recognize this was Dadabhai Naoroji Dordi, who in his book, suggestively titled, ‘Poverty and Un-British Rule in India’ (for Anderson no doubt, further evidence of modularity!), worked out the systemic/structural character of colonial-capitalistic economic exploitation in his theory of the ‘drain of wealth’ from the colonies to the metropole. However, the recognition of this intrinsic connection between capitalistic modernity and colonialism,81 pushes Chatterjee towards asserting the primacy of ‘community’, which he thinks harbors the potential for a ‘modernity’ distinct from capitalist modernity and its liberal-normative regime. For Chatterjee, ‘community’, usually relegated to the pre-history of capitalist modernity, which the latter ‘overcomes’ or ‘dissolves’, in the  Ibid. p. 223.  Cf. Ibid. p. 237. 81  This recognition is (or was, until quite recently, prior to the emergence of neo-liberalism as the hegemonic force), as much a commonplace in the anti-colonial and post-colonial nationalist discourse of the global south, as it is missing (with a few notable exceptions) in the discourse of the global north. 79 80

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onward march of human universal history, is its ever persistent, always naturalized, hence unthought ‘other’. It is this unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable, conflict between capitalism and community that continues to energize the question of national identity, forcing it into reified determinate categories that tend to ‘substantialize cultural differences’. This leads to the inevitable constitution of hierarchies, the formation of ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’ etc., which then create the basis for the exclusion of the latter from the hegemonic nationalist narrative. What then are the true categories of universal history? State and civil society? Public and private? Social regulation and individual rights? All made significant within the grand narrative of capital as the history of freedom, modernity and progress? Or the narrative of community—untheorized, relegated to the primordial zone of the natural, denied any subjectivity that is not domesticated to the requirements of the modern state, and yet persistent in its invocation of the rhetoric of love and against the homogenizing sway of the normalized individual?82

It seems ‘natural’ to turn to the conception of community to avoid, for instance, the ahistorical ‘artifice’ of social-contract theory and the presupposition of the ‘individual’, ‘rational’ subject. This line of thought reduces ‘rationality’ itself to the calculation of one’s immediate or foreseeable selfinterest and the consideration of the best means to achieve it. It gives rise to the ‘homo economicus’ and its ‘freedom of rational choice’, which constitute the normative-conceptual underpinning of capitalist modernity. There are however, several issues that immediately make themselves felt in Chatterjee’s return to the notion of ‘community’. First, if the opposition between community and capitalist society (which appears to reinvoke the old opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft) is understood dialectically, then the seemingly mutually exclusive character of the two conceptions—the ‘either/or’ choice between them, disappears. One the one hand, elements of community may reappear within capitalist society in a constitutive, though transformed sense,  Chatterjee (1993, pp. 238–39).

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that is, in the movement of ‘determinate negation’ that Hegel brings to light. For example, they reappear in the form of the (culturally, linguistically determinate) ‘nation-state’. The latter, I argued, although constituted through capitalist-industrial modernity, also has a constitutive role in capitalist expansion (hence, for capitalism as such), both in its colonial and neo-liberal phases. On the other, a regression to ‘community’ in the reified, ‘naturalized’ sense, along the lines of the (naturalized) hierarchical relations of pre-modern religious communities, and their modes of exploitation, is always possible in the face of crises that periodically afflict capitalist societies (such as chronic unemployment and the resulting recession). This point concerning the reification of human relations inherent in the notion of ‘community’, both historically, and as a regressive possibility in times of capitalist crises, is obvious, but seems to escape Chatterjee’s attention. It is not difficult to see how, in periods of economic recession and high unemployment under capitalism, a particular group may be singled out (Jews, Muslims, immigrants) and come to represent the externalized ‘source’ of the failure of society to resolve its inner contradictions. By externalizing its internal contradictions, society can continue to appear to itself, as an ‘all-encompassing whole’, or ‘pure’ universal, at one with itself. However, this is a form of self-delusion, even if perhaps, a necessary or ‘inevitable’ one, in the Kantian sense (that is, it is belongs to the order of a ‘transcendental’ illusion). For, as I will elaborate, it is the impossibility, in principle, of the closure of the social, that is, of its claim to universality as an independent, unified whole, that is also constitutive of it. A ‘constitutive negativity’ is thus the necessary condition of (impossible) universality, unity etc. Second, this dialectical conception would also imply that the dyad ‘inner/spiritual’ and ‘outer/material’ that Chatterjee underscores in opposing the modular view (which sets up the opposition between community and capitalist society), does not indicate an exceptionalism that would undermine ‘universal history’, as Chatterjee suggests. Or, it only undermines a caricatured version of ‘universal history’—the formulaic and naïve ‘stagist’ conception, with necessary transitions between the

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stages that admits no deviation and no regression—that is often misleadingly attributed to Hegel83 and Marx. In fact, the phenomenon that Chatterjee brings to light in relation to the emergence of Indian nationalist consciousness—the retreat to an ‘inner, ‘spiritual’ domain’ in which one can experience one’s freedom despite ‘external’ conditions, under which one is ‘objectively’ unfree— conforms quite precisely to the notion of ‘unhappy consciousness’ that Hegel elaborates in the master-slave dialectic. In the latter, self-consciousness is faced with another self-consciousness, which it seeks to negate, in order to vindicate its own self-conception as an independent self. This sets  For instance, in the introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel admits the possibility that consciousness might ‘retreat from its own truth’ and stubbornly hold on to its earlier limited self-­ configuration, when it starts becoming aware that its notion does not match its self-posited criterion (‘object’). Its sense of ‘anxiety’ (both awareness and disavowal of such awareness) may even lead consciousness to the ‘conceit’ of pure negation, or skepticism, where it ‘belittles every truth’ and finds satisfaction only in the empty affirmation of itself. Yet in these modes of self-deception, consciousness can ‘find no peace’, since its very anxiety (awareness/disavowal) troubles it, and goads it towards finding yet another (limited) mode of reconciling its ‘notion’ and posited ‘object’ (criterion). Yet, in this process, there is no guarantee that consciousness would necessarily overcome its own ‘limited satisfaction’ (or unthinking inertia). Such consciousness—for instance skeptical consciousness that negates all content and affirms only its own empty self (as the pure power of negativity), Hegel asserts, must be ‘left to itself ’. 83

Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Notion of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself. With the positing of a single particular the beyond is also established for consciousness […]. Thus consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands: it spoils its own limited satisfaction. When consciousness feels this violence, its anxiety may well make it retreat from the truth, and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But it can find no peace. If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia. Or, if it entrenches itself in sentimentality, which assures us that it finds everything to be good in its kind, then this assurance likewise suffers violence at the hands of Reason, for, precisely in so far as something is merely a kind, Reason finds it not to be good. Or, again, its fear of the truth may lead consciousness to hide, from itself and others, behind the pretension that its burning zeal for truth makes it difficult or even impossible to find any other truth but the unique truth of vanity--that of being at any rate cleverer than any thoughts that one gets by oneself or from others. This conceit which understands how to belittle every truth, in order to turn back into itself and gloat over its own understanding, which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren Ego instead of any content-this is a satisfaction which we must leave to itself, for it flees from the universal, and seeks only to be for itself (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 51–52, my italics).

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up a struggle, in which both attempt to assert their independence from the other, initially, by staking their lives in order to manifest their independence from (or irreducibility to) biologically determined life. However, if this struggle, is carried to its conclusion, and results in the actual death of one of the antagonists, it becomes self-defeating. The ‘independent’/victorious self that emerges has no one to acknowledge its victory, that is, confirm it in its feeling of independence. Thus, one of the antagonists must emerge as ‘master’, that is, as manifestly willing to stake her life, and the other as ‘slave’, who shrinks back in fear from death. Thereby, ‘slave’ consciousness becomes ‘for’ the ‘master’ consciousness, which is therefore, ‘immediately’ confirmed in its feeling of independence. Yet, this split into the extremes of absolute independence (lordship) and dependence (bondage) cannot remain unchanged, since it does not constitute the ‘truth’ of either the ‘master’ or the ‘slave’. For the ‘master’, the recognition of her independence/selfhood by the ‘slave’, which is either coerced or automatically given, remains ultimately unsatisfactory, since it is not ‘genuine’ recognition, freely bestowed (that is, of their own volition), by an independent other. For the slave, ‘absolute dependence’ on the master belies her sense of ‘inner’ independence/selfhood. It is the slave however, who emerges as the ‘agent’ of (historical) change, since she feels the contradiction between outer dependence and inner freedom more acutely. The slave consciousness therefore, attempts to resolve this conflict initially by retreating to an ‘inner, ‘spiritual’ domain’, in which she can experience her freedom despite inimical ‘external’ conditions—conditions where she is ‘objectively’ unfree. This retreat to the inner realm takes the forms of “Stoicism, Skepticism and the Unhappy Consciousness”, which constitute the untrue phases of ‘slave’ self-consciousness, on its path to ‘objective’ self-consciousness. For, this recourse to ‘inner’ freedom in the face of ‘outer’ unfreedom is a limited form of freedom, a source of comfort and self-assurance, which the ‘slave’ (who has given up her freedom to the ‘master’) soon realizes, is ‘not enough’ or unsatisfactory. Freedom has to be ‘objectively’ realized, or externalized. For Hegel, ‘objective freedom’—the only form of freedom that proves satisfactory, or constitutes genuine freedom—can only be

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intersubjectively realized. The other (‘master’) has to recognize me (slave) as an independent ‘other’, for my freedom to count as anything more than my own ‘inner’ or private source of self-assurance and comfort. The desire for the other’s recognition, who in turn desires my recognition (implicitly at first), is the constitutive condition of ‘objective’ (intersubjective) autonomy, hence, of self-consciousness—of my sense of self as an ‘independent’ self. This dialectical conception of dependence and independence (as mutually constitutive), simply means that ultimately, there can be no purely subjective, ‘inner’ or private form of freedom. Our sense of freedom (whether it is explicitly realized, or remains implicit), is fundamentally dependent on the ‘other’, that is, it is constitutively mediated through its recognition that the other bestows. Both the ‘slave’ and the ‘master’ come to this realization—of the constitutively intersubjective character of autonomy/self-consciousness qua mutual recognition (the ‘desire for the other’s desire’), in a gradual and mediated manner. The ‘slave’ comes to this realization by exercising her autonomy in transforming the immediate givenness of nature through work, and thereby initially externalizes her freedom through the products of her labour. The ‘master’ comes to see that the independence she had won in the face of death, has turn into a form of dependence on the ‘slave’. For, it is the ‘slave’ who does all the work of transforming nature, to satisfy the ‘master’s’ desire, and thus exercises her freedom in an immediate sense. The short circuiting of the ‘master’ desire through its (immediate) fulfillment, without experiencing the resistance offered by the material world and the labour required to overcome it, implies that the ‘master’ becomes a mere ‘consumer’. Thus, in a classical Hegelian dialectical reversal, the ‘master’ becomes the ‘slave’, that is, completely dependent on the labour, hence autonomy, of the vanquished other in the original struggle for recognition. As we know, Marx deploys, and in the process transforms, Hegel’s intersubjective model of self-consciousness/autonomy, based on mutual recognition, in analyzing the basic structural contradiction of capitalism. This dialectical relation is rearticulated in terms of the class ‘struggle’ between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat within capitalism. However, this relation is transformed into a ‘contradiction’, insofar as the mutual

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dependence and co-constitution of the two classes cannot, in principle, be acknowledged, or accommodated within the capitalist system (leading to periodic ‘crises’, or recessions). What needs to be emphasized here is that Marx’s expansion of this model of constitutive interdependence to the ‘material’-economic realm, does not undercut its ethical-normative (and ultimately, political) underpinnings. As I will argue, the dialectical movement towards the realization of self-consciousness/autonomy (of the self as an ‘independent’ self ), in and through the realization of its constitutive interdependence based on mutual recognition, is also operative at the socio-economic level. And it forms the basis for Marx’s political-emancipatory project of overcoming capitalist alienation (‘misrecognition’), in the constitution of society, with institutional mechanisms that are capable of accommodating (thus ‘recognize’), this co-dependence. Such recognition of constitutive co-­ dependence at a societal level, I shall argue, is the key to the realization of unalienated existence. The ethical sphere, on this Hegelian-Marxist reading, may be understood as concerning itself with the manners in which such recognition, or its failure, play out. We can think of ethical-normative notions such as justice, equality etc. along these lines, that is, based on the (mutual) recognition of the other as an ‘independent’ other.84 This would imply that moral injury or harm is also intersubjective in character. Moral injury, rather than being a transgression of some abstract universal principle or ‘moral law’, consists in the failure to recognize, in various ways and to various degrees, the ‘other’ as a (self-conscious, free) ‘person’. If Hegel is right in his intersubjective, deflationary account of morality, then I am suggesting that the emergence of nationalist consciousness  Several thinkers, such as Axel Honneth, (in a debate with Nancy Fraser) have developed this insight in various ways, in formulating a recognition theory of global justice. Honneth for example, argues that to think of global justice exclusively in terms of ‘distributive justice’, that is, in terms of the distribution and allocation of resources and goods to the poor (concentrated in the global south) is inadequate, since it does not take into account how poverty impinges on the non-material aspects of human dignity. Human well-being requires many forms of intersubjective recognition, according to the different domains of human relations—for instance, love, respect, esteem etc. (Cf. Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition?, London, New York: Verso, 2003; See also Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996; Cf. Renante D. Pilapil, “Beyond Redistribution: Honneth, Recognition Theory and Global Justice”, Critical Horizons, Vol. 21, pp. 34–48, 2020). 84

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in and through the colonial encounter, and the resulting struggle for independence, follows this pattern of ‘misrecognition’ and eventual ‘recognition’. Since the latter is a dialectical-structural movement of (historical) consciousness, it has an ideal, ‘universal’ dimension which would allow us to discern this movement in varied historical contexts, in which the colonial encounter plays itself out. Third, even if one admits the notion of community in a transformed sense, where it is no longer ‘in-itself ’, but becomes ‘for-itself ’, it is unclear on Chatterjee’s analysis, what institutional shape such a ‘post-­ Enlightenment’, (post) modern conception of community would take. The institutions that would realize such a community must be able to address issues of ‘justice’ in a ‘universal’ sense, without invoking either a transcendent ‘divinity’ or ‘natural ontology’, as the source of universality/ legitimacy. And yet, the rhetoric of ‘love’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘feeling’ that Chatterjee invokes, is open to the slippery slope of exclusions and parochialism of various kinds. It therefore, again necessarily runs the risk of restaging the universal in a narrowly delimiting, particularizing, hence exclusionary manner. In other words, if the ‘nation’, as Chatterjee seems to suggest, is to be understood as a ‘modern’ form of community, then the liberal-capitalist notion of individuals bound by contract, based on a ‘system of needs’ does not suffice; but neither does the appeal to the immediacy of ‘feeling’. It is true that any ‘slippery slope’ argument is questionable on the grounds that the possibility of some eventuality does not entail its actuality. Yet, one can still ask what institutional mechanisms could be put in place to ensure that these feelings of love, sacrifice etc., which for Chatterjee, realize unalienated co-existence in a community, are ‘rightly’, that is, universally oriented (potentially including all humanity), such that they don’t congeal into narrow solidarities. In other words, even at the level of feeling, one cannot get away from some notion of the universal as its guiding, orienting condition. On the other side of the coin, as I noted, if we are to avoid the deleterious effects of reified modernity/universality, the universal itself must be conceived and articulated as an empty universal, which means, as a

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universal constantly in becoming.85 I will develop the ethical dimension of the ‘universal in becoming’, by extrapolating the conception of the ethical/normative that finds its initial articulation in Kant, and is transformed by Hegel and then Marx. In doing so, the thesis I want to defend is that if the ‘nation’ is to be normatively and politically reimagined as the realization of unalienated life, then this cannot be accomplished via a return to the immediacy of ‘community’. Rather it must be reimagined from a standpoint located firmly within the modernist transformation, and that means from a universalistic orientation, but one which is not reified in its extant capitalistic (or even erstwhile communistic) figuration.

2.4 Summary of Our Critical Arguments, and the Task Ahead: The Main Contours of the Problematic Before I turn to this conception and trace its further implications, let me summarize the argument so far. It should be clear from the preceding discussion that on the one hand, with the notion of dialectically structured becoming, we avoid the pitfalls of Anderson’s static conception of ‘modularity’, as a finished model available for imitation. I have argued that modularity in this static sense, is the result of an empirical generalization. This implies that Anderson’s approach remains at the descriptive level, and therefore, does not uncover the processive structural pattern inherent in the historical emergence of nationalist consciousness in diverse contexts. Or more precisely, since this movement occurs not just in the realm of consciousness and ideas, but also in the realm of historical events, one may say that at times he comes descriptively, but not hermeneutically, close to unearthing this pattern of movement (as in the  This would hold even if the ‘justice perspective’ is understood as genealogically arising from the ‘care perspective’, or considered dialectically, in Hegel’s language, the universality of abstract rights is necessarily conditioned by the ‘family’ as its first concrete moment (ethical life) based on the ‘immediacy’ of ‘love’. For Kant, as we know, the ‘Categorical Imperative’, with its ‘empty universality’—a universality which lies precisely in its procedural/functional universalizability, takes as its point of departure, any subjective maxim. 85

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example of the tomb of the unknown soldier—a particularly modernist phenomenon), that is, he does not raise it to the level of principle. The colonial encounter however, demands a more nuanced understanding, that brings this processive-structural dimension to light in an explicit sense. Once this processive dimension is uncovered, it preserves certain aspects of the ‘modularity’ thesis, although in a wholly transformed sense. What is preserved is the dimension of its generalizability to different historical contexts. On the other hand, this generalizability is qualified by the crucial proviso that in each case, although analytically discernible retrospectively, in its historical unfolding the movement is lived through or enacted (in a pre-reflective, implicit sense), rather than explicitly imitated. For, there is no ‘model’ in a reified sense, to imitate. Rather, even when certain elements of nationalism (such as ‘linguistic nationalism’), are imposed ‘from above’, in a ‘modular’, static sense, they are actively taken up and transformed for their own purposes, by the colonial subjects upon whom they are imposed. With respect to Chatterjee’s critique of Anderson, I argued that Chatterjee does emphasize the processive character of the formation of nationalist consciousness in the colonial context, but again, understands it in an empirical manner. Like Anderson, this prevents him, on the one hand, from seeing its ‘ideal’ structural-dialectical dimension. Therefore, on the other, it compels him to turn to the historically available notion of ‘community’, with its relations of “love, kinship, austerity and sacrifice”, in order to recast it as an alternative conception of modernity. In this attempt, Chatterjee understands ‘modernity’ primarily in terms of its Enlightenment roots, and deposits all the ills of capitalist, and even pre-­ capitalist society at its doorstep. He claims, for instance, that the traditional multivalent, ‘fuzzy’ communitarian solidarities are transformed into reified caste identities owing to the quantified enumerative approach ‘imposed from above’ by the colonial regime, for the purposes administrative control. Such a claim overlooks the pre-modern, religiously ordained caste hierarchies, along with other ritualistic, ‘inhuman’ practices (from a modernist perspective), that have existed for millennia in the Hindu ‘community’. These include the practice of ‘untouchability’ vis-à-vis a whole group of its members—the Dalits, who therefore, are accorded

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sub-­human status; or the practice of ‘Sati’, where the widow is forced to the funeral pyre of her deceased husband and burnt alive. Indeed, the Hindu reformist movements of the nineteenth century (against the caste system, for widow remarriage etc.) were precisely attempts to look ‘inward’ in a self-reflective, critical manner, in response to enlightenment ideas, in order to forge a new unified nationalist consciousness. Irfan Habib emphasizes this point by drawing attention to Ram Mohan Roy’s 1828 letter, in which he remarks that what prevents Indians from developing strong patriotic feelings is the fact that their primary affiliation is to their caste.86 These pre-existing, pre-modern, narrow caste identifications and hierarchies could not be completely deracinated from Indian society. However, it is clear why they had to be critiqued and explicitly set aside within the nationalist movement. For, it is only then, that the movement could become a mass movement, and give rise to universalistic ‘nationalist consciousness’. Moreover, Chatterjee’s turn to the ‘alternative’ of a harmonious community, also misses what is at stake in the very problematic of an ‘alternative modernity’. Chatterjee’s notion of community is projected as an ideal, but draws its sustenance from an oppositional understanding of the relation between historically existing communities and enlightenment modernity. The latter is conceived primarily in terms of its onslaught on community, fundamentally conditioned by the violence of the colonial encounter. Yet, if as I am suggesting, this oppositional view is given up for a dialectical one, then it opens up the possibility of articulating an alternative conception of modernity from within the basic coordinates of (enlightenment) modernity. That is, from within its critical-rationalist stance and the ensuing disenchantment of the world. Enlightenment modernity, with its fundamental dualism between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, and the resulting conception of ‘objective’ knowledge and rationality (of which modern natural science is the exemplar), the rational individual with her ‘freedom of choice’, rights etc. confronts the modern consciousness as ‘established (historical) reality’. No doubt the reified conception modernity/universality that emerges in and 86

 Cf. Habib (2017, p. 5).

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through the Enlightenment leads to obvious shortcomings, that result from the limited modes of imagining its own ‘universalist’ impetus. In the actual course of human affairs, this is borne out by the long history of violence unleashed in its name, that is, in the name of ‘progress’, ‘rationality’ etc., which takes on a racist sense of superiority, in relation to ‘pre-­ modern’ communities, leading to enslavement and colonial subjugation. However, the fundamentally desacralized world-view, which includes the desacralization of human hierarchical relations that modernity inaugurates, also involves an ethical-normative transformation, (as Claude Lefort, puts it, a “mutation in the symbolic order”). This transformation comes to signify an abiding possession in the history of the progressive ‘education’ (in the Hegelian sense) of the human spirit. Thus, a critique of enlightenment modernity, and the search for an alternative modernity, cannot simply reinvoke the pre-modern, ‘enchanted’ or sacralized sense of either nature, or human community. Such a return to previous forms of enchantment would go against our modernist ethical-normative standpoint, since those earlier forms of life were shaped by their own unreflective modes of reification, (in terms of deified, hence, ‘naturalized’ social hierarchies etc.), and therefore, alienated modes of existence. Moreover, the reestablishment of pre-modern forms of consciousness is ruled out from an epistemological-philosophical standpoint. Just as in the case of perceptual illusion, once the ‘reality’ of a previous age (religious consciousness) is seen as ‘appearance’, it cannot be ‘unseen’—there can be no reinstatement of the ‘illusion’ (appearance), as ‘reality’. The switch in perspective, or in the ‘form of consciousness’, is constitutive of the ‘irreversibility’, in principle, of the critical-reflective distance that is opened up in an explicit sense, between human beings and ‘nature’. Here ‘nature’ must be understood in the widest onto-theological, or metaphysical sense, which includes hitherto ‘naturalized’ hierarchical relations constitutive of human community. This entails that any alternative conception of modernity, must take the form of a modernity that is true to itself. It must appropriate the critical-reflective movement that provides the original impetus to enlightenment modernity, but in a manner that shows how and why the latter does not go far enough, does not remain true to its own origin. The

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critical-reflective (self ) distancing with respect to nature, and the restriction of the social to its own immanent domain that it entails, is nothing but a movement of pure transcendence, that is, a movement towards a negative universality—a universality without determinate, static content, thus, in perpetual becoming. Yet, I have been arguing that its reified figuration in enlightenment modernity takes the form of an ‘objective’ stand-­ point, based on the posited divide between the subject(ive) and the object(ive); and this leads to an impasse, or a ‘crisis’ induced by the ‘positivistic restriction of reason’, as Husserl puts it. An alternative conception of modernity then, has the task of overcoming this impasse resulting from the reification (positivistic restriction) of the critical-reflective movement of thought into ‘subject’ and ‘object’, by reinstating the movement qua movement, that is, reinstating it in its negativity. Before I discuss these broader concerns however, let me turn to a more detailed consideration of the possibility of an alternative conception of modernity based on ‘community’, and how such a modern community might be articulated, what shape it might take. This set of concerns is the primary focus of Akeel Bilgrami’s essay on Gandhi and Marx, and what he takes to be the central question that both thinkers address, namely, the question of what constitutes ‘unalienated life’.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-­ colonial Histories. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Habib, Irfan. 2017. Nationalism in India: Past and Present. Social Scientist, Vol. 45, No. 3/4: 3–8. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Honneth, Axel. 1996. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Trans. Joel Anderson and Thomas McCarthy. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

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Honneth, Axel, and Fraser, Nancy. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition?. London, New York: Verso. Marx, Karl. 1978. Capital (3 Vols.) Vol. I. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. 1970. Communist Manifesto. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, 2nd ed. London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd. Pilapil, Renante D. 2020. Beyond Redistribution: Honneth, Recognition Theory and Global Justice. Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, Vol. 21: 34–48.

3 Genealogies of Modernity: Disenchantment and the Form of Unalienated Life

In this chapter, I will explore the theoretical possibility of unalienated forms of ‘community’ against the background of modernist ‘disenchantment’ in relation to society and nature. The latter, I noted, sets up the basic problematic of ‘community’—is a modern, desacralized and denaturalized form of community at all possible? It is this question, I argued, that is not sufficiently addressed in Partha Chatterjee’s critique of the modern ‘nation state’. For, in taking immediate recourse to the ‘alternative’ conception of a ‘community’ based on feeling, he merely posits ‘community’ in an oppositional sense to the modern (liberal, individual rights based) nation-state. This would entail a return to pre-modern community in the face of the onslaught of modernity (with all the problems associated with the former due to its restricted conception of the ‘universal’—resulting in narrow solidarities, hierarchies, inequalities etc.), rather than coming to grips with the problem of rearticulating the possibility of unalienated forms of collective life under conditions of modernity. To address this issue, I will first turn to Akeel Bilgrami’s essay, “Gandhi (and Marx)”. In the latter, Bilgrami (unlike Chatterjee), provides the basic coordinates for thinking ‘community’ (although he does not use the term) in a modern, desacralized sense, that is, in a manner that allows for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Patnaik, Modernity and its Futures Past, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32107-8_3

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the possibility of a transformed ‘re-enchantment’ of nature (and human society/beings), without attributing any kind of sacral or vitalist status to nature.1 The argument consists in bringing to light the contingent hegemony of the present capitalist figuration of modernity, by tracing its genealogy to the emergence of private property in early modernity. Further, Bilgrami shows how equally rationally viable alternative, ‘unalienated’ forms of social organization, based on the collective ownership and cultivation of the ‘commons’, were ‘very much in the air’, but eventually not realized. Thus, there is nothing rationally necessary or inevitable about the contemporary form of capitalist modernity, that in fact came to be realized. This analysis, based on a historical-genealogical approach, which reveals the contingent hegemony of the capitalist form that modernity takes, and rational (modernist) alternatives to the latter, serves to introduce broader theoretical concerns and themes, with respect to historicity, the critique of techno-scientific modernity, and its alternative forms, which attempt to rearticulate an unalienated relation to nature and society. I will take up these broader concerns in greater detail in subsequent chapters, by turning to the imbricated approaches in the phenomenological tradition. Bilgrami approaches this vast and complex set of issues through what seems, at first glance, to be a somewhat unlikely comparison between Gandhi and Marx. The common element between the two, despite the obvious differences, lies in their notion of an unalienated life2 (in all its modalities), formed through their respective critiques of capitalist, and inextricably connected with it, colonial ‘modernity’. To unearth the affinities between the two thinkers, who were after all, writing in quite different contexts and had quite different epistemic, normative, and political commitments, requires the construction of a common theoretical and interpretative framework for approaching their thinking. Bilgrami elaborates this framework in terms of an ‘irresoluble tension’ running through European Enlightenment from its very  Cf. Akeel Bilgrami, “Gandhi (and Marx)”, in Secularism, Identity and Enchantment, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014, pp. 155–56. 2  Cf. Ibid. p. 129 ff. 1

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inception, namely, the tension between ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’.3 This tension has come to dominate the economic, political and ethical landscape of (Western) modernity, with its most immediate and obvious manifestations in, for instance, the antithetical notions of liberal and socialist democracy—one based on individual rights (liberty) and the other on collective rights (equality). The sources of this antithesis between liberty and equality in the institutional form that modernity has come to acquire in the West, namely, liberal democracy, are deep-rooted and complex, and cannot be seen apart from the political economy of capitalism. Bilgrami mentions two salient sources—the manner in which the notion of liberty, thus individual rights etc., becomes conceptually tied from the outset to the ownership of property; and what he terms the “incentivization of talent”.4 The link between private property and inequality within capitalism is well-known (following the critiques of Marx and Engels, among others), and growing inequality (between those with ‘property’ qua capital and those without) immediately brings the notion of collective rights, equality and freedom in tension with individual rights/liberty. The ‘incentivization of talent’ refers to the seemingly ‘natural’ and intuitive understanding in liberal democratic societies that a person’s talent belongs exclusively to her, as opposed to say, being a contingent natural endowment or the product of the circumstances of birth, history etc. This conception of the ‘ownership’ of talent implies that it is the individual who should be praised for their talent and be free to reap its rewards. Bilgrami points out that these two sources of the conception of liberty qua individual liberty, which bring it into conflict with the notion of equality, are so deeply ingrained in liberal democratic thinking, that “[…] it is likely to be considered a hysterical egalitarian ideologue’s artifice to deny it. Denying it seems to fly in the face of our intuitive understanding of what it is to be an individual […]”.5 What must be emphasized here is the seeming ‘naturalness’ and intuitiveness of this conception.  Cf. Ibid. p. 125.  Cf. Ibid. p. 126. 5  Ibid. p. 127. 3 4

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It is the manner in which what is a specific normative, political, and economic system arising in a certain historical setting that comes to appear ‘natural’ or intuitively obvious, that has been variously critiqued within political theoretical discourse stemming from the broader phenomenological tradition. As I noted, these critiques bring to light the overlapping, though distinct processes of ‘reification’, the formation of ‘hegemony’, the manner in which the symbolic order becomes ‘invisible’ qua symbolic, and its constitutive historicity that results in a necessary lack of ‘presence’, non-transparency, incompletion of identity etc. Bilgrami here, like Žižek in a somewhat different context, points out that overcoming these deeply entrenched conceptions of “liberty” and “equality” requires not greater clarity or analysis concerning their meanings within the existing liberal political-economic framework, but a fundamental change in their meanings. In other words, invoking Thomas Kuhn, we may say that what is required is a ‘paradigm shift’.6 And it is nothing less than a paradigm shift that is involved in the more fundamental concept of ‘unalienated life’, articulated in different ways by both Gandhi and Marx. The concept is ‘more fundamental’, not only in the sense that it “[…] speaks more immediately to our experience and our ordinary lives”, but because in Gandhi’s and Marx’s critiques of capitalist modernity and its liberal-normative underpinnings, ‘unalienated life’ emerges as the “[…] fundamental goal of politics, the achievement of which is possible only if the two ideals [liberty and equality] are also jointly achieved”.7 Bilgrami’s interpretative framework is undoubtedly useful, since it allows us to see the link between two quite distinct thinkers. The link lies firstly, in what they were reacting against, namely the alienation afflicting consciousness under the conditions of capitalist, (and liberal) modernity. And secondly, it lies in their alternative conception of society based on the idea of ‘unalienated life’—an idea that can synthesize the contradiction between liberty and equality, but only through a tectonic shift of the terrain of enlightenment liberalism.

 Ibid. p. 128.  Ibid. p. 130.

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Bilgrami’s analytical framework is quite close, in certain respects, to Hegel’s basic phenomenological method. The ‘contradiction’ within a framework (form of consciousness) and its ‘synthesis’ in a transformed (more reflective) formation of consciousness (ultimately in ‘unalienated life’, which it can be argued, is inherent in the notion of ‘absolute knowing’), is a movement recognizable to any reader of Hegel’s Phenomenology. For Hegel, the transformation or ‘sublation’ (aufhebung), leads to a higher mode of consciousness precisely because it self-consciously attempts to accommodate the tension or contradiction inherent in its preceding form of consciousness. Through this movement consciousness ultimately comes to the realization (through many partial or dialectically ‘one-sided’, hence self-defeating forms of consciousness) that what it took to be distinct absolutes (subject/object, being-in-itself/being-for-another, the ‘I’ and the ‘We’) are its own self-formations. Therefore, it comes to the realization that these forms, which it took to be other than itself, are dialectically related to it. Thus, it reflectively grasps itself as nothing but the path that it has traversed through its own limited or dialectically one-­ sided (self ) formations, that is, as nothing but this history of overcoming its own “limited satisfactions”. If “[…] consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands, if it spoils its own limited satisfaction”,8 then, I noted in my discussion of Chatterjee’s work, it cannot, in principle, simply go back to an earlier, more limited mode of ‘self-satisfaction’. That is, it cannot return to its apparently “unalienated” form of life in the uncritical or unreflected immediacy of (sacralized/naturalized) ‘community’. However, I also noted that in practice, such retrogressions to earlier formations, particularly in periods of social upheaval, uncertainty or crisis, are always possible. To put the matter more directly, this implies that the notion of ‘unalienated life’ that comes after the disenchantment of the world, put into motion by enlightenment rationality, cannot simply appeal to an earlier, ‘pre-modern’ form of ‘community’, with its narrow and limiting ‘solidarities’, along for instance, caste or religious-communal lines. Bilgrami, towards the end of his essay, emphasizes just this point:  G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 51.

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Now if the achievement of an ideal of an unalienated life were to bring, in its wake, indirectly, conditions of liberty and equality (however transformed), it is bound to be very different from the unalienated life which is acknowledged to have existed in prior times because the conditions in which it existed then were also acknowledged to be acutely lacking in, precisely, liberty and equality. Thus, given this rudimentary conceptual/historical dialectic, what we need to show is how a new framework that breaks out of the dialectic would solve for three things at once—a transformed notion of liberty and equality […], but also it would now seem a transformed notion of unalienated life.9

This brings to light exactly what addressing the problematic of ‘community’ qua unalienated life, which is to sublate capitalist-liberal modernity, would require. Yet, how is such an ideal to be achieved, and what would it look like—what social, political and economic institutional forms will it take? Here Bilgrami finds, in the deep affinities he registers between Gandhi and Marx, a possible theoretical answer to the first (the ‘how’), if not the second (the ‘what’) of these intertwined issues.

3.1 Gandhi, Marx, and the Critique of Modernity Both Gandhi and Marx locate the source of alienation in capitalist modernity, fundamentally conditioned by the deracination of God from the world. Recall Marx’s famous description of the revolutionary transition from feudal, pre-modern society, to the modern, capitalist bourgeois society in the Communist Manifesto; “All that is solid melts into the air, all that is sacred is profaned […]”. In the Hind Swaraj (1909), Gandhi identifies the desacralized understanding of nature (including human ‘nature’), as the source of the modern alienation of human beings from nature and from each other. The deracination of the divine from nature comes about through the dominance that modern science comes to acquire, within the historical context of its emergence in Western societies, driven by profit  Bilgrami (2014, p. 172).

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and consumption under capitalism. For Gandhi, modern science, with its desacralized conception of nature, and capitalism, with its (colonial) expansionist logic driven by profit,10 are inextricably tied, and pervade every aspect of human understanding and sociality in Western modernity. Despite being on the opposite end of the political spectrum, this line of thinking is echoed in Martin Heidegger’s critique of techno-scientific modernity. For Heidegger, modern, techno-scientifically mediated consciousness encounters and understands nature, and even itself, as part of nature, in a positivistically reduced sense (a self-understanding that finds expression, for instance, in the ‘objective’ treatment of the ‘subject’ in psychology). In “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953), he points out that it is only when nature is desacralized—viewed as ‘brute matter’ bereft of any inherent meaning or purposiveness, that it is encountered as intrinsically quantifiable and measurable. It then becomes exhaustively representable in the formal language of mathematics—through its formalmathematical expression in the laws of the natural sciences. It is with the demise of the teleological conception of nature, and the natural theology11 underlying it, and its replacement by the mathematized disclosure and articulation of nature, that it becomes possible to conceive of nature as open to predictive control, and therefore, technological manipulation and exploitation. Thus, it becomes possible to grasp/encounter nature as a whole, as a ‘standing reserve’ (Bestand), that is, as ‘natural resource’. Further, within this ‘technological’ mode of world disclosure, human beings are understood as ‘human resource’, insofar as they become, in their own self-understanding, reducible to ‘standing reserve’. Thus, the techno-scientific disclosure/encounter of nature, reveals both nature and human beings as ‘standing reserve’, to be controlled and exploited on the massive scale that industrial capital demands. Heidegger’s term for this  Gandhi understood the political economy underlying colonial expansionism, and its debilitating effects in India, quite clearly. This is evident in his call for the boycott of foreign goods, specially cotton cloth from Manchester and the symbolic and practical emphasis on the spinning wheel, as a way of promoting indigenous petty production. 11  ‘Natural theology’ forms a common thread, originating in ancient Greek thought. It is articulated for instance, in Aristotelian philosophy, runs through Christian metaphysics, and is still visible in the views of some of the figures of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton among others. 10

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techno-scientific mode of world disclosure, (‘unconcealment’ or  alētheia), is ‘enframing’ (Gestell), which constitutes, not technology per say, but the essence of modern technology. One can discern a broad similarity, or a ‘family resemblance’, in the critiques of technology offered by such diverse thinkers as Marx, Gandhi, and Heidegger. The main lines of this critique constitute what has been termed the ‘classical’ philosophical approach to technology. In the Western continental philosophical tradition, in addition to Marx and Heidegger, the classical approach includes thinkers such as Karl Jaspers, Jacques Ellul, and members of the Frankfurt school such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. What binds these thinkers in their approach to technology, is the ‘alienation thesis’—the idea that technology is fundamentally alienating.12 Here, in the context of our discussion concerning the colonial encounter and its post-colonial consequences, what must be emphasized is that the encounter instigated self-reflection precisely on the interconnected themes of techno-scientific and capitalist modernity, and the form that the nation qua ‘community’ would take. Gandhi, adopting the classical stance on ‘techno-science’ in the Hind Swaraj in 1909, recognized that  With Marx being an exception, insofar as for him alienation is specific to technology under the capitalist mode of production, not technology as such. The classical critique has been challenged by contemporary thinking on technology, for instance, by the ‘post-phenomenological’ approach articulated by Don Ihde, or by Bruno Latour’s actant-network theory (among others). These contemporary approaches claim to offer possibilities of rethinking the techno-scientifically mediated relation between human beings and nature that go beyond the classical approach, based on the conception of technology as ‘essentially’ alienating.  From the perspective of contemporary thinking on technology, the classical ‘alienation thesis’, along with the conception of the techno-scientific disenchantment of nature that underlies it, amounts to an essentialist and deterministic understanding that betrays a certain techno-phobic attitude. Moreover, this essentialist and determinist conception of technology can be directly traced to the transcendental philosophical tradition in which the classical critiques of technology are rooted. For, instead of considering concrete technological artefacts and how they mediate our relation to the world in various specific manners, the transcendental perspective gives rise to questions concerning ‘the conditions of possibility’, (or ‘essence’) of technology as a whole. On this critique, the traditional ‘conditions of possibility’ approach results in a homogenized, monolithic view of technology. It is hardly surprising therefore that on this classical ‘transcendental’ conception, ‘technology as whole’ is understood as ‘essentially’ alienating. The critique of the classical position then, minimally asserts that the question concerning the ‘conditions of possibility of technology’, is not the only type of question that can be asked with respect to technology and the technological mediation of nature. I will return to this broader debate in the chapter four, where I will take up the classical approach, primarily through Heidegger’s critique of modern technology, in greater detail. 12

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India was in danger of traversing the same path of scientific modernity and capitalist ‘development’ that the West had a couple of hundred years earlier, and urgently sought to eschew it and provide an alternative conception of human episteme and sociality. To make the philosophical underpinnings of this debate more explicit, it is necessary to distinguish various understandings of the notion of ‘disenchantment’. These differences in understanding, along with their consequences for how an alternative modernity might be imagined, reflect undercurrents of thought within the processes and transformations wrought by the Enlightenment. More precisely, the ‘alternative’ conceptions of modernity, based on the difference in the analytical framework through which enlightenment modernity is understood, itself afford at least two different possibilities. One possibility consists in the return to a, perhaps diluted, sacralized conception of nature; and the other finds the conceptual resources for an ‘alternative’ conception in the processes of enlightenment modernity itself. That is, as I will argue, it finds the basis for imagining an alternative modernity in the negativity inherent in the critical-reflective distancing that provides the original impetus of the Enlightenment. Between these two alternatives, we find many shades of thought, ranging from those that posit an ‘unknowable, transcendent beyond’—a secularized remnant of the divine, to the reconstitution of the negative movement of thought, restricted to the immanence of (self ) consciousness (generalized to ‘spirit’), in a ‘determinate negation’. The theoretical affinities that our framework throws up therefore, are quite different from the ones Bilgrami registers. In keeping with the two alternatives opened up within an alternative conception of modernity (and all the shades in between), they lie not between Gandhi and Marx, but between Gandhi and the ‘true levelers’/‘diggers’ in seventeenth century England (as Bilgrami also argues). Or, to take more contemporary examples, on our account, the map of these conceptual affinities can be redrawn, to show a contiguity between Gandhi and the ‘deep ecology’ movement (which has understood itself as drawing on Heidegger’s thought) on the one hand, and between (with appropriate qualifications) Marx and the Critical Theory tradition, both going back to Hegel, on the other. Elements of Heidegger’s thought resonate with both camps (the reformed sacralists, and the reformed rationalists qua negativists),

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although the Critical Theory tradition, for obvious reasons, would want to distance itself from Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger’s ambiguous position within this debate flows from the intrinsic features of his thinking, which appears to rely both on a posited transcendence (Being), and on the negativity inherent in the movement of thought.13 With respect to the problematic of rethinking the nation qua (unalienated) ‘community’, instigated by the experience of colonial subjugation (in the name of scientific-rationalist and capitalist modernity), and the struggle for independence, Rabindranath Tagore’s writings offer significant resources. In his critique of the very conception of the nation and of nationalism, as representing narrow and limiting solidarities that go against ‘the universal (or infinite) in man’14 that is, our capacity for (self ) transcendence (the negative moment), Tagore’s thinking, despite obvious differences, displays an intrinsic affinity with Heidegger’s call for a critical-reflective self-­ distancing with respect to the technological mode of world disclosure. More generally, these intertwined strands of thought that Tagore brings to light have much in common with the broader phenomenological tradition, in which Heidegger’s thinking may be located. More specifically, Tagore’s critique of techno-scientific reason instinctively invokes themes (without of course, invoking the philosophical vocabulary) that are also central to the classical phenomenological tradition. Thus, he critiques the positivistic reduction of nature that stems from its mathematized scientific articulation, and the consequent subject-object dualism that emerges. He argues for a rearticulation of our relationship to ‘reality’ in terms of ‘transcendental’ human experience (touching upon the basic problematic of a transcendence constituted in what is necessarily immanently given in experience), by conceiving religious experience as precisely, an experience of transcendence—what he terms the ‘surplus in man’ or ‘the infinite in us’.15 While these themes are of course, more philosophically developed in the phenomenological tradition, the link that Tagore forges between these broader (phenomenological) themes and his critique of  As we shall see in chapter five, it is a matter of debate within Heideggerian scholarship, if ‘Being’ and ‘nothing’ can be conceived as identical. 14  Rabindranath Tagore: Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man, New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2005. 15  Ibid. 13

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nationalism, allows his writings to be read alongside contemporary political theory. To facilitate such a conversation, what must be kept in mind is that Tagore’s thought, despite containing elements of romanticism, is fundamentally inclined towards a humanist modernism. Thus, like Heidegger’s thinking, it occupies a position intermediate between the two alternatives that open up within the alternative conception of modernity. These alternatives, as I mentioned, consist in the ‘reformed sacralist’ position, which in effect, reinvokes the divine in the attenuated, transformed sense of the transcendent beyond; and the reformed rationalist position, which is forced to give up mind-independent objectivity for a negativity that may or may not reconstitute itself in the immanent domain of self-­ consciousness, qua ‘determinate negation’.16 This is not to suggest that Tagore’s and Heidegger’s thinking run completely parallel. Heidegger’s dalliance with National Socialism (however short-lived and, by his own admission, misguided), precludes such a reading. It falls prey to precisely those narrow solidarities, which unleash the viciousness and violence that Tagore saw as the greatest danger inherent in nationalism. Rather, in registering a certain affinity in their ideas, the point is to emphasize structural movements of thought—recurring structural motifs, which are common not only to the two thinkers, but run through the broader phenomenological approach. As a preliminary attempt at redrawing the map of these affinities then, in order to bring the two possible conceptions of an alternative modernity more sharply into focus, I will contrast Bilgrami’s argument with Heidegger’s position. In so doing, I will draw on Heidegger’s well-known critique of the techno-scientific mode of world disclosure. The constitutive interdependence between the techno-scientific understanding of nature, as the source of our alienated existence vis-à-vis nature, and the capitalist form of modern society, as the source of our alienation from each other, implies that the quest for a transformed conception of  It is not surprising therefore that in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer understand religious consciousness and enlightenment modernity as two sides of the same coin, since they both attempt to reach the ‘in-itself ’ beyond consciousness, in a dialectically ‘one-sided’ manner, that is, by forgetting that the ‘beyond’ is only a posit of consciousness, and therefore, only has a relational being.

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unalienated life (alternative modernity) requires a systematic rearticulation on both fronts. The two stand or fall together—or so I shall argue. Once I have established this interdependence and therefore, shown how we cannot reimagine one side of the equation—our relation to nature, without reimagining the other—our modality of social co-existence, this would force a fundamental rearticulation of our reified forms of rationality (tied to subject-object dualism), which are at the root of our twin modes of alienation. The non-reified conception of rationality, qua ‘pure negativity’, that surfaces, would in later chapters, facilitate a return to the explicitly political question of a transformed conception of unalienated life under conditions of modernity. Further, it would allow us to directly address the problematic of the kinds of social solidarity (qua ‘community’ or ‘society’) that ‘negative reason’ can potentially afford, without collapsing into the narrowness and viciousness that Tagore was so worried about.

3.2 The Emergence of the Alienated World-­View in the Establishment of the Private Economy: Early Dissenters and Theoretical Critique Bilgrami notes that an intermediate step is required for the transformation of desacralized ‘nature’, exhaustively determined as the ‘detached object of natural scientific study’ (to the exclusion of any other relational modes to nature), to ‘natural resource’. Natural science is only concerned with the properties of natural objects and their processes, not with the practical/technological engagement with nature that sees it as exploitable for human ends. Thus, for Bilgrami, the transformation of “nature to natural resources” requires, in addition to seeing nature as a set of properties/processes, seeing it as presenting ‘opportunities’ based on natural properties, for the satisfaction of our needs and desires. ‘Nature’ therefore, is conceived as a realm of properties bereft of values, while the latter are seen as originating entirely from our mental states, without any

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independent existence. Consequently, ‘nature’ as harboring ‘opportunities’, comes to bridge the gap between ‘fact’ and ‘value’, ‘object’ and ‘subject’, although from a necessarily reductive, anthropocentric perspective. I will return to the inherent tension between the anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric viewpoints that comes into play with the advent of enlightenment rationality, and discuss its consequences in relation to the possibilities it opens up (and forecloses) for a renewed understanding of nature viewed in terms of ‘ecology’ and ecological concerns. However, it is clear from this brief characterization of Bilgrami’s position that to take as one’s point of departure, the commonly held standpoint of the natural sciences, which conceives nature exclusively as an ‘objective’, value-­neutral realm, even if to criticize such a conception, already presupposes the distinction between the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ domains. Given this presupposition, technology can only be understood as ‘applied’ natural science, applied, that is, in order to satisfy our (subjective/anthropocentric) ends. Thus, although Bilgrami goes on to critique this position, I am claiming that the way the problematic is set up forecloses the possibility of finding sources within the movement of reason that instigates the modernist transformation of nature and society, to go beyond its present figuration in the modernity that comes to dominate. That is, it blocks a modernist critique of the current reified hegemonic form of modernity, with its techno-scientifically mediated conception of nature and its capitalist social organization. The ‘alternative’ conceptions of modernity that emerge, therefore, are forced along two predetermined paths. On the one hand, these conceptions return to sacralized sources that are, however, sublated in the movement of reason at the core of the modernist transformation—such that (as Bilgrami also acknowledges), there is no going back to these earlier forms of seemingly “unalienated” existence, since they lack precisely, the elements of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’. On the other, they can invoke ‘rational’ arguments that stay within the dominant reified, dualistic figuration of reason, which however, opens up the gap between subject/object, appearance/reality, fact/value etc., constitutive of contemporary modernity, and the alienation inherent to it.

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Thus, the once extant, concrete-historical traditions that Bilgrami mentions as examples of this alternative conception, almost invariably operate within a sacralized world-view. The sacralized understanding of nature remains a constant feature of these ‘dissenting’ traditions, even if, over time it takes on a modified, perhaps diluted, and more ambiguous form. This ambiguous sacralized understanding is discernible from the high tide of European romanticism (roughly from 1800 to 1890) to the ‘deep ecology’ movement of the 1960s and 70s). The sacralized understanding is central to the original protestant ‘dissenters’ of seventeenth century England. Many dissenting movements emerged in the turbulent period of the English civil wars, and in its immediate aftermath. Of these, as Bilgrami elaborates, the “levelers” and the “true levelers” (as they called themselves, since they started out critiquing the levelers), who, once they put their ideas into practice, came to be known as the “diggers”, articulated a significant critique of the established social hierarchy, and the emergent capitalist economy with its liberal-­normative underpinnings. Thus, William Walwyn (and the levelers in general) invoked the ‘natural rights’ of man by, in most instances, appealing to the Bible, and the ideas of equality stemming from Christian onto-theology. Their demand for ‘democratic rights’, such as extension of suffrage to all adult males, religious freedom etc. was premised upon the idea that all human beings were ‘children of God’, and God does not recognize hierarchy amongst men (their conception of ‘universal’ suffrage, given its underlying onto-­ theology, did not extend to women). Gerrard Winstanley, and his followers, went a step further by cultivating the ‘commons’ (and inviting all to come and participate, in return for food) and demanding an end to enclosures. They put their ideas into practice by literally digging up the land and leveling any trenches, or pulling down fences that enclosed a tract of land. Again, underlying these ideas was a Christian onto-theological conception of man’s relation to nature, where man is entitled to ‘use the earth’ for his ‘nourishment and preservation’. This conception drew upon

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the Bible—specifically, from passages in the “Acts of the Apostles”17 that became the foundation for early ‘Christian communism’, in the form of agrarian community life which collectively cultivated the common land and distributed its fruits equally. To this day, this predominantly religious form of communism is the basis for liberation theology in Latin America, and various amalgamations of Marxist thought and strands of Christian anti-capitalism. On the other hand, in and through the concrete historical exemplifications of an alternative paradigm to capitalist modernity, Bilgrami, abstracts a rationalist and counterfactual argument that undermines the reified, and thus, seemingly ‘naturalized’ liberal-normative foundations of capitalism, based on the justification of private property. This counterfactual argument, he maintains, is inherent in the ideas elaborated by Walwyn and Winstanley.18 The factual and the counterfactual arguments, intertwined at every level, are together designed to establish the contingent, hence merely hegemonic, status of capitalist modernity—the modernity that happened to win out over equally possible and viable historically factual and counterfactual (though extant, as possibilities) alternatives. Through the two levels of argumentation, Bilgrami wants to show that the dominance of the modernism that comes to shape our contemporary world, in its natural-scientific and capitalistic figuration, is a hegemonic formation that comes into being due to contingent historical factors, such that there is nothing necessary or inevitable about it, in the sense of a rational-historical development of ideas. The justification of the ‘enclosure of the commons’, Bilgrami elaborates, stems from social contract theory, which therefore, constitutes the rational-normative foundation of capitalism. The social contract tradition (for instance, in its Lockean formulation), as we know, posits a ‘state  The idea that the first Christians formed communist societies stems from Acts 2 and 4 of the Bible. Act 2:44–45, asserts, “All who believed were together and had all things in common; 45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” Act 4:32–35, asserts, “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. … 34 There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. 35 They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.” 18  Cf. Bilgrami (2014, p. 137). 17

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of nature’, prior to all social norms and institutions, from which it then claims to derive the principles and norms governing the system of enclosures, ‘purely rationally’—without any onto-theologically ‘thick’ presuppositions. Consequently, it appears as if the institution of private property, and the entire social, political, and economic organization which develops from it, can be the only form of ‘rationally’ organized, hence necessary, and ‘just’ society. The argument from ‘social contract’, as Bilgrami elaborates, is the following: “Suppose in the state of nature some people decide to come together and agree to respect each other’s claims to the ownership of land. That is, they agree that if a person puts up a fence around a stretch of land, and registers it in an office that ‘they set up for that purpose’ then the land becomes his or her private property.19 Further, they agree that this can only be legitimately done when no one is made worse off in the process than they were in the state of nature, even if some people are better off than others in the new arrangement. It is easy to see that this seemingly reasonable proviso justifies the institution of wage-labor, since the people who do not own land, and are therefore worse off than those who do in the new order, can sell their labor for wages, and if these wages permit a higher standard of living, they would still be better off than in the state of nature.”20 Almost all versions of social contract theory, Bilgrami points out, aim to show how despite inequalities in the distribution of property (initially, landed property, but later encompassing industrial capital), people are better off than they would have been in the state of nature. Within the historical context in which it emerged, this argument in its Lockean form, becomes the basis for the justification of the system of enclosures. Yet, it also normatively underpins later industrial capitalism, in the idea of ‘mutual advantage’ for both the owners of capital and those who work (on capital, whatever its form) for wages. However, this seemingly plausible argument, which over time becomes so historically sedimented that denying it seems to go against ‘common sense’, contains certain unjustified presuppositions. And it is the counterfactual argument, that according to Bilgrami, is implicit in a whole range  Cf. Ibid. pp. 134–35.  Cf. Ibid. p. 135.

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of dissenting traditions in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe that brings to light the illicit character of the presuppositions in the very idea of ‘social contract’. The counterfactual argument is based on the notion of ‘opportunity cost’, that is, the ‘cost’ associated with making a choice, from a range of available possibilities, which, in being made, foregoes the benefit which would have accrued from choosing an alternative possibility. In the context of the argument for the enclosure of the commons, based on social contract, this critique from ‘opportunity costs’ would claim that, as Bilgrami puts it, while it may be granted that “we are all better off than we were in the state of nature, it is perfectly possible for us to say that we are worse off than we would have been had the private economy not been established”.21 As Bilgrami quite rightly points out, the notion of opportunity costs associated with making a choice, complicates the idea of ‘consent’ (and the much vaunted ‘freedom of choice’). This complication is simply not recognized, let alone accommodated, in the liberal social contract tradition, given its governing presupposition of an ahistorical, entirely conjectural, and normatively neutral ‘state of nature’. The concept of opportunity costs shows that consent or choice is not given or exercised from a neutral position, but against the background of a set of historical, social, economic, and political circumstance not of our own making. Thus, as Bilgrami asserts, “if there was an implicit consent by those who are hired to work for wages, it was coerced by a condition they could not avoid, their non-possession of land”.22 As I noted, the factual and the counterfactual arguments are closely intertwined, and together, are designed to show how there is nothing rationally necessary or historically inevitable about the (techno-scientific and capitalist) modernity that came to be, and that the latter therefore, is merely a contingent hegemonic formation. Bilgrami emphasizes the intertwinement of the factual and the counterfactual (or the descriptive and the normative), such that the latter is not simply “an argument from anachronism”23—an idle theoretical exercise with no basis in historical  Ibid. p. 136.  Ibid. 23  Ibid. p. 137. 21 22

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reality. For, although such a critique or alternative normative conception, is ‘counter to fact’ (as all counterfactual arguments are), it is “not counter to all facts”, just those that actually happened to prevail for contingent reasons, since others “very much in the air did not survive”.24 In other words, the counterfactual argument brings to light alternative normative conceptions, which were prevalent at the time, and which therefore, were historically extant qua possibilities that went unrealized (or as opportunities that were foregone). However, the counterfactual argument based on opportunity costs, relies on the utilitarian principle of ensuring the accrual of greater ‘common good’ as compared to the privatization of the commons and the institution of the political economy of capitalism. To that extent, it seems to remain within the ambit of an anthropocentric perspective, and therefore, within the subject-object divide. This is not to say that utilitarianism is necessarily anthropocentric in principle, since the principle of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ is not necessarily confined to the consideration of only the good of human beings. However, the ‘cost-­ benefit’ analysis usually plays out in an anthropocentric manner, insofar as it either implicitly or explicitly attributes greater weightage to the interests of the human species over all other species. Where this attribution is explicit, it usually relies on an ontologically thick conception of a human ‘species essence’.25 As we shall see, the tensions inherent in the  Cf. Ibid.  As I shall discuss in chapter eight, Peter Singer has made this argument, drawing from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. Singer points out that positing an onto-theologically ‘thick’ criterion of human essence (such as tool-usage, intelligence, linguistic ability etc.), in order to attribute a ‘privileged status’ to human beings in relation to other animals, is not only arbitrary, but goes against our most basic moral ways of being with each other. That is, it is morally counter-intuitive, since a person or child that happens to be mentally or physically challenged, places not less, but greater demands on us for our consideration, and indeed, ordinarily elicits (and deserves) such consideration. Thus, what elicits our consideration for others, is not some specific ability they might possess, but simply the ‘capacity to suffer’. Insofar as any being is capable of suffering, it has (biological) ‘interests’ in the world (as opposed to inanimate objects), and therefore deserves our consideration of its interests. Therefore, not extending our consideration to animals amounts to a form of ‘speciesism’ (which is nothing but anthropocentrism), analogous to racism, sexism etc., and just as arbitrary. And since we have at least conceptually overcome these narrow delimitations, in moving towards a universalism which has been progressively more inclusive, we are involved in a self-contradiction when we do not include the interests of other species in our considerations. (Cf. Peter Singer. Animal Liberation: The Definite Classic of the Animal Movement, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2009). 24 25

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anthropocentric perspective, and ultimately, the dualistic conception underlying it, are keenly felt, for instance, with the emergence of ecological concerns, which force the question of our relation with nature, center-stage. If, as I am suggesting, in keeping with Bilgrami’s main line of argument, that the problematic of reimagining ‘unalienated life’ under conditions of modernity, is inseparable from reimagining our relation to nature, then it requires the revision and refinement of the anthropocentric approach. Bilgrami, towards the close of his essay provides the outline of just such a reimagining, with his conception of nature as intrinsically containing value properties, in a qualified, mediated sense. We may put the matter in the following manner: the new ideal of unalienated life that is to be realized, has two aspects, namely, (1) an unalienated relation to nature, and (2) unalienated relation to each other. Since these two aspects are irreducibly co-dependent, for the sake of consistency, we cannot tend towards a non-anthropocentric approach26 on one front (our relation to nature), while seemingly retaining it on the other (intersubjective co-existence). Or put differently, further arguments are required (as Bilgrami concedes27) in order to forge the link (which Bilgrami emphasizes without developing it further28) between an unalienated relation to nature (one that is not exclusively anthropocentric), and an unalienated relation to each other, captured (though, for the most part, as he admits, indirectly elaborated) in Bilgrami’s insight that “Nobody in society is well off if someone is badly off.”29 In an indirect sense, this insight brings to light the general malaise symptomatic of our alienated existence in modern society, where not only the poor, but the rich are also alienated from society—manifested for instance, in the way they isolate themselves in gated communities.  I have deliberately used the expression ‘tend towards’ to indicate that Bilgrami, for structural reasons, does not get rid of the anthropos in ascribing intrinsic value properties to nature, for otherwise we would be back in the ‘objective-subjective’ trap. Rather, as we shall see in greater detail, for Bilgrami these value properties and the normative demands they impose are necessarily mediated through us, that is, it is we who feel the force of these demands and respond to them. 27  Cf. Bilgrami (2014, pp. 170, 172, 174). 28  Cf. Ibid. p. 169. 29  Ibid. p. 165. 26

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The philosophical substance of this idea must be distinguished from notions of compassion, empathy etc. The latter feelings may arise from, and therefore, may be symptomatic of, the basic existential state that the idea encapsulates, but they do not reach its deeper philosophical import. This import lies in the constitutive character of intersubjective co-­ dependence. The latter conception entails getting away from the “individualized notion of liberty that attached to property, labor and talent, in ways that made for liberties conceptual incoherence with equality”,30 within the hegemonic capitalist form of modernity, with its liberal normative scaffolding. Positively stated, it entails the realization that my individual liberty, by which I pursue my own self-interests, is dependent on everyone else’s liberty and self-interest, such that individual liberty itself must be “conceived of in collective or non-individualistic terms”,31 that is, from the perspective of the ‘collective other’. Within the confines of his essay, Bilgrami does not develop this idea (although it seems to have some striking parallels with Kantian ethics), nor his suggestion (indicating the link between the two modes of unalienated existence vis-à-vis nature and society) that just as nature places normative demands on us, so does society, and therefore, “to be unalienated [from nature and one another] is to be in responsive sync with these demands”.32 I will return to this set of issues towards the close of this chapter. The basic coordinates of the problem are now clear. What needs to be spelt out is the notion of normative demands, both from nature and from society, and what it means to be in sync with them so as to realize the new modality of unalienated life (such that ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ are no longer in tension). Yet, as long as the link between the two realms— nature and society, is not fully worked out, the impression that these are two completely distinct realms continues to persist, along with the dualistic ontological conception underlying them, and the inherent tensions that result from this dualism. For instance, it is not difficult to envision a situation where the demands placed on us by modern industrial society (even in its collective, say, communistic organization), come into conflict with the demands placed on us by nature.  Ibid. p. 172.  Ibid. p. 173. 32  Ibid. 30 31

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In this sense, both the factual and the counterfactual arguments, I am claiming, do not countenance the possibility that the source of an ‘alternative modernity’, and of a secular form of unalienated existence, might lie within the very movement of reason that gives rise to the present figuration of modernity. Thus, this movement of reason qua movement, that is, when it is not reified in the notion of disenchanted, quantified, and technologically mastered nature, nor in the capitalist form of social organization, may contain the potential for an alternative, unalienated modernity (in sync with the demands of both ‘nature’ and ‘society’). To articulate this notion requires that ‘reason’ is understood in its non-­ reified negative-critical movement, which formed the original historical impetus of the Enlightenment. From such a stand-point, not only ‘disenchanted nature’ and ‘capitalist society’, but also the sacralized (re)conception and utilitarian arguments (insofar as they end up privileging the ‘good’ of human beings), turn out to be reified manifestations of the negative movement of reason.

3.3 The Problem of History: Contingency, Necessity, and the Notion of Historicity In order to recover this negative potential of reason, from its positivistic reified formation, the first step, in the present context, is to problematize the apparently strict opposition between (historical) necessity/determinism and contingency (which is intertwined with all the other oppositions between subject-object, fact-value etc.). For, the idea of an alternative modernity that is completely independent of the modernist strand of thought that comes to dominate, and the idea of the contingent hegemony of the latter, are two sides of the same coin. However, I am claiming that the ‘alternative’ is inherent in the negative/critical movement of reason, which instigates the disenchantment of nature and of human beings, characteristic of enlightenment modernity, and the contemporary techno-scientific and capitalist form it takes. Therefore, I am advocating a shift in emphasis from the paired concepts ‘determinism/contingency’ to ‘reified/unreified’, to articulate this position, though not with a view to replacing the former, but to explicating it.

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As I noted, Bilgrami shows how the entire trajectory of thought constitutive of Western capitalist modernity, “is quite uncompulsory”,33 by tracing its genealogy in relation to other (once extant) dissenting traditions within the Enlightenment, and by providing an alternative counterfactual rational-normative model. The factual and the counterfactual (or descriptive and normative) arguments, taken together, show that this trajectory of thought and the modernity to which it gives rise is a contingent hegemonic formation. It is not at all rationally-normatively necessary. The understanding of nature and human beings exclusively through the desacralized ontology of the natural sciences merely happens to win out over alternative (primarily sacralized, though also rational-normative) conceptions of nature and society. In other words, our contemporary extractive, exploitative capitalistic and technological modernity is the direct result of the hegemony that the scientific conception of nature on the one hand, and the notion of ‘individual liberty’ (institutionalized in the ownership of property) on the other, comes to acquire. The scientific conception takes nature to be the ‘objective’ realm of matter and its properties, processes etc., devoid of any intrinsic value. ‘Value’ on its side therefore, comes to be located exclusively in ‘subjective’ mental states, based on our practical interests, desires and intentions—either with respect to other human beings, or with respect to ‘objective and indifferent nature’. In relation to others, it is easy to see how the reduction of ethics to ‘naturalized’ self-interest, gives rise to the artifice of self-interested individuals in a ‘state of nature’, that come together in a ‘social contract’, to preserve their (long-term) self-interests. In relation to ‘nature’ as such, I noted that the idea of technology as ‘applied science’, follows from this scientific conception of nature and the subject-object divide underlying it. On this account, it is clear that the (contingent) hegemony of the scientific understanding of nature, founded on subject-object dualism, leads to the alienated world-view with respect to nature and human beings. However, it is less clear what the precise relation between the concepts of ‘contingency’ and ‘necessity’ is, both with respect to historical processes, and with respect to the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of these processes,  Cf. Ibid. p. 156.

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that is, in relation to the possibility of the reflective–critical grasping of historical becoming. I am suggesting that these concepts form an ‘ordered pair’—the apparently strict opposition between contingency and necessity in cognizing/interpreting the movement of history, corresponds to the subject/object dualism that informs that cognition/interpretation of history. As we know, in the philosophical tradition, the subject-object divide emerges through intertwined metaphysical and epistemological considerations, that is, through the distinction between the ‘object’ and ‘instrument’ (or means) of knowledge, that becomes explicit for consciousness in the course of its experiencing. The ‘metaphysical’ and the ‘epistemological’ dimensions of experience further split up into ‘objectively ideal existence’ (a priori, universal principles) and positivistic, factual existence, on the metaphysical (or ‘objective’) side, corresponding to the rationalist and empiricist approaches on the epistemological (or ‘subjective’) side. Similarly, I am claiming that as thought becomes more self-reflective, and therefore, becomes aware of its history in a more constitutive, genealogical sense, it cannot help but cognize its own history, on the basis of this basic dualistic conceptual machinery. Thus, it grasps this history, initially at least, in terms of the split (and seemingly strict opposition) between ‘necessity’ and ‘contingency’ on the metaphysical (‘objective’) side (corresponding to the split between ‘ideal’ and ‘factual’ existence, or universals and particulars), and an ‘a priori’ rationalist and a posteriori empiricist approach on the epistemological (‘subjective’) side. Thus, the problematic of overcoming the seemingly strict opposition between contingency and necessity, and finding ways of thinking them together in the domain of historical becoming, is at bottom related to the problematic of reconceiving the subject-object divide. If this is correct, then, although the element of contingency, and thus hegemony, in historical becoming is undeniable, historical ‘contingency’ and ‘necessity’, understood in a suitably transformed sense, are not mutually exclusive contradictories, rather, they condition each other. I will have much more to say concerning their interrelation, in Chap. 5, in the context of the political, that is, with respect to the possibilities that still remain open for an emancipatory politics, and the constitution of ‘universal’ solidarities in the face of the contemporary reified, hegemonic formation of modernity.

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However, in the present context, I am claiming that Bilgrami’s point of departure, as it determines his approach to, and conception of, an ‘alternative’ to the modernity that in fact won out or acquired hegemony, takes the dominant conception of modernity to be intrinsically, and exclusively, structured by the subject-object divide. This leads Bilgrami to seeks the source of an ‘alternative modernity’ either in sacralized dissenting traditions which are considered ‘outside’ (insofar as they are sublated by) the modernist tradition, or in a rational normative (counterfactual) argument that in turn, I noted, cleaves too closely to the subject-object divide that structures the reified formation of reason in modernity. In other words, it prevents him from finding resources for an alternative modernity from within the movement of thought (understood in an unreified sense) intrinsic to modernity—visible even in the reified and distorted form in which it confronts us today. To critique (reified) modernity from ‘within’, and uncover the potentialities for rearticulation inherent in it, requires that we first loosen the grip that the dualistic ontological (and epistemological) conception of the subject-object—in the sense in which it informs the (self )-understanding of the modern natural sciences, and the conception of technology as ‘applied science’—has on our thinking. As I noted, loosening this grip would also undercut the rigid opposition between historical necessity and contingency. To this end, I began by noting that the dualistic ontological conception inherent in natural science, and thus in technology as ‘applied science’—the latter flowing from the former—which set up the problematic of ‘modernity’ and its ‘alternative’, in a specific way, are at odds both with contemporary and classical theoretical approaches to technology. For instance, the post-phenomenological approach as well as Bruno Latour’s actant-network theory emphasize, although in quite different ways, the constitutive role of technological mediation (of various types of instrumentation, measuring and recording devices etc.) in the very production of scientific knowledge.34 Modern natural science, according to these theories of technology, would be impossible without  Even theoretical physics is indebted to experimental physics and its technical apparatus, not only for the confirmation of its theoretical results and postulates (and without such confirmation they remain merely mathematical models), but also for the precise measurement of various constants that are indispensable to its theoretical models. 34

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technological apparatus and its mediation with respect to ‘nature’. It follows that science is necessarily (constitutively) ‘techno-science’.35 The conception of technology as ‘applied science’ is also at odds with Heidegger’s understanding (and with others in the classical tradition), which is concerned with technological mediation in a much broader sense in comparison to the mediation through concrete technological artefacts that both post-phenomenology and Latour’s actant-­network theory emphasize. The latter theories develop a critique of the classical philosophical approaches to technology, which include those of Marx, Jaspers, Ellul, and Heidegger (and with which Gandhi and Tagore share a broad affinity). As I noted, from a post-phenomenological and Latourian perspective, what ties these diverse thinkers together is that they are concerned with the ‘conditions of possibility’36 of the technologically mediated encounter/understanding of the world and of ourselves in modernity, and not with how concrete technological artefacts mediate and co-shape human experience and action. However, I will argue (1) that the critiques developed by contemporary theories of technology of this ‘conditions of possibility’ approach (in the ‘transcendental style’ of thinking), are misdirected insofar as they misunderstand the concept of technological ‘alienation’, central to the classical (‘transcendental’) approach to technology and (2) contain elements of the phenomenological-transcendental approach they criticize, just as the classical approach contains the possibility of analyzing ‘concrete’ artefacts. As a consequence, both approaches—the ‘transcendental’ and the concrete-empirical, through differences in emphases, bring to light different dimensions of technological mediation that, I shall argue, are co-­ constitutive rather than mutually exclusive.  Don Ihde makes this point from a “post-phenomenological” perspective, when he investigates, in a concrete manner, the complex technologies needed, in the form of scientific instrumentation— computational and recording devices etc., for setting up experiments. By analyzing the types of technological mediation at work in the generation of scientific knowledge concerning ‘nature’ (the manner in which ‘nature’ is constituted, in how it reports itself, through its quantitative ‘representation’ via instruments) Ihde shows how, technology is not merely ‘applied science’, as is ordinarily understood, rather, ‘science’ could be ‘applied technology’. (cf. Don Ihde, Instrumental Realism: The Interface Between Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 67–115). 36  Cf. Peter-Paul Verbeek. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency and Design. Trans. Robert P. Crease, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2010. 35

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From the perspective of the classical thinking on technology in the ‘transcendental style’, the notion of ‘techno-science’ that these contemporary, ‘concrete’ understandings of technological mediation through technological devices underscore, seem not to go far enough. If we take Heidegger’s thinking on technology as exemplary of this approach (and the post-­ phenomenological position takes its stand primarily in relation to Heidegger), then his general argument may be captured in his famous assertion in “The Question Concerning Technology” that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological”.37 What this means is that “the technological” qua essence, particularly as it pertains to modern technology, is a specific historical mode of ‘revealing’ or encountering the world, and is not therefore, itself a piece of technology (in any positivistic sense) we encounter in the world. Yet, this simultaneously opens up the possibility of a transformed understanding of the movement of history. For Heidegger, history is not to be thought of in a positivistic sense—as a series of occurrences (whether causally related or not) fixed, thus unrepeatable in themselves, in ‘linear’ time. For, the essence of technology, qua mode of ‘revealing’ or ‘unconcealment’ is antecedent not only to ‘technology’ (as technological processes and artefacts), but to modern natural science as well, insofar as the technological mode of revealing/encountering makes the modern scientific conception of nature as a “calculable coherence of forces”, itself possible. Chronologically speaking, modern physical science begins in the seventeenth century. In contrast machine-power technology develops only in the second half of the eighteenth century. But modern technology, which for chronological reckoning is later, is from the point of view of the essence holding sway within it, historically earlier.38

This claim is quite different, Heidegger writes, from the usual assertion concerning the mutual dependence of modern science and technology, which tries to establish that modern science, insofar as it is experimental and relies on ‘data’ generated through experiments, is as dependent on various technical apparatus, as technology is dependent on science. For  Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”, in Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell (Ed.), San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992, p. 311. 38  Ibid. p. 327. 37

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Heidegger, while the claim concerning the mutually constitutive relation between science and technology (underscored in contemporary discourse as ‘techno-science’), is ‘correct’, it does not get to the ‘essence’ of technology. It is said that modern technology is something incomparably different from all earlier technologies, because it is based on modern physics as an exact science. Meanwhile, we have come to understand more clearly that the reverse holds true as well: modern physics, as experimental, is dependent upon technical apparatus and upon progress in the building of apparatus. The establishment of this mutual relationship between technology and physics is correct. But it remains a merely historiological establishing of facts and says nothing about that in which the mutual relationship is grounded. The decisive question still remains, of what essence is modern technology that it thinks of putting exact sciences to use?39

I will discuss Heidegger’s conception of the ‘essence’ of technology in greater detail in Chap. 5. What is of relevance here is the difference between Heidegger’s and Bilgrami’s approach. Bilgrami, I noted, starts from the subject-object divide as constitutive of enlightenment modernity, and then attempts to bridge the gap by conceiving ‘value’ as an intermediate ‘entity’ between human beings and ‘nature’—neither purely subjective, nor purely objective. Given its starting point, as we shall see, this approach runs into difficulties in its attempt to articulate an intermediate conception of value. In contrast, with the notion of truth as alētheia, that is, as a historical mode of unconcealment or revealing (which turns out to be simultaneously a form of concealment, precisely of alternative possibilities of revealing), as opposed to the ‘derivative’ concept of ‘veritas’ (based on correspondence between cognition and its object), Heidegger circumvents the subject-object divide from the get-go. And this opens up the possibility of bringing an alternative model into view, one which articulates a series of shifts not only with respect to ‘knowing’, but also with respect to historical becoming, the notion of freedom, agency etc., insofar as these notions are now understood in their co-constitutive interrelation. Every mode of revealing is historically mediated—it is always a historically 39

 Ibid. p. 319.

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handed down mode of revealing/encountering the world. As a result, ‘knowing’, or more broadly, ‘experiencing’, (insofar as it is conceptually determined), is constitutively historical, since concepts themselves are historical—not only in the sense that they have a certain genealogy, but also in the manner in which they come to structure our experience. Heidegger calls the ‘essence’ (condition of possibility) of technology, understood as a mode of historical revealing, ‘Enframing’ (Gestellung). As a mode of encountering the world, it is all-encompassing, and not, as Heidegger first approached technology in Being and Time,40 through  In Being and Time, Heidegger circumvents the subject-object divide, in keeping with the phenomenological approach, by bringing to light the ‘deep structure’ of our experiential involvement in the world—through the temporal structure of ‘care’. The latter emerges as the ‘condition of possibility’ for the derivative experience of ourselves and the world as ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’. For Heidegger, ordinarily this ‘deep structure’ remains implicit within the positivistic conception of nature and the self that comes to dominate our understanding with the advent of the modern natural sciences. In Being and Time, Heidegger attempts to unearth the temporal structure of our involvements (as care), through specific types of experiences and ‘moods’ (Stimmungen) which ultimately bring the totality of these involvements, and Dasein’s situatedness in the world, to the surface. Starting with equipmental breakdown—the unavailability of equipment in its ‘equipmental being’, that is, in its seamless, ‘transparent’ functioning, which gives rise to circumspection; the sense of the ‘uncanny’, or not-being-at home (Unheimlichkeit), profound boredom, anxiety etc., he shows how the realization that my death is ‘mine alone’ pulls me out of the care structure—the network of my involvements, and makes the totality of this network of involvements itself visible through the future oriented “being-towards-death” that underlies this network. Through this existential analytic of Dasein, Heidegger shows that the reflective-critical movement of thought does not lie in turning ‘inwards’, away from the world; rather it is built into the very manner in which Dasein ‘ek-sists’ in the world—as a future oriented, and historically determined temporal being. There are obvious tensions between the analysis of equipmental being, and the manner in which it mediates our experience of, and existence and praxis in, the world (in terms of zuhanden/vorhanden, breakdown, circumspection etc.) in Being and Time, and the notion of the essence of (modern) technology in “The Question Concerning Technology”. Yet, despite these tensions, we find a basic continuity in Heidegger’s thinking on technology—which lies in the transcendental ‘conditions of possibility’ approach. In both works, technological mediation is constitutive of the manner in which we ek-sist in, and thus experience, the world.  However, in Being and Time, technological mediation is conceived as the concrete manifestation of Dasein’s temporal ‘ek-sistence’, from which Heidegger abstracts to make the underlying temporal structure, consisting in the mutual, constitutive conditioning of the past and the future, explicit. Even with this abstractive movement, Heidegger articulates the temporal structure of Dasein’s being in the world not merely theoretically, but through concrete ‘existentiell’ analyses that uncover the existential possibility, on Dasein’s part, of a mode of being that is oriented towards its fundamental ‘being towards death’. Thus, the moment of negativity or reflective (self )distancing, that pulls Dasein out of the totality of its involvements, is itself an existential possibility that can be realized in an ‘authentic’ mode of existence—which keeps its own being-towards-death constantly in view, and is prepared for it (thereby appropriating it), in ‘anticipatory resoluteness’. Whereas, in “The Question Concerning Technology”, the ‘essence’ (condition of possibility) of technology, as a mode of (historical) revealing qua ‘Enframing’ (Gestell), is all-encompassing, and not merely an ‘existentiell’ instantiation of Dasein’s temporality. 40

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technological artefacts (though still from a ‘transcendental’ orientation), merely a concrete ‘existentiell’ instantiation of Dasein’s temporal, future oriented way of being in the world. And yet, the possibility of negation or (self )distancing is not foreclosed by the all-pervasive, all-encompassing character of the modern technological mode of revealing (world disclosure). For, ‘enframing’ as a mode of revealing, is simultaneously a mode of concealment—of alternative possibilities of revealing. On this account, the pre-modern world and its understanding is one such historically extant mode of revealing that is transformed in modernity. This allows Heidegger to underscore the irreducibility of human beings to any one particular historically conditioned manner of encountering and understanding the world. Insofar as it is historically determined, no form of world disclosure (including the ‘enframing’ of modern techno-science) can, in principle, lay claim to the ‘in-itself ’. Historicity, in this sense, implies that human beings are irreducible to ‘nature’, in the positivistic interpretation that modern techno-science gives to the term. We can easily detect certain parallels between Bilgrami’s position and Heidegger’s arguments. Bilgrami, I noted, emphasizes the contingent hegemony of enlightenment modernity in its present (techno-scientific and capitalist) configuration, by tracing its historical emergence or genealogy. He therefore, draws attention to the alternative understandings of modernity which are lost or remain suppressed in relation to the present hegemonic formation. Similarly, Heidegger also sees the current, historically constituted, techno-scientific (and implicitly ‘capitalistic’, although he does not use the term), mode of revealing, as inherently ‘contingent’, since it covers up alternative possibilities of disclosing the world. However, there is also a significant point of contrast between Heidegger’s and Bilgrami’s positions. Bilgrami looks to draw on alternative strands of thought sublated by the dominant modernist understanding of the Enlightenment, even as, in his rational-normative articulation of an alternative, he does not seem to do enough to break with its dominant discourse of the subject and object. The latter, in the counterfactual rational-normative argument, returns in the form of the division between the natural and the social world, and calls for a locus of value, ‘in-between’ the two. Whereas Heidegger, despite appearances to the contrary, remains committed to the basic principle underlying modernity in a non-reified

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sense, namely, the negative moment of critical-reflective self-distancing. Indeed, this negative moment is the constitutive condition of ‘meaning’, even as it instigates the movement of thought that leads to its reification, for instance, in the present (dualistic) configuration. Negativity, or the irreducibility of human beings to the world they inhabit, lets a ‘world’ (mode of revealing/encountering a world) emerge for human ‘being-in-the-world’ (Dasein), in the first place. In other words, rather than attempting to overcome this distance between human beings and the world, either by reducing one to the other, or reifying it into the subject-object divide (and then, in keeping with tradition, attempting to show how the ‘subject’ can apprehend its ‘object’) Heidegger, as I will elaborate, makes this distance itself the constitutive ‘condition of possibility’ of having a (meaningful) world, in which we always already find ourselves.41 This irreducible distance, variously characterized throughout his writings42 as ‘pre-ontological understanding of being’, ‘uncanniness’ or ‘unheimlichkeit’ (‘not being at home in the world’), ‘freedom’ (understood not as individual willing or agency), the ‘saving power’ (contained in the essence of technology qua mode of revealing), etc. is therefore, not something that is restricted to enlightenment modernity. As the very condition of possibility of having/inhabiting a world, it is common to all modes or revealing—all historical ways of ‘being-in-the-world’. What then distinguishes the pre-modern from the modern, while accounting for this continuity? It is possible to argue that this ‘original’ state of ‘not being at home in the world’—the sense of contingency, negativity, alienation etc. as the constitutive condition of meaning (of having a world), comes to explicit (self ) awareness in the critical-skeptical turn in modernity. However, this explicit self-awareness is once again reified in the subject-­ object divide,  and at the socio-political-economic level, in capitalist  See Chap. 5.  We may say that in the development of Heidegger’s thinking, this basic structuring idea, while undergoing various iterations in different contexts, is refined to the extent that it drops its seemingly individualistic tone that Heidegger struck in Being and Time with its articulation in terms of ‘authenticity’ and ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ in one’s ‘being towards death’, and is reworked in terms of its historicality (‘destining of a sending’ etc.). 41 42

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industrial society, normatively based on the notion of the individual. The dualistic conception then, sets up the problematic of ‘nature’ and of ‘human beings’ in a manner that is geared towards ‘overcoming’ this divide. This compulsion, flowing from the skeptical impasse that the underlying dualist ontology generates, comes to pervade modern thinking. In the context our discussion, it comes to pervade the thinking concerning the (intertwined) themes of nationalist consciousness, technological mediation, and ecological concerns. As I shall argue, the fecundity of the negative moment is recognized not just by Heidegger (who, I noted, occupies an ambiguous position in the tradition, insofar as the status of the notion of ‘Being’ is not entirely clear), but by a trajectory of thought, that includes, Kant’s transcendental turn, the Hegelian dialectic, Husserlian phenomenology, Marx’s ‘materialistic’ reinterpretation of the dialectic, and Critical Theory, (more specifically, Adorno’s negative dialectic). Before elaborating this claim by tracing the role of the negative in shaping the theories of some of these thinkers, let us return to our comparison of Heidegger’s and Bilgrami’s arguments, in order to further develop the point concerning the constitutive character of negativity, in relation to historical becoming (and the contingency inherent in it). For Bilgrami, both Marx and Gandhi saw quite clearly that modernity in its capitalistic figuration, with its underlying reified conception of ‘objective’ nature devoid of value and the (individual) ‘rational subject’, as the source of ‘naturalized’ value, is entirely contingent. Gandhi’s critique of the dominant conception of enlightenment modernity that emerged in the West, Bilgrami argues, is continuous with a rich and nuanced dissenting conceptual tradition within Europe (the ‘Scientific dissenters’), going back to the mid seventeenth century. Further, I discussed how, through a critique of Lockean Social Contract theory, which provides much of the theoretical and normative scaffolding for the justification of the enclosure of the commons and the establishment of the private economy (initially founded on landed property), Bilgrami shows that the latter is itself based on contingent premises that fail to consider an alternative, equally possible, counterfactual scenario. The counterfactual possibility has greater normative/rational claim to the furtherance of the common and individual good, thereby opening up the prospect of

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bringing liberty and equality into harmony, as the basis for a modern form of unalienated existence. There is therefore, nothing either rationally/ethically (assuming, in keeping with the critical stance of enlightenment modernity, an intrinsic connection between reason and ethics) necessary or historically inevitable about the ‘enclosure of the commons’, and thus, about the liberal and capitalist modernity that won out, or the hegemony it came to acquire. Here again, the similarity between Bilgrami’s and Heidegger’s arguments is readily discernible. Both underscore alternative possibilities of “disclosing the world”, by tracing the genealogy or historical emergence of the world we find ourselves in, and thereby, bring to light the intrinsic contingency of our ‘world’. However, in his essay on technology, Heidegger provides an articulation of how to think contingency (and freedom) and historical becoming together, without reducing one to the other, through the allied concepts of historicity, historical ‘destining’ (of a revealing), and the event of appropriation (Ereignis). Historicity or historical destining refers to the historical unfolding of a certain mode of world disclosure within which humans always already find themselves— within which they are appropriated, but never appropriated completely. As Heidegger puts it, “Always the destining of revealing holds complete sway over men. But that destining is never a fate that compels”.43 ‘Enframing’, as a mode of world disclosure or revealing inherent in (the essence of ) modern technology, is a specific type of historical destining, set in motion with the advent of the modern scientific conception of nature.44 Yet, even if the ‘destining of the technological mode of revealing’ holds complete sway over modern (scientifically oriented) consciousness, it does not determine it completely. For, I noted, ‘freedom’ (and thus, contingency) is the very condition of ‘having a world’, insofar as it creates the space for meaning—for the interpretation, hence  Ibid. p. 330.  That is, minimally, it is set in motion with the demise of the Aristotelian (arche)teleological notion of causality (which is ‘circular’ insofar as the ‘final cause’ or telos is potentially present at the ‘origin’ or ‘arche’ and acts as the guiding principle of growth and development), and its replacement by the linear causality (where the cause is necessarily antecedent to the effect) of the modern natural sciences, which rejects the concept of ‘final cause’ or any notion of teleology or purposiveness in nature. 43 44

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representation, of the world. In the very possibility of ‘representing’ the world (although for Heidegger, representation is not our most primordial relation to the world), we hold the ‘world at a distance’, that is, we are not fully immersed in it, but encounter it ‘as’ a world—as inimical or dangerous, purposive, beautiful etc. To encounter something ‘as’ something, is to be non-identical with it. Thus, the very structure of representation— the ‘as structure’—entails an ‘original’ constitutive non-identity (or “alienation” in a broad sense), or simply, negativity (of reflective distance), as the ‘condition of possibility’ of having a (meaningful) world. Consequently, the aim of overcoming the current hegemonic configuration of techno-scientific and capitalistic modernity, hence the aim of any emancipatory politics, cannot be to return to a sacralized view of nature, along with a sacralized idea of community (as Bilgrami also emphasizes). However, it also cannot be that of returning to an ‘original’, non-alienated human community, at one with nature and itself, that is, to some harmonious state of nature, even in a desacralized, ‘objective’ sense, since such an ‘original’ non-alienated state is ruled out in principle. Further, as I will argue in relation to Marx’s dialectical conception of historical movement, and the political-normative aims it underpins, the realization of unalienated existence by overcoming capitalist alienation, cannot entail a posited future ‘society without antagonisms’. Thus, against the standard philosophical critique of Marx’s position, I will argue that his political-normative aim must not be understood as being oriented by the possible realization of a society that reflectively coincides with itself in transparent closure—a society fully ‘present’ to itself. The latter, as the critics have pointed out, constitutes a ‘metaphysics of presence’—a mode of reification specific to modernity qua transcending/negative movement of thought. For, it involves the reification (determinate negation) of the negative, critical-reflective distance opened up by this movement of reason, into another ‘closed’ universality/objectivity. This metaphysically and epistemically totalizing tendency, they claim, then gives rise to politically totalitarian effects. Thus, on the one hand, the pull of the imagined past, of a return to some posited original unalienated state of unity, is based on the intertwined conceptions of human community at one with itself and with nature, which function as founding myths that set up the political itself

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as a nostalgia for the past (a temptation which Heidegger also could not avoid). On the other, as Adorno and Horkheimer argue, these myths also contain an implicit awareness of negativity, contingency, freedom etc. Indeed, it is precisely this awareness, insofar as it remains suppressed, that is, insofar as the modern political/institutional avenues of acknowledging and appropriating it may appear inadequate (particularly in times of crisis) that provides impetus to these regressive political tendencies. The latter then manifests itself, for instance, in positing and invoking a mythical unity of the past in the service of a posited common, unified future (the nation and the ‘people’ as constituting a singular, ‘eternal’, cultural, ethnic or religious identity, with its projected continuity with the past etc.). I will take up a fuller analysis of the various forms that the modernist acknowledgment and appropriation of negativity in the political domain may take, by turning to the debate between Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek. The analysis will articulate the interrelations between contingency and hegemony, in relation to the possibility of staging the ‘universal’ in the political domain, in the form of emancipatory political projects which still appeal to universal, yet ‘empty’ or contentless notions of justice, equality, rights etc. The debate between these philosophers raises the question of the very possibility and scope of political agency, in the context of the reified and hegemonic capitalistic configuration of modernity. In responding to this issue, I will show how the universal in the political domain may be represented, such that it is reducible neither to a wholly contingent historical hegemonic formation, nor, to the idealobjective telos of ‘universal history’. Just as with the reified notion of a (posited) unified and harmonious past which serves to forge a ‘common national (historical, cultural) identity’, the modernist conception of universal history, when it is reified in terms of an ideal-objective guiding telos (such as that of a society fully, transparently present to itself in reflective self-coincidence, a ‘society without antagonisms’), results in the kind of historical determinism with respect to the emergence of the capitalist form of modernity that Bilgrami

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is concerned about.45 Yet, since Marx’s theory is also prone to such a reified interpretation, in drawing a parallel between Gandhi and Marx, Bilgrami needs to account for this apparently obvious point of divergence between them—Marx’s seemingly determinist conception of history, stemming from his dialectical materialist understanding of its movement. The latter, if correct, would entail a stagist understanding of history, where colonial and post-colonial countries like India must necessarily pass through the stage of capitalism, which would then allow productive forces to develop to the point where the capitalist relations of production could be “torn asunder”. On the contrary, Gandhi’s critique of capitalist modernity, is based on precisely the recognition of the ‘uncompulsory’ character of capitalist (and expansionist, colonial) development. Bilgrami accounts for this difference between the two positions by maintaining that it is only apparent. The deterministic understanding only applies to the capitalist system and its ‘immanent logic’, and not to previous socio-economic formations. However, this reading not only goes against the grain  of Marx’s thought, but is not necessary, since a dialectical and even teleological understanding of the unfolding of history at the meta-empirical level, can accommodate historical contingency (along with difference, dissent etc.) at the empirical level, so long as the telos (the universal standpoint) is not reified but thought as a ‘universal  The universal conceived as a contingent hegemonic formation, makes the source of the ‘universality’ empirical, and therefore, ‘the political’ is understood as the arena of endless contingent struggles between various groups that attempt to acquire hegemony, by passing off their interests as the interests of society as a whole. Here, the claim to universality amounts to a kind of Machiavellian mass deception. In contrast, the reified conception of ‘universal history’, results in a historical determinism that infects not only the analysis of the emergence of the capitalist form of modernity (as Bilgrami notes), but also the only form of modernist ‘universal politics’ that has so far been articulated and put into practice as an alternative to capitalistic modernity, namely, communistic societies. The determinist/reified conception of history infects the latter in its own self-­ understanding, since it leads to stagist conception where capitalism is understood as a necessary ‘stage’ (just as slavery, feudalism etc.) that must be ‘passed through’, such that in and through its necessary dissolution owing to its own internal contradictions, we may arrive at the ‘final destination’ of a classless society. That is, a society without contradictions, fully transparent to itself— where the ‘subject’ and the objective forces of history coincide. Moreover, I noted, from a liberal standpoint this leads to the oft-repeated allegation that this deterministic conception contains an intrinsic tendency towards (a specifically modern form of ) totalitarianism, stemming from a ‘metaphysics of presence’. For, on the latter account, a society fully present/transparent to itself in reflective self-coincidence can brook no dissent or difference – at best it can understand differences only as remnants of the old order, unthematized class interests etc. 45

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in becoming’; and that means, it is understood as the movement of the negativity of reason itself.46 Thus, just as with Heidegger, Marx’s understanding of the dialectical materialist movement of history can admit contingency in history, although the understanding of the movement of history is obviously quite different for the two. This implies that there is nothing stagist about Marx’s conception of historical becoming, such that capitalism is a necessary ‘stage’ that must be traversed in the progress towards the telos of a classless society. Marx’s position then, would not necessarily be antithetical to what Gandhi’s articulates with respect to India at the beginning of the twentieth century—for, there would be nothing “[…] pre-ordained and compulsory about the adoption of capitalism in India (or, for that matter, in Europe)”.47

3.4 The Secular Reenchantment of Nature: Its Limits, and Rearticulation Through the Experience of Negativity Despite their projected agreement on the issue of the contingency (but for reasons different from the one’s Bilgrami offers), of a particular hegemonic historical formation, here a basic and ineradicable difference between Gandhi’s and Marx’s vision of an alternative to capitalist modernity, and what constitutes unalienated life, can no longer remain implicit. Marx, keeping to the Hegelian trajectory (even if in a ‘materialist’ sense), occupies the modernist perspective that takes the disenchantment of the  As we shall see, through a comparison of two passages from Marx, Laclau pinpoints the apparent tension between the deterministic and contingent-hegemonic views of history running throughout Marx’s writings. These passages provide the point of departure for Laclau’s attempt, following Gramsci, to subject Marx’s thinking to a ‘series of transformations’ that shift the emphasis from a structural-dialectical and therefore deterministic understanding of history to one that emphasizes contingent hegemonic historical formations. A similar set of concerns animates Claude Lefort’s essay “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another”. In chapter six, I shall take up a fuller discussion of these issues in relation to the question of whether these tensions can be reconciled within Marx’s theoretical system, or do they require, in keeping with the Gramscian turn, its fundamental transformation in the direction of a ‘hegemonic’ understanding of socio-historical formations. 47  Ibid. p. 140. 46

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world following the European Enlightenment (with its epistemic, normative, economic and political roots) as a fait accompli. The question for Marx therefore, is: given the inherent, unreflected and unresolved contradictions within capitalism, leading to reification and alienation, how is the latter to be transcended in a form of society that resolves these contradictions (between the bourgeois and the proletariat, between individual liberty and collective equality etc.), resulting in unalienated existence? An unalienated existence which however, no longer understands itself as living in immediate unity with ‘nature’, or ‘community’, narrowly rooted in either sacralized or naturalized identities, but is explicitly self-­conscious, having suffered the experience of disenchantment and alienation. Thus, the question for Marx is: how do we conceive of an unalienated form of life that does not appeal to any transcendent source of normative legitimacy, such as divine nature or God, (or to an immediate unity with ‘objective’ nature) but accomplishes the unity of liberty and equality (in a dialectical sense) within the immanent domain of human society?48 The Gandhian critique of modernity, along with his alternative conception of unalienated life is, on the other hand, driven by a different ontology—one that understands nature as enchanted. Further, I noted, the main strands of the dissenting tradition in Europe with which, Bilgrami argues, Gandhi’s thinking appears continuous, also appeal to a fundamentally sacralized conception of nature. Bilgrami is quite aware of this point and mentions it explicitly:

 Indeed, as I noted, post-structuralist, deconstructionist critiques of the Marxist (and Hegelian) tradition have faulted precisely this teleological idea of a classless society, (as a society fully transparent to itself, which reflectively coincides with itself, such that no social differentiations, hierarchies etc. remain as the ‘unthought’, persistent effect of historical inertia) as succumbing to the ‘metaphysics of presence’. Against this charge it is possible to argue that there is a distinction between alienation and reification; the latter may be a necessary condition for the former, but it is not a sufficient condition. Consequently, Marx’s thinking is primarily geared towards overcoming alienation (which is self-consciously felt under capitalism), but not towards overcoming reification, which is a necessary and inevitable feature of experience. Rather, for Marx, the idea is that in becoming self-consciously aware of the structural processes and tendencies towards reification, one can make the appearance of reification, even though it continues to persist qua appearance, ‘harmless’. Just as for Kant in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’, the ideas of reason although necessary illusions, which continue to persist despite the discovery of their illusory character, become ‘harmless’ once it is understood that they have only regulative and not ontological status. I have elaborated this position elsewhere (see : “The Question of Alienation in Marx”). 48

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The pervasive Bhakti influences on Gandhi made him think of nature in essentially sacralized and spiritual terms. To think of nature as shot through with divinity was an intrinsic obstacle to transforming it conceptually to the idea of natural resources. And—to make the historical and genealogical connection—this sacralized understanding was precisely how much of popular Christianity (sometimes this strand was described as a modified element of neo-Platonism […]) conceived of nature in the early modern period in Europe. Thus, for instance, the radical puritanical sect the Diggers, among others in England, resisted the system of enclosures because it was transforming something sacred, something to live in, to make a life in and to respect, into a resource and a site for an early form of agri-business.49

However, for Bilgrami, if Gandhi and Marx are to be compared in a manner that promises to be conceptually productive and prepares the ground for the ‘paradigm shift’ that they both, in their own ways, seek to articulate, then it is not a question of simply unearthing the fault-lines of the sacralized versus descralized conceptions nature’ that divides their thinking. Rather, the deeper source of affinity between the two thinkers, to which their thought may be seen as responses, lies in the attempt to think of nature as suffused with value. The latter, contrary to Gandhi’s (or to the ‘dissenters’ of seventeenth century England) sacralized conception, need not to be immediately understood as originating from a divine source. Put differently, the task of reenchanting nature in the wake of the disenchantment wrought by scientific and capitalist modernity requires that value itself be conceived as sui generis.50 Here the link between the ethico-political problematic of the recovery of unalienated life and ecological concerns begins to emerge more clearly. As the discussion so far has made clear, capitalism and disenchantment of nature are intertwined aspects of alienated modernity. Consequently, recovering unalienated modernity must occur on two interconnected fronts—the articulation of an alternative conception of the nation based on a sense of community, rather than on ‘individuals’ governed by capitalist instrumental rationality, on the one hand, and of nature understood  Bilgrami (2014, pp. 133–134).  Cf. Ibid. p. 157.

49 50

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as a systemic whole (that is, precisely as an eco-system), though now divested of teleology. On Bilgrami’s approach therefore, part of the problematic of recovering unalienated life, consists in working out how it would be possible to conceive of nature as ‘suffused with value’, given the context of disenchanted modernity. To approach this issue, it is necessary to keep the background theoretical context, and positions in mind. As we know, the emergence of the non-anthropocentric world-view is most dramatically exhibited in the Copernican turn and in Galileo’s experiments. The ‘objective’ conception of the universe that results, reveals that man’s perception of nature is inherently perspectival, and therefore, opens up the gap between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ in a manner that is decisive. For, unlike cases of ordinary perceptual illusion (mistaking a distant tree trunk for a man etc.) which disappear in the course of experience, that is, their illusory character is revealed within the realm of further ‘possible experience’, the idea of a heliocentric world is not confirmed within the realm of ordinary experience in the same sense.51 Further, the illusory perception (appearance) persists despite its discovery. Thus, the emergence of the ‘objective’ (non-­ anthropocentric) universe, (despite our necessarily perspectival, geocentric opening onto the world), involves an imaginative/conceptual leap that is always underdetermined with respect to empirical experience. This (reflexive) gap that opens up between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’, between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’, therefore, brings to light its own irreducibility, and thus, fundamentally transforms  the understanding of our relation to nature. As Husserl emphasizes in some of his writings on spatiality (in relation to its phenomenological-experiential origins), human beings can no longer take their perspectival opening onto nature as ‘absolute’, but come to be aware of it precisely as perspectival, or relative, to their own situatedness. Moreover, at the scientific theoretical level, the closure of the gap between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ is increasingly understood as being permanently deferred. As a consequence, humans also become aware that  Even if one considers the possibility of going into space (a possibility realized in our time but unimaginable at the time Copernicus was writing), it does not invalidate the basic point. For, the boundary between the ‘apparent’ and the ‘real’ is merely pushed back—until in contemporary physics—in quantum theory or relativity, that boundary becomes inherently blurred. 51

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they no longer have a special place in nature (as opposed to religious consciousness, particularly, Christian onto-theology), but find themselves in the midst of nature, as one among its many species, on a planet revolving the sun among other planets, in a solar system among other billions of solar systems in the galaxy, and so on.52 Thus, the emergence of the non-anthropocentric, objective-scientific standpoint based on, but not reducible to, our perceptual experience, can engender not only the ‘will to mastery’ of desacralized, disenchanted nature, but also a sense of finitude, in the realization of the enormity of the universe and the insignificance, contingency etc. of our existence and place in it. Thus, while the general account of the emergence of the non-­ anthropocentric world view is a familiar one, its significance is for the most part, understood one-sidedly—in terms of the disenchantment of nature and resulting alienation, the exploitative relation it sets up with respect to nature, and the disastrous environmental consequences of this entire historical trajectory. In tracing back the contemporary ecological crisis to the emergence of enlightenment rationality and its ‘objective’ world view, the “Greens” are usually forced into adopting one of three possible positions; either they attempt to reenchant nature in the naïve sense, by reinvoking pre-modern sacralized, vitalist conceptions of nature (this includes the romantic fetishization of tribal life, of rivers, trees, the earth etc.); or they accept, in a critical sense, the disenchantment of nature. In the latter scenario, they either make their case through speciesspecific (self-consciously anthropocentric) utilitarian considerations (the environment needs to be protected for future generations etc.), or by embracing the non-anthropocentric, non-instrumental understanding that locates human beings as one species amidst the diversity of other species, seen in their interdependence, within the ecosystem understood  Cf. Edmund Husserl, 1981, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature”, in Husserl, Shorter Works, Ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. See also, “The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism”, (Husserl, Shorter Works). I have discussed some of Husserl’s ideas pertaining to the phenomenological origins of spatiality in “Science and the Promise of Objective Knowledge: Husserl’s Intersubjective Renewal” (in Problem of the Self: Consciousness, Subjectivity and the Other, Ed. Manidipa Sen, Delhi: Aakar Books, 2019). 52

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as an inter-connected whole. This position, represented for instance, in the ‘deep ecology’ of Arne Næss, Rachel Carson and others, attributes ‘intrinsic value’ to all species and the living environment as such. If we discount the return to sacralized nature as no longer (intellectually) viable, contemporary environmental debates tend to become trapped in the anthropocentric (instrumentalist) versus non-anthropocentric (or eco-centric, biocentric) divide, and this almost inevitably leads to an impasse.53 The former, broadly utilitarian position is unsatisfactory—for the same reasons that any form of utilitarianism is ultimately unsatisfactory—it misses out on the deontological dimension of ethical experience. The latter, in the form of the non-anthropocentric, or ecocentric stance however, faces the burden of showing how nature (understood either as ‘biosphere’ or individual life-forms within it) can possess ‘intrinsic value’. This impasse between the anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric understanding of nature and value, is again the result of the underlying commitment to ontological and epistemological dualism. To overcome this impasse requires jettisoning this commitment, and this is precisely what the transcendental-phenomenological tradition, starting with Kant, attempts to accomplish. Thus, Kant’s deontological approach may be understood in a phenomenological manner, as intrinsic to our experiential sense of what it is to act morally. Kant (but also Husserl) articulates this sense in terms of what it is to experience ourselves as acting autonomously.54 More recently, Charles Taylor, in his magnum opus, Sources of the Self, provides a detailed philosophical and historical/genealogical account of the inescapable ‘moral ontology’ (inescapable that is, despite the context of modernity) underlying our contemporary moral 53  There are some exceptions to this, such as Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, where the main emphasis is on the self-contradiction involved in discrimination against animals what Singer calls ‘speciesism’, akin to other form of intra species discrimination, like racism, sexism etc. The argument is based on the normative/ethical premise that anything that has the capacity to suffer deserves equality of consideration, for otherwise we fall into inconsistency in our (human) reasoning (that is, into speciesism). Yet, it is clear that from a non-anthropocentric position, the question of ‘intrinsic value’ remains. 54  On this line of interpretation, see James Dodd, “Husserl and Kant on Persönlichkeit”, Santalka, Filosofija Vol. 17, No. 32009, pp. 29–38.

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intuitions—our deepest, universal moral commitments. Taylor argues that the ontological dimension inherent in our ethical attitudes and reactions does not involve, as the naturalist would have us believe, a valueneutral stance with respect to some ‘objective natural property’ (such as our capacity to reason), on which we then adopt an ethical, evaluative attitude. Rather, such ontological descriptions (human beings as created in the ‘image of god’, as eternal souls, rational etc.) are nothing but articulations of our deepest moral commitments. It is because we always already inhabit a moral universe that these ontological descriptions acquire moral significance. Thus, such ontological characterizations are irreducibly moral, and to think of them as value-neutral ‘natural properties’, towards which we adopt certain moral attitudes, on which we pass judgments etc., amounts to an illicit extrapolation of the ontological and methodological presuppositions of the natural sciences (however questionable these presuppositions may have become even in the domain of the sciences) to the realm of ethics. Insofar as Taylor emphasizes the irreducibility of the moral universe we inhabit, and which shapes our moral reactions, attitudes, and responses, his position is, broadly speaking, in line with the transcendental-phenomenological approach that tries to undercut ontological and epistemological dualism. I will return to this point below. It is against this background that Bilgrami’s proposal for a secular conception of value in nature, must be analyzed. The background, as I indicated, consists, on the one hand, of the post-Enlightenment skeptical turn in ethics, and the consequent reconception of value along seemingly more procedural lines. This holds of both the rationalist and empiricist traditions, which claim to do away with ‘moral ontology’ altogether, by attempting to reduce it to naturalistic or rationalistic processes. On the other, it also includes the transcendental-phenomenological, non-­ dualistic approach (in which I locate Taylor’s thought), as a reaction against these reductive naturalistic and rationalistic tendencies. Where does Bilgrami’s proposal of a secular conception of value intrinsic to nature, stand with respect to the reductive tendencies and the resulting

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procedural understanding, common to both the rationalist and empiricist approaches to ethics, under conditions of modernity?55 A response to this question requires that we first come to grips with how the sui generis conception of value in nature is to be understood. Here Bilgrami mentions Marx’s idea that value properties are inherent to nature, but in such a manner that it is only we, in our species-being who are capable of responding to them. In other words, if as the preceding arguments have shown, nature is not exclusively determined by the ontological understanding of the natural sciences, then this opens up the possibility of understanding value not merely in a reductive sense as ‘subjective’ mental states, but as a modality of mediating our relationship with nature. On this revised understanding, ‘nature’ itself places normative demands on us, but only because we in turn, are capable of perceiving and responding to those demands. Bilgrami explicates this point concerning ‘value’ as a mediating ‘middle term’ between nature and human beings, by drawing a distinction between the first-person perception/experience of the desirable value properties in the object, and the third-person perspective we can take on our own desiring/valuing mental states. If our desiring or valuing ‘something’ was not mediated through the object—the thing desired, such that it is the latter that is given as desirable (with certain value properties), but always given immediately as a reflective experience of our mental states, then of course, we would cease to be practical agents. There is a basic  Charles Taylor characterizes this fundamental shift from the ancient to the modern conception of value in terms of the distinction between the ethical questions that animate ancient and modern discourse. While the ancients were concerned with questions of the ‘Good’—what it is to lead a life where human beings achieve their highest potential (Good as Eudaimonia or human flourishing), the modern rationalists and empiricist preoccupy themselves with questions concerning what constitutes right action vis-à-vis others, and one’s own self, under various conditions. Thus, it appears that the rationalist approach to ethics, starting with Kantian deontology, down to contemporary social-contract theorists such as John Rawls on the one hand, and the empiricist approach starting with classical Utilitarian thinkers, (and the Hobbesian line of social-contract theory on the other), follow this procedural tendency in ethics. However, against this standard procedural understanding of Kantian and utilitarian ethics, it is possible to argue, following Taylor, that the procedural itself has its source in a certain, irreducible moral ontology—for Kant it consists in our capacity for rational autonomy (which therefore has a more ‘substantive’, contentful status in his system than it first appears); for utilitarianism it consists in ‘pleasure’ becoming an ethical-normative rather than a naturalistic principle, allowing for the ranking of pleasures, and for the ethical, non-­egoistic principle of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. 55

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difference between the first-person perspective of desiring something, i.e. judging that “X is desirable/X is valuable”, and the third-person perspective we can take on our desiring X, in judging “X is desired by me/X is valued by me”.56 The former type of value judgment motivates me to act, places ‘normative demands’ on me, whereas the latter type of descriptive judgment concerning my mental states carries no such motivation, makes no such demand.57 It is this reciprocal relation between the desired qua desired and our desiring that constitutes the sui generis, as opposed to sacralized or vitalist basis for an ‘unalienated experience of the world—of “living in” or “being at home in” the world, as opposed to a detached perspective of mastery and control. Bilgrami, sums up this position when he writes: So, the most general and underlying source of the unalienated life (one that stands behind the profound details of Marx’s and Gandhi’s analyses of alienation in modern society) lies in the idea that nature contains the sorts of things (values) that make normative demands on us, and when we exercise our subjectivity and agency to be in tune with these demands, we are in an unalienated relation with nature. […] to be unalienated from nature is for our subjectivity to be in sync with the normative demands upon it coming from the value properties of nature.58

There are certain questions that immediately arise in relation to this thesis. First, how do we move from the conception of nature as having intrinsic properties (even if we do not, in principle, have unmediated epistemological access to them), to its having intrinsic normative properties? Clearly the argument concerning the distinction between the  Cf. Bilgrami (2014, p. 159).  It would then require a second–order act of desiring, which would motivate the realization of desires qua mental states. This could then form the basis for a detached, alienated form of agency that imposes one’s desires or valuing on the world, resulting in the conception of nature as something mastered and technologically controlled. However, as I noted, the technological understanding of the world also necessarily responds to possibilities and processes in nature, that is, it is in a sense constrained by nature, without which it the project of technological ‘mastery’ would not be possible. 58  Bilgrami (2014, p. 160). 56 57

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‘first-person’ and the ‘third-person perspective’ (upon my first-person perspective), is not enough to establish the claim concerning intrinsic value properties. For, it is always possible to argue (given the explicit awareness of the irreducible gap between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ in modernity) that the first-person perspective simply projects, in an anthropomorphic and anthropocentric manner, ‘subjective’ values/mental states on to (a posited) ‘external’ or mind-independent ‘reality’, which, since it is necessarily given in a mediated manner, is inaccessible ‘in-itself ’. Moreover, this objection holds even if the ‘in-itself ’ was directly accessible. For instance, it seems quite plausible to say that gold ‘in-itself ’ has no value, but acquires value for human beings, or becomes ‘coloured’ as a desirable object, given their ‘subjective’ liking/desire for shiny metals, coupled with its rarity and the difficulty (for Marx, the socially necessary labour required) in extracting it, or its other natural properties, which make it a great conductor of electricity etc. At the epistemic level, it seems that the way to deflect the force of this objection would be to ‘bracket’ or ‘put out of play’ (through a ‘reduction’ or ‘epoché’) any considerations of the mind-independent existence of the world given in the “natural attitude”, along the lines of Husserl’s phenomenology. The phenomenological reduction, which consists of both the ‘eidetic reduction’ and the ‘transcendental reduction’ (in that order), would then allow ‘value’ to emerge as a (‘first-person’) intentionally structured experience constituting the mediating middle ground between ‘subjective mental states’ and the ‘properties of nature’, without being reducible to either. This is indeed the gist of Husserl’s conception of intentionality, consisting of both a ‘noetic’ and ‘noematic’ dimension, with their corresponding noesis and noemata. Both the noetic and noematic sides are subject to the constraining influence of hyle (or ‘matter’ qua sense-data of an experience), which is nonetheless, systematically underdetermining with respect to the formed intentional experience. For Husserl, the methodological agnosticism of the epoché enables a change in reflective focus, which serves to unearth the structuring principles of phenomenal experience that remain hidden from view in the

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natural attitude. These structuring principles59 bring to light an alternative conception of ‘objectivity’—not the transcendent objectivity of the positivistic natural sciences, but the transcendental objectivity that has the status of a transcendence that emerges from within consciousness and its stream of experiencing. The transcendental, as this ‘transcendence in immanence’ is then seen (in a reflective-reconstitution), as the ‘conditions of possibility’ for all (phenomenal) experience. It is clear that Bilgrami’s suggestion comes close to Husserl’s conception of intentionality; yet in the absence of the methodological epoché and the transformation of the traditional conception of the ‘transcendent’ into the ‘transcendental’, questions of the sort outlined above would continue to arise. As a result, I am suggesting that to get beyond this impasse generated through the subject/object dichotomy, requires that we bring to light the ‘negative’ (self )-distancing moment inherent in the ‘objective’ standpoint and the sense of finitude it generates. A second, though related, way to circumvent the problematic of ‘intrinsic value-properties’ is provided by Marx’s ‘labour theory of value’. As we know, on Marx’s account, the ‘value’ of an object consists in the interdependent aspects of its use and exchange-value. Use-value is determined by both the natural/material properties of the object, and the socio-culturally conditioned need it fulfills. Yet, it would be difficult to maintain that use-value is an intrinsic property of the object, since it is a ‘use-value’ only insofar as it serves the needs, desires, and interests of human beings. In contrast, exchange-value, is the socially necessary labour-­ time to produce it, that is, the average per unit labour-time required given a certain socially recognized base-line, usually determined by the prevailing state of technology. To locate ‘value’ (either use or exchangevalue) in the ‘object’ (commodity) amounts to a mode of reification, at the basis of commodity fetishism. However, it might be objected that here ‘value’ refers to use and exchange-value (the distinction between them comes to be represented in  For example, the structure of intentionality—noema, noesis, hyle, along with the modalities of intentionality, and the intentional modifications built upon each other that bring to light the temporal (and spatial) structure of all experiencing, leading to the later emphasis on genetic phenomenology, intersubjectivity etc. 59

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the separation of the money-commodity as pure exchange-value, where its materiality is of no consequence) and not ethical-normative value; and it is the latter that is at stake in the quest for realizing an unalienated mode of existence. But for Marx exchange-value is an indirect, quantified representation of ethical value, insofar it contains a recognition of the ownership of labour-power on the part of the worker, and the equivalence all kinds of concrete labour. This two-fold recognition, takes the form of wages paid to the worker in exchange for his/her labour-power, which the capitalist buys for a certain amount of time. Wage-labour therefore, marks a fundamental transformation in the ethical-normative order, in relation to previous modes of production (feudalism, slavery etc.). As Marx remarks, wage-labour could not have come about “until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of popular prejudice”.60 Second, even if we accept ‘intrinsic value properties’ in nature in the mediate sense in which Bilgrami understands it, that is, as arising from the irreducible interaction of humans (in their species being) and nature, how are we to determine which specific normative demands to be attuned to? This question is pressing because the idea of ‘right attunement’ seems to imply a substantive as opposed to a procedural conception of value; and there can surely be more than one substantive set of values which can lay claim on us. The question is driven by the larger issue of how to conceive of technology, and the relation between the sciences and technology. One could argue that the techno-scientific understanding of nature is also a kind of attunement to nature, since it is constrained by natural properties and processes. Yet, presumably such attunement is of the ‘wrong’ kind, leading to the exploitation of nature and alienation from it. Bilgrami’s proposal therefore, requires further articulation if it is to address these issues. We can accept the notion of ‘intrinsic’ properties of nature, to the extent that, in a minimally substantive and negative sense, they act as constraints on our intentionally structured articulation of the (phenomenal/experiential) world. However, it is more difficult to defend 60

 Marx, Capital Vol. I, 1978, p. 65.

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the attribution of intrinsic normative-value properties to nature, even in a mediated sense, and my analysis diverges from Bilgrami’s on this issue. Instead, I want to argue that the source of ‘normative-value constraints’ that prevent our ethical attitudes and actions with respect to nature from being either entirely reducible to utilitarian criteria, or to our capacities such as ‘intelligence’, ‘autonomy’ etc., understood as species-specific traits, which we then privilege, lies in the reflective distance vis-à-vis nature that is afforded by the experience of alienation itself. And while the capacity for such reflective distance (thus, for moral consciousness) might arise from our capacity for autonomy, it is not autonomy per se (which again tends towards reification), but what it brings to light that is crucial here. As a first step towards articulating this claim, I have tried to loosen the hold that the interrelated divisions between the modern and the pre-­ modern, subjective and objective, enchantment and disenchantment, etc. have on our historical understanding. However, in relying on this conceptual vocabulary, the analysis (according to the very nature of ‘analysis’ as a process of separating or disassembling) has inevitably provided a simplified view. It is indeed true that the various threads of the argument are more entangled than I have made out in the discussion so far. They cannot be neatly separated along the lines of pre-modern enchantment and modern disenchantment of nature (corresponding to the anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric perspectives), where the emergence of the latter then opens up nature to techno-scientific manipulation and exploitation under capitalism. At best this is only part of the story, for, on the one hand, to have an understanding of the world as a whole, however implicit or pre-thematic such an understanding may be, is to be already in a sense, ‘alienated’ from it. As I noted, any understanding opens up a certain interpretative distance with respect to that which is understood (the ‘as’ structure of experience), in a manner essentially distinct from merely existing ‘alongside’ the world, in the modality of an inanimate object.61 If this much is correct, then it follows that there can be no ‘original’  This is the sense inherent in Heidegger’s claim that in relation to humans, animals are ‘poor in the world’, whereas inanimate objects such as a stone, do not ‘have’ a world. Cf. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 195. 61

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state of unalienated existence, where human beings were entirely ‘one’ with nature. Rather, there can be only degrees of alienation in different historical epochs. Further, the conceptual correlation between enchantment and the lack of exploitation/manipulation of nature also bears closer scrutiny. For instance, in the Christian onto-theological world-view, man, created in the image of God, occupies a special place in the “scale of nature” or “chain of being”. The latter conception assumes a divinely ordained hierarchy in nature, leading up to man, where each species, being God’s creation, is immutable.62 On this static understanding of a natural hierarchy, nature and its creatures are ‘for’ humans, who thereby find legitimating grounds for exercising their dominion over them. In principle then, the (unthematized) anthropocentrism of the pre-modern Christian world-­view (as a mode of alienation) also lends itself to the exploitation of nature, although without the modern techno-scientific understanding of nature, the extent of such manipulation and exploitation remains limited. On the other hand, it is indeed true that the explicit break with anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, constitutive of the critical rationality of enlightenment modernity, leads to the emergence of nature as ‘dead/blind matter’, subject to the ultimately non-purposive, ‘contingent’ laws of physics (insofar as there is nothing preordained in them, and they could have been otherwise). Thus, nature is conceived and encountered as open to the techno-scientific ‘will to mastery’. However, this nonanthropocentric understanding simultaneously opens up a different sense of finitude—one that is not tied to the transcendence of God, in whose name human beings give themselves a privileged position in a projected ‘natural’ hierarchy, but to the inexhaustible transcendence of nature itself. It is this transformed sense of transcendence in modernity that reveals the true ‘scale of nature’ and our place within it. This profoundly alienating experience, with its awareness of our insignificance and the contingency of all that we take to be meaningful, can emerge as the basis for a transformed relationship to nature. The very loss of meaning that the break 62

 Cf. John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 2000, pp. 22–23.

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with anthropocentrism entails; this experience of negativity, can lead to an awareness of our place in nature—as one among all the other creatures on the planet, with no special ontological-­normative status. How this reflective experience on the part of thinking, of its own negativity, is to be understood, and what normative, socio-economic, and political forms it takes, particularly in relation to the modern mode of social organization in the nation, will be the subject of discussion in subsequent chapters. In particular, we will find that the notion of negativity itself has been understood differently within the continental philosophical tradition, resulting, as I mentioned earlier, in at least two distinct directions of discourse. Broadly, this difference may be characterized in terms of the absolute and relative conceptions of negativity—the former restricts itself to the negative qua negative, where the negative is not oriented by, or ‘for the sake of ’, some posited transcendent positivity (existence, sense-data, Being, immanent unity of consciousness etc.), whereas the latter sees the negative moment as a means of reaching some positive ground, either in the traditional metaphysical or dialectical sense (as determinate negation). Before explicating this basic split in the conception of the negative, it is necessary to clarify some related issues: if, as I am suggesting, we can only speak of degrees of alienation in different epochs, then how do we understand the ‘decisive break’ represented by enlightenment modernity—what is so ‘decisive’ about it? Further, and more broadly, how does such a conception impinge on our understanding of historical becoming? In response to the first question, I shall put forward, as a claim subject to further argumentation and revision, that the break consists in the becoming explicit of the interpretative/reflective distance that was implicitly operative in pre-modern societies. The manners in which it becomes explicit and manifests itself in political forms of society in modernity, is worked out in different ways by both Hegel and Marx. It is critically elaborated, as I shall discuss, by Adorno and Horkheimer, and contemporary philosophers, such as Lefort, Butler, Laclau and Žižek, who take up this trajectory of thought. In response to the second related question, the point that bears emphasis is that for both Hegel and Marx, and others in this tradition, the explicit awareness of this distance (constitutive of, but not restricted to,

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the modern experience of alienation), is not simply an act of will, but has a ‘structural’ component, and is therefore, also ‘forced’ upon consciousness. As we know, for Marx, this ‘structural self-consciousness’ is imposed by the political economy of capitalism, and the ‘commodity-form’ that is central to it. This understanding preserves the historical/social dimension of (self )-consciousness, without immediately giving rise to the extreme and otiose charge of historical determinism. For instance (on Lukács’ interpretation of Marx), the notion of historically conditioned ‘objective possibility’ of proletarian class (self )-consciousness, which may (or may not) be realized in the explicit (self )-awareness of the reified “reality” of capitalism qua reified, can accommodate both ‘contingency’ and ‘necessity’ in the understanding of historical transformation. Further, this movement of implicit self-consciousness towards explicit self-consciousness at the level of the ‘we’ of history—that is, as ‘spirit’ in the Hegelian sense, entails its explicit ‘staging’ in our (modern) institutions and practices. This staging, or the inevitable tendency towards representation, can create certain distorting effects, leading to newer modes of reification. For instance, the appeal to ‘universality’ within a liberaldemocratic polity, which is once again, too narrowly staged insofar as it attributes a specific content to the universal (such as universal ‘Human’ rights), tends to obscure the emptiness (negativity) built into universality, which is the very source of the normative legitimacy of universality in modernity. I will return to these considerations concerning the becoming explicit of negativity in this historical-structural sense, and the manner in which it is both institutionally staged and distorted in the modern polity. The staging of the universal would clarify the sense in which negativity becomes the source of normative validation in modernity. The explication of the possibilities of staging and distortion of negativity/universality would then allow us to return to the question of the nation and national consciousness, in the sense of a modern, non-substantive form of ‘solidarity’ (which nevertheless inevitably tends towards substantiation). This would uncover its inherent limits, and bring to light the further possibilities of the political itself, understood as the “infinite task” (in the Husserlian sense), of the realization of rational autonomy qua negativity.

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Before I address these issues directly, it would be helpful to further clarify the link between the ethical and political question of the realization of unalienated life and that of the techno-scientific experience of nature in modernity, that I have already touched upon in our preceding discussion. To do so, in the next two chapters, I focus on the relation between the disenchanted, techno-scientific experience of nature and the experience of negativity. In Chap. 4 I elaborate aspects of Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Husserl’s positions that recognize the negative moment constitutive of thought as a transcending movement; or a movement towards a ‘universality always in becoming’. In Chap. 5 I will take up a more detailed analysis of Heidegger’s philosophy, this time reading his critique of the essence of modern technology in connection with the experience of the ‘nothing’. The reasons for turning to Heidegger are twofold. First, to explicate some of the points I have already mentioned, namely, the historicity of consciousness as constitutive of our mode of encounter with nature and with ourselves,63 along with the emergence of the explicit self-­awareness— the negative moment—of the technological mode of encounter in its non-subjective dimension, that is, as Heidegger attempts to access it through various ‘moods’ that ‘come upon’ us, and through the work of art. Second, to emphasize the fact that these arguments bring to light the negative moment of thought/experience, as the ‘common thread’ running through diverse (and sometimes politically antithetical) philosophical articulations.64 As I noted, this ‘common thread’ will however, unravel into two distinct, yet closely intertwined strands, or conceptual articulations of negativity—the ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ conceptions—which again, is indicative of the structural (dialectical) dimension of the movement of thought. The distinction and tension between absolute and relative negativity, which begins to emerge in the difference between the Kantian and  I noted that the political economy of capitalism remains an implicit theme in Heidegger’s writings on technology, and at the very least, is not antithetical to the notion of historicity. 64  From Marxist thought and the Critical Theory tradition on the one hand, to Heideggerian “fundamental ontology” (which on the political front leads to the idea of instituting an “authentic mit-sein” of the “Deutschen volk”), on the other. More broadly, both these strands of thought have their roots in the German transcendental-idealist tradition. 63

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the Hegelian conceptions of dialectics, brings to light an undecidable movement or oscillation of thought. Both Heidegger’s and Marx’s writings can be understood in light of this oscillation. Heidegger, I will argue, in a sense revives the Kantian absolute conception of negativity (the unknowable ‘beyond’ of possible experience), in the face of its apparent rejection in Hegel’s dialectical-­ relative conception, where all negativity seems to be relative to, or falls within consciousness. Whereas Marx’s version of the dialectic, despite its ‘materialist’ aspect, remains continuous with the Hegelian dialectic and the relative conception of negativity that appears predominant in it. In these different lines of emphases, the structural (and structuring) oscillation itself proves to be irreducible or ‘undecidable’. I will have more to say on this oscillation, that is, the irreducibility, and transformation from the one to the other, of relative and absolute negativity/difference, along with its import for the possibility of any emancipatory politics still oriented by universal claims, (such as the realization of unalienated life), towards the latter part of this study, by drawing on Adorno’s conception. For now, let me turn to this structural movement of negativity in relation to nature’ by tracing its complicated genealogy in the thinking of Kant, Hegel and Husserl.

Bibliography Bilgrami, Akeel. 2014. Secularism, Identity and Enchantment. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Dodd, James. 2009. Husserl and Kant on Persönlichkeit. Santalka, Filosofija. Vol. 17, No. 3: 29–38. Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1992. The Question Concerning Technology. In Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers. Heidegger, Martin. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1981a. Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature. In Husserl, Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Husserl, Edmund. 1981b. The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism. In Husserl, Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Ihde, Don. 1991. Instrumental Realism: The Interface Between Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Patnaik, Nishad. 2019. Science and the Promise of Objective Knowledge: Husserl’s Intersubjective Renewal. In Problem of the Self: Consciousness, Subjectivity and the Other, ed. Manidipa Sen. Delhi: Aakar Books. Singer, Peter. 2009. Animal Liberation: The Definitive classic of the Animal Movement. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Tagore, Rabindranath. 2005. The Religion of Man. New Delhi: Rupa and Co. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2010. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency and Design. Trans. Robert P.  Crease. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press.

4 Historicity, Negativity and Nature

In this chapter I elaborate the entanglement of ‘theoretical’ (cognitive) and ‘practical’ (instrumental) reason in its systematic, structural-­dialectical dimension, by drawing attention to the negative movement of thought, or in more phenomenological terms, the experience of negativity that underlies and constantly re-instigates this entanglement in the domain of reason. Since, in modernity, the natural sciences are taken to be the paradigmatic expression of (objective) reason, the epistemological and ontological (self ) understanding of the natural sciences forms the point of departure for our analysis. The present chapter compares aspects of the Kantian, Hegelian and Husserlian responses to these issues, whereas the next takes up Heidegger’s critique of techno-science. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Bilgrami argues that the natural sciences understand their relation to nature as one of ‘detached observation’, and correspondingly, the technological outlook then (in relation to the sciences) sees nature as containing ‘opportunities’ to be exploited for human ends. However, such a characterization of the sciences is debatable, for, both in ‘practice’ and ‘theory’ (if this distinction is allowed to stand for the moment), the two spheres are inextricably interconnected.

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In practice, as contemporary philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, among others, have elaborated, modern science is highly dependent on, even as it devises, a whole range of measuring, recording and computational technologies that enable experiments, hence ‘observation’. The latter is therefore, almost wholly technologically conditioned. Consequently, the mediated perception/cognition of the world through various concrete technological devices (such as microscopes, telescopes, and various digital imaging technologies) is necessarily a hermeneutic of the world. Whereas technological ‘practice’, insofar as it is ‘applied science’, is conditioned by the scientific theoretical understanding of nature as a nexus of causal connections and processes, which due to their consistent, repeatable ‘observability’ are determined according to fixed laws. The laws of physics take mathematical form, and nature itself is understood and articulated as inherently quantifiable. These laws, as more or less general, belong to various levels of explanation and description. At the descriptive level they are confined to sets of consistent observable regularities between phenomena, and at the more abstract level of ‘explanation’, they unify diverse descriptive regularities of phenomena under a few fundamental principles. However, these unifying principles or laws of the highest generality (universality), which ostensibly constitute the theoretical mastery of nature, also end up being ‘descriptive’ at a higher level, since they come up against the “givenness” of natural processes.1 In the “Transcendental Dialectic” Kant recognizes that the need for such unitary, ‘unconditioned’ principles of the highest generality, stems from the fundamentally ‘interested’ (and not ‘disinterested’) character of finite reason, giving rise to the (speculative) ‘ideas of reason’. This would imply that the theoretical mastery of nature is continuous with its

 Hegel argues, as we shall see shortly, that the moment of what I have termed ‘description at a higher level of generality or abstraction’ is nothing but the necessary determinateness of the law, which differentiates it and thus specifies it—setting up the dialectical movement at the level of the ‘understanding’ between ‘force’ posited as the pure empty and undifferentiated universality of the ‘inner world’ and its ‘expression’ or specific representation (determination) in the world of appearance. 1

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technological (‘practical’2) mastery. For Kant, the ‘ideas of reason’ arise from the “natural dialectic of reason”—the irreconcilable movement between the levels of ‘description’ and ‘explanation’ that when it remains unreflected or unthematized, leads to the “logic of illusion”. In the ‘Antinomies of Pure Reason’, this logic of illusion manifests itself in the ‘inner conflict’ of reason. Even as Kant spells out the ‘undecidable’, and interminable nature of this conflict of reason with itself, and the various forms it takes, that is, the ‘ideas’ it generates, he also makes clear that once the dialectical movement is reflectively recognized (qua dialectical), these (necessary, i.e., dialectically generated) ideas of reason are understood as having regulative, but not constitutive status. They do not contain any substantive, ontological content, but merely serve as presuppositions (which are explicitly acknowledged as presuppositions) that guide the understanding in its higher cognitive activity—for example, in scientific enquiry and theorizing. Two points need to be emphasized here in the context of the discussion concerning the relation between science and technology in connection with ‘nature’, both pointing to their essential continuity. The ‘theoretical mastery’ of nature in the natural sciences, I noted, is continuous with its technological mastery insofar as; (1) ‘practical’ (in the usual sense of ‘technology’ as ‘applied’ theory) and theoretical reason are both (following Kant) ‘interested’ (contrary to the idea that theoretical reason is detached or disinterested), according to the inner dialectical movement of reason towards finding an ultimately unified, unconditioned ground for conditioned phenomena and, (2) Constitute a mode of “attunement” to nature (as Bilgrami puts it) where they inevitably come up against the “given” in ‘nature’—its consistencies—such that every ‘explanation’ is ultimately transformed into a ‘description’, albeit at a higher level of generality and abstraction. This implies that just as in the case of the theoretical attitude of “detached observation”, there are limits to practical-technical intervention in, and exploitation of, nature.

 I am using the term ‘practical’ here in a general sense, to emphasize its inner continuity with ‘theoretical’ reason (in contrast to its commonsensical understanding as an application of pure, ‘disinterested’ theory) and not in the specifically Kantian sense of ‘practical reason’. 2

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Here the ‘given’ is not to be understood in the naïve realist sense (which would succumb to the ‘myth of the given’), but from within the phenomenal domain, in terms of both the regularities and consistencies nature manifests, and the resistances to our theoretical/practical interests it offers. However, it is precisely when reason comes up against the ‘given’ of nature—at the moment it seems most ‘attuned’ to nature through the ‘forces’ (expressed in determinate laws) it seemingly ‘discovers’ in nature itself that the necessarily determinate ‘expression’ of these forces, i.e., their very specificity, spurs reason to seek a further ‘explanation’. The determinate ‘givenness’ of the ‘force’ (or law) calls forth (‘solicits’ as Hegel puts it) the inherent negativity of thought—its ability to step back from the (phenomenal) ‘given’ and inquire after its further ‘conditions of possibility’. Both Kant and Hegel recognize the structural basis for this negative movement of thought in relation to nature, though their articulations take very different forms.

4.1 Kant, Hegel and Negativity For Kant, the transformation of ‘explanation’ into ‘description’ (owing to the determinacy of the laws it finds in nature) can only result in an infinite causal regress from ‘conditioned’ to its ‘condition’, according to the natural dialectical movement of reason and its (impossible) quest for an absolute ground—the absolutely unconditioned—which reason cannot negate further. This leads I noted, to the ‘ideas of reason’—the metaphysical claims that reason makes beyond all possible experience, in its speculative “flights of fancy”. According to Kant, these speculative posits, insofar as they are not seen as such, constitute specific modes of transcendental illusion, corresponding to the categories of the understanding. They are ‘transcendental’, precisely because they are necessary illusions arising from the negating-transcending (thus ‘negative’) movement of reason. Since the movement is dialectical/structural, transcendental illusions, unlike the illusions of ordinary phenomenal experience, do not simply vanish once they are discovered in the course of further experience. Yet through this movement, reason is also potentially open to becoming explicitly aware of its own movement qua movement—its own

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negativity. And therefore, it can become aware of the ‘gap’ between its posited ‘ideas’, and ‘nature’ as the noumenal beyond; or equivalently, of the ‘regulative’ and not ‘constitutive’ status of these ideas. Consequently, even if the illusions themselves persist owing to their structural character, as Kant puts, they may be rendered ‘harmless’, following their discovery in (self )reflection, and thus employed in a regulative sense. Hegel, as we know, rejects the noumenally posited ‘beyond’ of the (unknowable) ‘thing-in-itself ’ as precisely a posit of thought, and thereby, seemingly brings Kant’s “Copernican revolution” to its logical conclusion. According to Hegel, even if the ‘thing-in-itself ’ is a noumenal posit in Kant’s system, Kant maintains that the ‘thing-in-itself ’ could possibly exist independent of thought. For Hegel, the ‘noumenally posited unknowable beyond’ of the phenomenal/experiential realm—the ‘limit’ constituted by ‘possible experience’—represents the last vestiges of the ‘in-itself ’, in an ‘uncritical’ or unreflected metaphysical sense, left over in Kant’s system, which consciousness, in becoming fully self-conscious, realizes is its own posit. From a dialectical standpoint, the moment a ‘limit’ (possible experience) is posited, the ‘beyond’ is also relationally posited. Consequently, both the limit and what lies ‘beyond’ are divisions within consciousness.3 Thus, consciousness comes to see that the ‘initself ’ is only one of its moments, its own reified ‘notion’—that ‘the in-­ itself is for consciousness’. Thus, we already begin to discern, in Hegel’s critique of Kant, the distinction between ‘absolute’ and relative conceptions of negativity (or ‘difference’), I mentioned towards the end of the last chapter. For Kant the ‘thing-in-itself ’, as ‘beyond’ the limits of possible experience, represents the complete negation of consciousness (what is absolutely other, or different from it), even as paradoxically, the negation itself, along with the noumenally posited ‘beyond’ is the work of consciousness. Whereas for Hegel, the ‘in-itself ’ is only a posit of consciousness, which consciousness comes to realize as such in the attempt to reach the “unmediated inner world” of ‘force’ posited by the scientific understanding, and in its  As Hegel puts it (though in a different context), “Consciousness, however, is explicitly the notion of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself ”. (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 51). 3

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necessary failure to do so. Consequently, negation comes to stand for a moment internal to consciousness—its own self-differentiation, which consciousness now becomes explicitly aware of, as its own. Thus, consciousness, in and through this experience, which constitutes its transition from the level of “Understanding” to “Self-consciousness”, comes to realize that every negation (as a moment internal to itself ) is always transformed into a ‘determinate negation’ (negation of the initial negation). The latter therefore, has the apparent effect of rendering (self ) consciousness all-encompassing. However, the ‘structural undecidability’ between the absolute and relative manifestations of negativity in the movement of thought implies that the ascription of these distinct modes of negativity to Kant and Hegel is not as unequivocal as it has been made out so far. In each system of thought, we find the other mode of negativity present in an implicit manner. For Kant, the ‘in-itself ’ still remains a noumenal posit, and for Hegel, the initial negation in the cancelling/preserving movement of consciousness (Aufhebung) can be seen as a moment of ‘pure’ negation/ difference.4 The latter then manifests itself, for instance, in the structure of mutual recognition of two independent self-consciousness’, and  Derrida’s critique of Hegel rests on such an argument. He suggests that the moment of absolute difference or negativity (‘différance’) constitutes the very possibility of ‘determinate negation’ in the master-slave dialectic. The latter then enables the dialectic to overcome its own moment of contingency—the possibility of the death of either the master or the slave, which would otherwise stop it dead in its tracks. As Derrida puts it: 4

The blind-spot of Hegelianism, around which can be organized the representation of meaning, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity—here we would have to say expenditure and a negativity without reserve—that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or a system (“From a Restricted to a General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve”, in Writing and Difference, 1967, p. 259). However, I am suggesting that the ‘undecidability’ of the relative and absolute (difference/negation) that Derrida points to as a ‘critique’ of Hegel, that is, as an undecidablity that is constitutive of the Hegelian dialectic but is not acknowledged as such by Hegel, comes to the fore in the constitutive role of the other qua other in the formation of self-consciousness. In other words, if self-­ consciousness is necessarily (constitutively) intersubjective—based on ‘mutual recognition’—then, this amount to an acknowledgement of the ‘absolute difference’/independence (while, at the same time, bringing to light the mutual dependence) of the other with respect to my (self ) consciousness.

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therefore,  in the mutually constitutive, thus, simultaneously dependent and independent/differential character of self-consciousness. If therefore, the structure of dependence/independence of self-­ consciousness that the irreducible mutuality of recognition brings to light—that my self-consciousness is constitutively dependent on its recognition by the other qua independent other, and vice-versa, then the question of the seeming totalization of consciousness remains, at the very least, an open question. It prompts further questions, such as the manner in which intersubjectively founded self-consciousness (which has absolute negation/difference at its basis) may be transformed into the relative conception of difference constitutive of the ‘unity’ of meaning, which gives rise to the broader, intertwined conceptions of the systematicity of the historical, social, political-economic etc. These issues, while introduced here in the context of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I am suggesting, are not specific to it—they play a significant role in Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism. For instance, the possibilities of transformation between the absolute and relative aspects of negativity are central to his conception of historical becoming, underlying the emergence of the (modern) capitalist social formation from (pre-modern) pre-capitalist formations, via a movement that both negates and preserves the ‘old’ in the ‘new’. This fundamental structuring movement between the absolute and relative operations of difference/negativity is also at play in his analysis of the creation of ‘excess’ or ‘surplus value’ from within the sphere of the apparently (proportionally) equivalent exchange of commodities. The ‘absolute difference’ introduced by this excess/surplus in the process of exchange, is necessarily transformed into a relative difference, that is, it can only be relatively represented (owing to the dialectical character of the movement) in relation to the prices of all other commodities in circulation. Further, I have already briefly alluded to the wider significance of these apparently opposing tendencies, namely, the inevitable transformation of absolute into relative difference, and vice-versa, as it comes to drive and shape the expansionist logic of capital. Historically, the latter, in the form of the absolute differences of ‘place’ and relative differences of ‘space’, gave rise to imperialism and the political economy of colonial exploitation. These differences and transformations between the absolute and

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relative continue to drive the contemporary reconfiguration of capitalism in neo-liberal, financialized capital. We saw how neo-liberal capital is necessarily dependent on a ‘constitutive outside’, which is appropriated within its system, even as it cannot be acknowledged in the system. Thus, while it is correct to say that every system is fundamentally incomplete— that its ‘closure’ qua system is based on a fundamental non-closure (absolute difference), the question at the political, economic and normative level is whether, and to what extent, can the system acknowledge its own incompleteness, non-closure, constitutive difference, negativity etc. As I will show, such acknowledgement/reflective awareness, and the political, economic and ethical institutional forms it takes, would constitute the basis for the recovery of unalienated existence. Reflective awareness in this sense (and thus unalienated existence), is nothing but and awareness of finitude, which arises from the negative (reflective) movement of thought that forms the original impetus of modernity in an unreified sense. Returning to our present concerns, if we leave aside for the moment the problem of the ‘totalization’ of consciousness (at the level of ‘spirit’, and its further ramifications with respect to history, society, politics etc.) that stems from relative and absolute conceptions of negation that are simultaneously operative in the dialectic, then the Kantian and Hegelian points of departure bring to light some common features. Thus, akin to Kant’s ‘Copernican turn’, which (despite positing the ‘unknowable beyond’), maintains that within the phenomenal realm (possible experience), the epistemic relation consists not in the cognizing ‘subject’ and its concepts conforming to the ‘object’, but in the object (qua phenomenon) conforming to the a priori cognitive structures of the subject, Hegel writes: Something is for it [consciousness] the in-itself; and knowledge, or the being of the object for consciousness, is, for it, another moment. […] If the comparison shows that these two moments do not correspond to each other, it would seem that consciousness must alter its knowledge. But in fact, […] as knowledge changes so too does the object, for it essentially belonged to this knowledge. Hence it comes to pass for consciousness that what it previously took to be the in-itself is not an in –itself, or that it was only an in-itself for consciousness. Since consciousness thus finds that its

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knowledge does not correspond to its object, the object itself does not stand the test; in other words, the criterion for testing is altered when that for which it was to have been the criterion fails to pass the test […].5

Hegel’s point of departure mirrors the Kantian insight concerning the manner in which consciousness comes to objectify or hypostatize itself in its representations/determinate concepts, which therefore appear to take on an independent existence. However, as we know, for Hegel, unlike Kant’s ostensibly ‘static’ notion of critique, the way in which consciousness comes to the reflective realization of these ‘objective’ forms as its own moments, thus, its reified/alienated self-figurations, has its own history, its own dialectical unfolding.6 This historical becoming of consciousness—the ‘series of configurations it goes through’—is nothing but the “[…] detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of science”7—initially expressed in ‘absolute knowing’. ‘Absolute knowing’, involves an all-encompassing reflective self-­awareness, where “knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself ”, […] where notion corresponds to object and object to notion”.8 Thus, the path to ‘absolute knowing’ involves, within each configuration of consciousness, a process of comparison between knowledge and its criterion (or ‘notion’). The criterion is initially, the ‘in-itself ’ (given in the mode of ‘immediate’ “sense certainty”, then qua ‘universal’—in the dialectic of ‘substance’ and its ‘accidents’—in perceptual consciousness, then as ‘force’ and ‘law’ at the level of ‘understanding’ and so on) that, as consciousness comes to realize, in and through this process of comparison, is a moment internal to itself. Thereby it transitions from the modes of consciousness to the modes of self-consciousness. In this process, since consciousness only compares itself to itself, when knowledge fails to reach its ‘object’ that is, fails to meet its own posited criterion, the ‘object’ or  Hegel, Phenomenology, 1977, p. 54.  It is possible to argue that for Kant the conception of ‘history’ as constitutive of (self ) consciousness remains undeveloped, though implicit in the synthetic activity of consciousness and its inherent temporality, which becomes reflectively explicit in the transcendental deduction of the categories. 7  Hegel, Phenomenology, 1977, p. 50. 8  Ibid. p. 51. 5 6

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criterion itself changes. A ‘new’ object/criterion of consciousness emerges in a determinate negation, corresponding to a new form of consciousness. This dialectical movement of consciousness is what Hegel calls ‘experience’. This movement, I emphasized, is primarily a via negativa, where consciousness goes beyond its own self-imposed (hence reified and ‘alienated’) limits, or dialectically ‘one-sided’ self-formations. As Hegel puts it, “[…] consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands; it spoils its own limited satisfaction”.9 Yet, for Hegel, the ‘violence’ that consciousness does to itself, is not necessarily confined to a merely negative movement. Rather, the ‘pure’ moment of negativity, insofar as it is hypostatized as skeptical consciousness (or in its extreme form, in nihilism), is itself one of the limited or one-sided forms of consciousness that consciousness ‘goes beyond’. The ‘going beyond’ (aufhebung) involves a determinate negation, where for instance, the “being-for-consciousness of the first in-­ itself ”, emerges as the new ‘object’.

4.2 “Force and Understanding” With this outline of the negative movement of consciousness in place, let us take a closer look at how it plays out in Hegel’s analysis of ‘nature’, in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel elaborates the dialectical movement between ‘description’ and ‘explanation’ in the section on “Force and Understanding”. Consciousness, having experienced the loss of the ‘immediacy’ of “sense-certainty” (due to the constitutive mediation of universality in what was considered most ‘immediate’, namely, indexicals like the ‘this’ and the ‘that’, the ‘here’ and the ‘now’), “arrives at thoughts” in “Perception”.10 Through the back and forth dialectical movement (oscillation) between ‘form’ and ‘content’, inherent in perceptual cognition, on the one hand perceptual consciousness arrives at the “unconditioned universal”, which it posits one-sidedly as a simple “being for self ”, namely, undifferentiated substance. On the other, the “underlying” ‘substance’ is necessarily represented through its differential and  Ibid.  Cf. Ibid. p. 79.

9

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differentiating ‘content’,—its ‘accidents’ (colour, shape, taste, smell etc.). The latter turn out to be equally ‘essential’ to it, since without them the “pure universality” of ‘substance’ remains an “empty abstraction”, which cannot be distinguished from any other substance. Yet, the ‘accidents’, in turn, are determinate universals, common to many ‘substances’, and thus dissolve the ‘one’ of substance into the ‘also’ of a ‘heap’ of unrelated properties. This results in a constant back-and-forth movement on the part of ­perceptual consciousness; an immediate transformation into each other, of the ‘one’ and the ‘many’, the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’, the ‘essential’ and the ‘non-essential’ etc., where each is only a ‘vanishing moment’. These empty abstractions of a ‘singleness’ and a ‘universality’ opposed to it, and of an ‘essence’ that is linked with something unessential—a ‘non-­ essential’ aspect which is necessary all the same—these are the powers whose interplay is the perceptual understanding, often called ‘sound common sense’. This ‘sound common sense’, which takes itself to be a solid, realistic consciousness is, in the perceptual process, only a play of these abstractions […].11

Describing the formal structure of negativity inherent in this oscillation of (perceptual) consciousness, Hegel writes, The conceptual necessity of the experience through which consciousness discovers that The Thing is demolished by the very determinateness that constitutes its essence and its being-for-self, can be summarized as follows. The Thing is posited as being for itself, or as the absolute negation of all otherness, therefore as purely self-related negation; but the negation that is self-related is the suspension of itself; in other words, the thing has its essential being in another thing.12

This structure of negation and the movement of consciousness it generates will repeat itself at every level of (self ) consciousness on its journey towards “absolute knowing” i.e., until consciousness grasps itself as nothing but this structural movement. However, at this stage, in the face of this 11 12

 Ibid. p. 77.  Ibid. p. 76.

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oscillation—in the vanishing of the ‘essential’ into the ‘unessential’ and vice-versa, perceptual consciousness clings to these ‘non-entities’. That is, it clings to the separation of ‘essences’, and tries to save them or secure their ‘truth’ by resorting to the distinction between ‘appearance’ (or as Hegel puts it, the ‘insofar as’ or its various ‘aspects’) and ‘reality’. It preserves this distinction by “[…] making itself responsible for one thought in order to keep the other one isolated as the true one”.13 Thus, it posits ‘reality’ as an ‘unconditioned universal’, the ‘being-for self ’ as having ‘returned to itself ’ from its conditioned expression in ‘appearances’ (‘accidents’, ‘qualities’ etc.) Put differently, having realized that the ‘unessential’ element, namely, all that belongs to the phenomenal realm, is inseparable from the ‘essential’ element, consciousness attributes the former to itself, in order to isolate the latter in its ‘unconditioned (by appearance) purity’, as a ‘real existent’ which it posits in a ‘supersensible’ world. The emergence of the supersensible world qua supersensible, or equivalently, the realization of the necessary mediation of ‘reality’ through ‘appearance’ (such that there is no possibility of accessing the ‘thing-in-­ itself ’ ‘behind’ the veil of appearances), marks the transition from perceptual consciousness to “Understanding”. In the latter, consciousness, in positing the supersensible ‘unconditioned universal’ arrives at pure thoughts, i.e., the ‘notion’; yet only in an implicit sense, since it posits the unconditioned as a (‘real’ or mind-independent) object, and does not grasp the notion qua notion, that is, as its own posit. This unconditioned universal, which is now the true object of consciousness, is still just an object for it; consciousness has not yet grasped the notion of the unconditioned as Notion. […] for consciousness the object has returned into itself from its relation to an other, and has thus become notion in principle; but consciousness is not yet for itself the notion, and consequently does not recognize itself in that reflected object.14

Yet the same oscillatory movement of negation unfolds at the level of the ‘unconditioned universal’ posited qua ‘object’ in a supersensible  Ibid. pp. 78–79.  Ibid. p. 79.

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realm. For the ‘unconditioned universal’ or supersensible ‘object’, is again nothing but the determinate negation (negation of the initial negation) that brings together the vanishing moments of ‘independent’, ‘essential’, ‘pure’ ‘abstract’, hence, empty’ or undifferentiated universality on the one hand, and dependent, unessential, differentiated particularity on the other.15 Yet, precisely because consciousness at the level of ‘understanding’ is unaware (or only implicitly aware) of the supersensible ‘object’ as its own posit, the tension between these vanishing moments remains unresolved. The unity of ‘being-for-self ’ and ‘being-for-another’ in the ‘object’ again splits up into its two moments, that is, the ‘independent ‘matters’ (phenomena in nature), which immediately turn into their unity, and the latter in turn, is immediately transformed into the diversity of its ‘matters’. This movement, which, in perceptual consciousness leads to the ‘self-destruction’ of the posited notions of ‘substance’ and ‘accidents’ (as the posited ‘independent, though vanishing extremes’ of the movement) now acquires ‘objective form’.16 As objective, this movement, Hegel says, is “what is called force”.17 The objectification of the movement itself qua Force, entails (as I just mentioned) that ‘unconditioned universal’ no longer appears as something ‘objective’ in the sensible world (behind appearances) but as “the inner being of things”—as constituting the ‘inner’, supersensible world, ‘underlying’ all things in the sensible realm and to which all sensible things are subject.18 I will return to this point below. ‘Force’ (such as the force of gravity) is thus split into two interpenetrating moments—the ‘expression’ of force in its diverse and independent ‘matters’ (phenomena, events etc.), and its withdrawal into itself as the unity of these ‘matters’ or “force proper”. Since these moments are again only vanishing moments, their “difference exists only in thought”.19 For, ‘pure force’ or “force driven back into itself ” cannot remain withdrawn, but must express itself, whereas in expressing itself, it remains ‘within itself ’.20 However, the question of what creates this movement between  Cf. Ibid. pp. 80–81.  Cf. Ibid. p. 83. 17  Ibid. p. 81. 18  Cf. Ibid. p. 86. 19  Ibid. p. 82. 20  Cf. Ibid. p. 81. 15 16

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these moments, despite their difference being ‘only in thought’, again brings the ‘undecidability’ between ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ difference (or negativity) to the fore. Hegel underscores this ‘undecidability’ when he writes: […] these differences remain pure forms, superficial vanishing moments. At the same time there would be no difference at all [my italics] between Force proper which has been driven back into itself, and Force unfolded into independent ‘matters’, if they had no enduring being, or, there would be no Force if it did not exist in these opposite ways. But that it does exist in these opposite ways simply means that the two moments are at the same time themselves independent.21

Thus, force, split into the extremes of a (supersensible) ‘One’, and its ‘expression’ in the many (phenomenal) ‘matters’, such that it exists as the “medium” of these matters, sets up an oscillatory movement, where each posited mode of force immediately calls forth (“solicits”) its (transition to the) ‘other’. The splitting is thus only the doubling of Force, where the apparently ‘other’ of Force which both ‘solicits’, and is ‘solicited’ (Force as expression/medium and Force as a ‘One’) is Force itself; and each is what it is only in relation to its ‘other’. We see then, the manner in which, this necessary structural oscillatory movement constitutive of ‘Force’, is negative through and through; for Force is nothing without its actualization in its ‘expression’ in phenomena, and yet, its very ‘actualization’ is its ‘supersession’, since it immediately surpasses its ‘expression’ in the notion of ‘Force proper’, or Force “driven back into itself ”. Thus, Force as ‘being for self ’ is now ‘actual’ Force, which however, in turn necessarily requires ‘actualization’ in ‘expression’ and so on. Thus, “[…] the realization of Force is at the same time the loss of reality”22; and it is through this movement of loss (negativity) that the notion of Force first emerges qua notion for the understanding (which is yet not fully ‘notion’, insofar as it is objectively posited). That is, it emerges as the ‘empty universality’ of the ‘supersensible’  Ibid. p. 82.  Ibid. p. 86.

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world—the ‘inner being’ of things or the ‘permanent beyond’ of sensible experience.23 The latter therefore, now acquires the status of ‘appearance’. The empty, supersensible universality is thus a determinate negation, where negativity itself is posited in a positive sense, as ‘universality’. Describing this movement of consciousness from the naïve ­‘reality’ of sensible perception to the mediated (through appearance) ‘supersensible reality’ (Force) posited by the ‘understanding’, Hegel writes: The play of forces is consequently the developed negative; but its truth is the positive, viz., the universal, the object that, in itself, possesses being. The being of this object for consciousness is mediated by the movement of appearance, in which the being of perception and the sensuously objective in general has a merely negative significance. Consciousness, therefore, reflects itself out of this movement back into itself as the True; but qua consciousness converts this truth again into an objective inner, and distinguishes this reflection of Things from its own reflection into itself […]. This inner is, therefore, for consciousness an extreme over against it, but it is for consciousness the true, since in the inner, as the in-itself, it possesses at the same time the certainty of itself or the moment of its being-for-self. But it is not yet conscious of this ground or basis, for the being-for-self which the inner was supposed to possess in its own self would be nothing else but the negative movement [my italics]. This, however, is for consciousness still the objective vanishing appearance, not yet its own being-for-self. Consequently, the inner is for it certainly Notion, but it does not as yet know the nature of the Notion.24

The opening up of the necessarily mediated (through sensible ‘appearance’), hence supersensible ‘inner’ realm or permanent, ‘beyond’, is therefore the negative movement of consciousness itself—its return to itself from sensible perception (the “nothingness of appearance”), which it does not realize as such and therefore positivizes its own negativity qua ‘Force in-itself ’ on the one hand and its own inner self-certainty or ‘being for self ’ on the other. Yet, since the supersensible inner realm is pure emptiness, the pure ‘beyond’ of appearance, it is posited precisely in and 23 24

 Ibid. p. 87.  Ibid. p. 87.

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through appearance. Appearance is the ‘truth’ of the supersensible—what gives it ‘content’, or as Hegel puts it, the ‘essence’ of the supersensible is appearance, as its ‘filling’. Consequently, the supersensible is nothing but “appearance qua appearance” insofar as appearance is “posited as superseded”.25 Yet, for the understanding, this positivized negativity, initially posited as the pure, empty universality of the supersensible beyond, will start ‘filling’ itself out through the splitting and movement of force(s), which we know, is understanding’s own movement. Since each extreme in ‘force’ split into the (undifferentiated) one and the (differentiated) many, is only a vanishing moment, all there is, Hegel says, is the ‘universal difference’ (what I termed ‘absolute difference’ to distinguish it from relative difference, although the former ‘appears’ in and through the latter), which ‘instigates’ this oscillatory movement. This ‘universal difference’, takes the form of the ‘law’ (of force), and is the filling out of the undifferentiated supersensible, inner world.26 The ‘law’ therefore, emerges as the intermediary between the posited supersensible (force) and the sensible (phenomena or appearances). It is the representation (or ‘expression’) of ‘universal difference’, insofar as through it Force becomes determinate and differentiated in order to capture specific differences between (types of ) ‘naturally given’ phenomena—for instance, those between gravitational and electromagnetic phenomena. In scientific consciousness (consciousness at the level of “Understanding”), these differences between types of phenomena are posited in nature, where ‘nature’ signifies both a ‘visible’ or phenomenal component and the ‘inner’ being of things, underlying the phenomenal. Consequently, in admitting specific differences (determinateness) within itself, that is, abstract ‘Force’ qua determinate law, and determinate law as the expression of abstract ‘force’ (each again only a vanishing moment, transforming into the other), the posited law/force ends up being ‘descriptive’ (at a higher level of generality). However, it is ‘descriptive’ in a manner where consciousness becomes immediately reflectively aware of its

 Cf. Ibid. p. 89.  Cf. Ibid. p. 90 ff.

25 26

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own movement (oscillation) between ‘description’ and ‘explanation’ (‘particularity’ and ‘universality’), brought about through negation qua ‘universal difference’. In other words, negation is an essential moment of the universal, and negation or mediation in the universal is therefore a universal difference. This difference is expressed in the law, which is the stable image of unstable appearance. Consequently, the supersensible world is the inert realm of laws, which though beyond the perceived world —for this exhibits law only through incessant change—is equally present in it and is its direct tranquil image.27

Thus, the undifferentiated, ‘empty universality’ of the supersensible realm, that is, Force in its ‘being for self ’ now acquires ‘content’ through its differentiation into laws. The latter therefore, emerge as intermediaries between supersensible Force (Force ‘withdrawn into itself ’, or Force ‘proper’) and its expression in sensible phenomena. For, laws are, on the one hand, in relation to the simple difference/negativity of supersensible Force, differentiated into specific laws, while on the other, they are not reducible to their manifestation in the flux of sensible appearance; rather as the “stable image of unstable appearance” they also belong to the supersensible realm.28 However, exactly the same oscillation again articulates the notion of law. On the one hand, the gap between the supersensible (universal) law and its manifestation in the ever-changing realm of appearances—that ‘appearance’ cannot be absorbed without remainder into the law—seems to imply that appearances retain a certain independence with respect to the ‘inner realm’; or appearance is not yet, for consciousness, ‘appearance qua appearance’, (as “a superseded being for self ”). On the other, while the law is differentiated, hence determinate (“it is not law in general, but a law”,29 such as the law of gravity), it is still a universal law (a  Ibid. pp. 90–91.  It should not go unnoticed that this basic structure of the ‘third’ as intermediary between vanishing ‘extremes’, is analogous to Kant’s ‘Schematism of the Understanding’, through which the (transcendental) categories acquire ‘intuitive content’ (in and through pure intuition). 29  Ibid. p. 91. 27 28

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determinate universality), such that it has a ‘descriptive’ element. In short, there are necessarily, a plurality of laws. This plurality now appears as a ‘defect’ for the understanding, since, for it, the inner, supersensible being of things ultimately consists in the simple unity of Force. Consequently, it strives to ‘collapse’ the plurality of laws into one law. In the process however, the law loses its specificity—it again becomes ‘Force’ in general.30 Hegel has the law of gravity in mind here. The latter unifies diverse phenomena, such as a falling stone and the motion of the planets, and this unification constitutes its ‘explanatory power’. At the same time, in combining within itself the laws of terrestrial and heavenly motion, the law of gravity “[…] in fact expresses neither law” (in its specificity). Rather, insofar as it posits the pure ‘force’ of gravity as the underlying ‘explanation’, it posits the mere notion of law. For, ‘gravitational force’ understood as “universal attraction”, says nothing more than what is already ‘given’ in the specific laws and their manifestation in appearance. Or, put differently, ‘universal attraction’ cannot exist (and has no content), apart from its ‘expression’ in the visible realm. Thus, it amounts to a distinction without a (‘real’) difference, and is therefore, merely the pure ‘Notion of law itself ’ qua unity.31 And yet, although it is merely the ‘notion of law’, or pure unity that the understanding posits (which therefore is nothing ‘in itself ’, but another vanishing moment), in positing the notion (“universal attraction”, or ‘Electro-magnetic force’) the understanding manifests nature as “in itself conformable to law”.32 It brings to light the visible, sensuous realm as non-independent (hence non-contingent), that is, precisely as superseded. The supersession of the visible world in and through the notion of ‘law’ (which must again admit difference/specificity within itself, thereby merely repeating the content of specific laws whose ‘essence’ it is) is what is known as ‘explanation’. Hegel illustrates this in the case of ‘electricity’ as a ‘force’:

 Cf. Ibid.  Cf. Ibid. 32  Ibid. 30 31

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This process is called ‘explanation’. A law is enunciated; from this its implicitly universal element or ground is distinguished as force; but it is said that this difference is no difference, rather that the ground is constituted exactly the same as the law. The single occurrence of lightening, eg., is apprehended as a universal, and this universal is enunciated as the law of electricity; the explanation then condenses the law into force as the essence of the law. The force is so constituted that opposite electricities appear [‘positive’ and ‘negative’ charges] which disappear again into one another; that is force is constituted exactly the same as law. […] Thus, the difference qua difference of content, of the thing, is also again withdrawn.33

The other mode of being of the law that Hegel distinguishes, is relational. Thus, the law(s) of motion simply establish functional relations between elements, such as space and time, which can otherwise be conceived quite independently of each other. Here the being of ‘Force’ is entirely relational and thus split up into its elements (F = ma). Thus, the ‘universal’ in the case of ‘Force’ instigating motion, is already “divided in its own self ” since there is no ‘simple’ or ‘unified’ motion as the ‘source’ underlying its relational ‘expression’. Similarly, the ‘expression’ of Gravitational force (F = GMm/R²) and the motion resulting from it, takes a relational form between elements that are otherwise indifferent to each other’; although in this case a ‘pure’ gravitational force is posited as underlying the relation. This shows, as Hegel puts it, that the necessity of positing a pure unity of ‘force’ in the latter case is itself a “sham”.34 The duplication of differences inherent in the law, at the level of ‘Force’ (where it is posited as the ‘simple essence’ of law, but turns out to be nothing ‘really’ different from it) entails that all explanation is ultimately tautologous. This therefore, sets up a movement of consciousness where ‘explanation’ again collapses into (determinate) ‘description’, since the specific differences at the level of this or that (‘descriptive’) law, reappear at the level of its ‘essence’, namely, the ‘pure’ unity of ‘Force’. In this tautological movement, the understanding […] sticks to the inert unity of its object, and the movement falls only within the understanding 33 34

 Ibid. pp. 94–95.  Cf. Ibid. p.94.

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itself, not within the object. It is an explanation that not only explains nothing, but is so plain that, while it pretends to say something different from what has already been said, really says nothing at all but only repeats the same thing.35

The tautologous character of all ‘explanation’ instigates the oscillatory movement of consciousness between ‘explanation’ and ‘description’. For, every differentiated ‘description’ (the regularity of phenomenal change captured and ‘stabilized’ in the specific law), calls for its ‘explanation’ in the unity of (‘undifferentiated’) ‘Force’ as its ‘essence’. And in turn, ‘Force’ again must admit differentiation, to be this or that ‘force’ (the Force of gravity as opposed to electromagnetism), and thereby merely repeats the differentiation that was present in the specific law. In this way, the back-­ and-­forth movement which was initially divided between ‘appearance’ and supersensible ‘reality’, such that the understanding took responsibility for the former, to preserve the latter, now penetrates the supersensible realm itself. What is present here is not merely bare unity […] but rather a movement in which a distinction is certainly made but, because it is no distinction, is again cancelled. In the process, then, of explaining the to-and-fro of change which before was outside of the inner world and present only in appearance, has now penetrated into the supersensible world itself.36

Further, it is this tautologous character of explanation that provides self-satisfaction to consciousness at the level of ‘understanding’. “The reason why ‘explaining’ affords so much self-satisfaction is just because in it consciousness is, so to speak, communing directly with itself, enjoying only itself; although it seems to be busy with something else […].”37 With the transition to self-consciousness, when consciousness becomes aware (through many limited, one-sided formations) of this negative movement and the ever-vanishing moments it generates, as its own movement, ‘explanation’ as a source of satisfaction turns into one of  Ibid.  Ibid. 37  Ibid. p. 101. 35 36

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dissatisfaction. For, it comes to realize that what it took to be ‘something else’, is its own self. Such dissatisfaction instigates consciousness to take on further phenomenal shapes, before reconciling itself with its own negative movement. For the development of our argument, it suffices here to emphasize the negative movement of thought intrinsic to, and constitutive of, our concept of ‘nature’ in general. The latter consistently eludes our ‘grasp’ in the very attempt to know it more thoroughly, by ‘filling it out’ with determinate content. I have tried to argue that despite the difference in the manner in which negativity is primarily conceived (as ‘absolute’ or ‘relative’), and how it plays out in their systems of thought, both Kant and Hegel recognize the role of negativity in the dialectical movement of thought, along with its distorting effects. These distorting effects are again due to the hypostatization/reification of the ‘products’ of negation, as well as of the reification of the process of negation itself (in the skeptical and nihilistic forms of consciousness). I have elucidated these distorting effects stemming from the negativity inherent in the movement of thought/consciousness, primarily as it manifests itself in the conception of nature. While both Kant and Hegel have much more to say concerning ‘nature’ (or ontological issues), the brief outline presented here suffices to indicate how negativity, qua ‘process’ or ‘movement’, shows itself in the necessary and ceaseless oscillation of thought between the conditioned and the unconditioned, description and explanation, sensible and the supersensible, law and force etc. I will return to both these thinkers (in Chap. 5), and touch upon this processive character of negativity that they bring to light, in relation to the ethico-political sphere. In the context of our present set of concerns, namely, the manner(s) in which the negativity of thought conditions our conception of ‘nature’ in modernity, I will discuss Husserl’s related approach to these issues in his last unfinished text—The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. But before I do so, it is necessary to clarify the conceptual-methodological background of Husserl’s approach in the Crisis, in relation to Kant’s approach in the first Critique. This would allow us to underscore the interrelation between the two forms of negativity and how it articulates these works.

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4.3 Methodological Distinctions Between Kant and Husserl; and the Sense of ‘Crisis’ Two interrelated ideas orient our discussion of the Crisis and must be kept in mind. First, the same oscillation between the absolute and relative conceptions of negativity that we have come across in our discussion of Kant and Hegel, plays itself out, and comes to structure Husserl’s thinking on both the cognitive-phenomenal and ethical-normative fronts. In what follows, I will focus on the cognitive-rational and phenomenal aspect of this oscillation, as it pertains to ‘nature’. However since, for Husserl (unlike ostensibly, for Kant) the ethical-normative is inseparable from the cognitive-rational—and as we shall see, this inseparability is again indicative of the dominance of the relative sense of negativity in Husserl’s thought—the former set of considerations must also inevitably enter the analysis. I will explicate the structuring effects of the movement between the two senses of negativity in the Crisis by once again contrasting the preponderance of the relative sense in Husserl’s thinking, with that of the absolute in Kantian thought. However, since the movement is structural/ dialectical, each system of thought, despite its dependence on one type of negativity (hence one aspect of the movement) also exhibits the other type and its structuring effects. Thus, the relative dimension of negativity must enter Kant system (and is explicitly articulated, for instance, in the ‘Antinomies’), even as it is subsumed under the absolute dimension. And similarly, the ‘absolute’ notion of negativity manifests itself at certain points in Husserl’s phenomenology; for instance, in the notion of ‘being’, of ‘hyle’, and the irreducible ‘otherness of the other’, in the intersubjective co-constitution of phenomenal space. Secondly, Husserl’s treatment in the Crisis immediately puts the historicity of the (negative) movement of thought, center-stage. Consequently, its configuration in modern scientific rationality is understood in terms of its historicity. That is, it is understood in terms of the reification/distortion of the negativity of thought in the “positivistic reduction of the idea of science”, leading to a “crisis of meaning”. Thus, this distortion of

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negativity—of the transcending movement (critical stance) of thought, which constitutes the original driving force of the enlightenment, entails that the renewal of ‘meaning’, that is, freeing oneself from its positivistic restriction in the contemporary configuration of the natural sciences, can only be an exercise in the recovery of a possibility intrinsic to enlightenment modernity. The latter idea, which Husserl articulates in relation to the natural sciences, forms, in its schematic outline, the basis for our attempt to recover an unreified conception of modernity from within (the negativity of thought constitutive of ) the modernist tradition, in and through the articulation of the possibility of unalienated existence. Before I discuss the Crisis directly, it would be useful to recall certain broad, systemic features in Husserl’s and Kant’s thinking that, by bringing to light the two senses of negativity at work, along with its structuring effects, facilitate comparison. As we know, both Kant and Husserl reject the empiricist view that cognition involves a “correspondence” between our mental representation and the mind-independent object that is represented. Yet, Kant’s rejection of the possibility of even the mediated givenness of the object “in-itself ”, or its “bracketing” in Husserl’s phenomenology, does not imply a rejection of objective knowledge, and a retreat to ‘inner mental representation’ or ‘phenomena’, understood in a merely subjective sense. Rather, the very conception of objectivity is revised, insofar as it is now understood in a transcendental-ideal sense. This transcendental-ideal objectivity, ultimately encompasses not just objects of sensible (phenomenal), or even categorial experience (given through non-sensible or ‘pure’ intuition), but the unified spatio-temporal realm of (a priori) possible experience for Kant, and the spatio-temporal horizon for Husserl. Closely allied to this transformation in the sense of objectivity (as transcendental ideality), is the transformation in the notion of cognition. For both Kant and Husserl, cognitive activity does not merely grasp a mind-­ independent object, but actively constitutes it. However, just as, in this process, the ‘objectivity’ of the ‘object’ is not wholly reducible to mental activity/events in which it is constituted, similarly such activity is not wholly reducible to its empirical/psychological occurrence. That is, the activity of consciousness is not to be understood as identical with ‘inner’ mental occurrences, which would be qualitatively indistinct from ‘outer’

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physical/natural events. Rather, synthetic-constitutive activity again involves a transcendental dimension, in that it does not constitute its ‘objects’ (in a conceptually determinate sense), in a merely subjective-­ contingent manner, but according to certain ideal-objective rules (functions), or formal possibilities of experience. The latter again, do not simply pre-exist as ideal objectivities, but are themselves (re)constituted as explicit possibilities, at a higher level of reflective modalization/abstraction, in and through such reflective-constitutive activity. Here certain differences of method, and inseparable from it, (formal-­ ontological) ‘content’ between Kant’s transcendental idealism and Husserl’s phenomenology become visible. Kant rigidly defines these formal possibilities of ‘experiencing’ in a set of a priori ‘categories’, derived from the Aristotelian ‘forms of judgment’ (‘general logic’) already available to him as historically handed-down (or ‘sedimented’, in Husserl’s terminology) accomplishments of rationality. As a consequence, for Kant the problem presents itself as that of showing how the categories (arrived at following the ‘clue’ of the judgment forms), are a priori ‘applicable’ to, or determine, possible experience, such that all possible experience must necessarily take those fixed categorial shapes. Kant must therefore, resort to a ‘transcendental deduction’, to demonstrate their ‘a priori applicability’. In contrast, Husserl conceives the a priori dimension of experience, not in terms of a fixed set of categories, ‘exhaustive’ of all possible experience, but with much greater plasticity. This permits him, even in the initial, ‘static’ phase of his phenomenology, which articulates intentionality predominantly according to the ‘intentional object—fulfillment’, model of cognition/perception, to uncover and abstract the a priori structures of experience from within experience. That is, these a priori formal possibilities of experience are uncovered in and through the process of fulfillment itself, as its “conditions of possibility”. While Husserl shares Kant’s overall transcendental orientation, encapsulated in the latter expression, his methodological orientation is more explicitly bottom-up, rather than top-down. Husserl realizes, as early as the Logical Investigations, that intentional fulfillment is necessarily recognitive, memorial, re-­ constitutive etc., and therefore, contains ‘backward references’, to the prior constitutive activity of consciousness. As a result, Husserl’s

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methodological approach, despite its own ‘static’ beginning, is conducive to its later genetic, and historicist reorientation, right from the outset. With the genetic-historicist turn, experience itself emerges as a (transcendental) field of potentiality, from which its ‘categorical shaping’, despite being a priori, emerges in an explicit, conceptually determinate fashion, in and through the intentionally directed activity of consciousness. However, the genetic-historicist dimension, even if underdeveloped, is not entirely absent in Kant’s system. Their common set of commitments ensures that for Kant, just as for Husserl, cognitive activity is understood as both constituting and constituted, or, as a movement between immanence and transcendence. This sets up, the transcendental deduction for instance, as a modal operation of recovering the transcendental-­constitutive aspect of (possible) experience, in and through its active, reflective reconstitution/reenactment (through the realization of the possibility ‘I think’, in pure intuition), by following the ‘guiding thread’ (Leitfaden) of the already constituted formal-rational objectivities, given in ‘general logic’. However, since, on the one hand, as I noted, Kant introduces the categories as pre-given and fixed, the deduction is understood in a distorted, top-down fashion, as explicating the a priori ‘applicability’ of the categories to possible experience (rather than the bottom-up approach which actually orients the deduction, and makes the a priori structuring presence of the categories in experience, explicit, through their reflective reconstitution). On the other, since, (as the discussion in relation to Hegel, underscored) Kant maintains the possibility of an ‘unknowable beyond’ of possible experience (which is however, noumenally posited), the reflective-synthetic reconstitution of the categories (as a priori conditions of possibility of experience), is still confined to a finitely closed or circumscribed realm, namely, that of the “understanding”. Whereas, with the ‘epoché’ and the full-blown emergence of the genetic-historicist orientation in Husserl’s phenomenology, the phenomenal realm of (possible) experience becomes an all-encompassing (transcendental) field, or potentiality, for conceptually determinate experience. In other words, with the genetic turn, there is an infinite extension of ‘sense’, since nothing remains ‘beyond’ possible experience, that is, beyond possible conceptual articulation and determination.

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We see then, how the difference and interrelation between the absolute and relative conceptions of the negativity of consciousness, and the movement of thought it engenders, again manifests itself here. In relation to Kant’s system, Husserl’s genetic-historicist approach relativizes the negativity of consciousness, since the ‘beyond’ of consciousness is only a relative, even if inexhaustible, beyond—always potentially open to appropriation in conceptual determination. However, as I noted, despite the ‘absolute negativity’ of the (noumenal) ‘beyond’, operative in Kant’s thought, we find a temporal, genetic-phenomenological account, along with a series of modal transformations that underpins his system—for instance, in the transcendental deduction and the schematism. Similarly, for Husserl, the openness, in principle, to conceptual appropriation/ articulation that characterizes the field of (possible) experience, as the relative beyond/negativity of consciousness, is, at the same time, also intersubjectively co-constituted—for example, in the phenomenal experience of space. And it is precisely the ‘otherness of the other’, qua another co-constituting transcendental subjectivity, that as Husserl emphasizes, cannot be appropriated without remainder into my transcendental-­ constituting ‘I’. In other words, the ‘other’ cannot merely be reduced to my possibilities of articulation (the ‘Ich kann’ with respect to phenomenal space), even though the other is given in and through these possibilities. Thus, despite the preponderance, in each system, of one type of negativity over the other, the structural-dialectical character of their interrelation and transformation entails an ‘undecidable oscillation’ between relative and absolute negativity, in each system of thought. Here two related questions, of central importance to the aims and structural-methodological orientation of both the first Critique and the Crisis, must be addressed. And it is these questions which bring to light the basic link between negativity, in its interwoven relative and absolute aspects, and the transcendental-genetic-historicist orientation. These questions concern the why and the how of the modal transformations involved in transcendental, and genetic-historicist ‘critique’ of the ideal-­ objectivities of reason.

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As I noted, for both Kant and Husserl, the ‘external’ world, as a spatio-­ temporally unified phenomenal38 realm, is an accomplishment of rational consciousness. Thus, both the ‘world’ and consciousness carry with them a certain ‘history’ of their own becoming, contained in their ‘sedimented’ objectivities and determinate modes (rules) of cognition. This sets up, for both thinkers, the task of ‘transcendental critique’, or ‘intuitive fulfillment’, as an active reflective-synthetic reconstitution of these passively pre-given, ‘always already’ accomplished products of the (‘original’) activity of consciousness. Consequently, it sets up the structuring methodological orientation of their works, as a ‘looking back’, and reconstitution (in an ‘analytic unity of apperception’ of the ‘original’ synthetic unity of apperception), or a ‘return enquiry’ (‘rückfrage’), aimed at the recovery and renewal of the ‘intuitive sense/content’ of these sedimented (intentional) objectivities in intuitive-synthetic reconstitution/fulfillment. Moreover, since the ‘external’ phenomenal-intelligible world is nothing but the finished, reified product of the activity of consciousness, for both thinkers, the transition from ‘external’ to ‘internal’, reflective apprehension (in active synthetic-intuitive reconstitution), can only be a modal transformation. I noted that for Kant this modal transformation is carried out in the transcendental deduction, where the forms of judgment (pre-given through the Aristotelian logical heritage) are modalized in the categories (according to the categories of modality) as the determinate forms of the transcendental unity of apperception, which constitute the a priori structures of possible experience.39 For Husserl, the modal transformation is most clearly recognizable in the phenomenological reduction, which involves a fundamental transformation of the ‘naturalistic attitude’. This implies a transformation of both ‘object’ and ‘subject’ understood naturalistically, that is, as empirical/psychological entities ‘in’ the world, into phenomena for my transcendental consciousness

 In the extended sense that ‘phenomena’ have for both thinkers, which I noted, includes, but is not limited to, determinate figurations of ideal objectivities. 39  Recall that for Kant “The modality of a judgment is a quite peculiar function. […] it contributes nothing to the content of the judgment (for besides quantity, quality and relation, there is nothing that constitutes the content of a judgment), but concerns only the value of the copula in relation to thought in general” (Kant 1929, B100, KrV, AAIII, 89, 26–30). 38

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(self-­conscious synthetic-constitutive activity). It is this transformation in the modality of our encounter with the world and the ‘self ’ that allows the transcendental-constitutive dimension of consciousness―both its ‘meaning-­giving (Sinngebung) and performative character (as constituting meaning according to the a priori, yet plastic possibilities of sense constitution), to emerge, in a manner that is not reducible either to unmediated empirical or transcendent representation.40 Yet, all this leaves two basic interconnected questions unanswered: 1) why is such a modal transformation, or equivalently, ‘transcendental (logical) critique’ necessary in the first place? 2) How is it brought about? With respect to the ‘why’, the question can be reframed to underscore the underlying problem from which it stems. If the phenomenal-intelligible world is a constitutive accomplishment of thought/reason, then why does consciousness lose sight of its own constitutive-rational activity, and encounter the world as ‘in-itself ’ (such that a transcendental-­ phenomenological critique is required in the first place)? It is clear that the clarification of this issue would also clarify the reasons for Kant’s and  Husserl Characterizes the first step of the reduction, namely, the ‘epoché’ in the following manner;

40

Within my field of transcendental phenomena, I no longer have theoretical validity as a human Ego; I am no longer a real Object within the world which I accept as existing, but instead I am posited exclusively as subject for this world. And this world is itself posited precisely as I am conscious of it in some fashion or other, as appearing to me in a certain way or as believed, predicatively judged, valued, etc. Thus, it is posited in such a manner that the certainty of its being belongs itself to “phenomenon” in no different a way than other modes of what I have in consciousness and its “contents”. (Husserl, 1989, p. 143; Ideen, Drittes Buch, Hua V, 146). As many commentators, such as Fink and Zahavi have pointed out, the phenomenological reduction has two irreducible and mutually conditioning ‘moments’, namely the ‘epoché’ and the ‘transcendental reduction’ (cf. Fink 1995, p. 41; cf. Zahavi 2002, p. 46). The ‘epoché’ constitutes the negative procedure through which the ‘naturalistic attitude’—the ordinary belief in the existence of the world (and ourselves in it) in the mode of immediate, naïve realism, is suspended, that is, it is ‘bracketed’ or ‘put out of play’. This lets the transcendental—constitutive dimension of consciousness and its correlation with the (phenomenal) ‘world’ (both as its conceptually articulated ‘product’ and at the transcendental level, as the ‘apriori’ potentiality or ‘genetic’ ground for conceptual articulation) emerge in a ‘transcendental reduction’. Thus, whereas the ‘epoché’ initiates the ‘methodic regress’ that allows the transcendental constitutive dimension of consciousness to be made explicit in the transcendental reduction, the reflective modalization inherent in the latter, through which the world and the self is recovered in its phenomenal being, in turn gives ‘methodic certainty’ to the ‘epoché’, (cf. Fink 1995, p. 41) and prevents it from collapsing into the ‘pure’ negativity of skepticism.

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Husserl’s initially ‘static’ points of departure, in the judgement forms and intentional objectivities, respectively. With respect to the ‘how’, the underlying problem arises from the opposite direction. If consciousness is so immersed in the world that it forgets its own constitutive activity and takes the world and itself in a passively ‘given’ sense—as ‘object’, where the ‘subject’ itself is approached qua ‘object’ for scientific-psychological investigation—then how can it ever break from this immersion? How can it open up the requisite reflective distance that allows transcendental critique to get underway? The short (though only partial) answer to the first question is that the temporal discursivity of the synthetic activity of (finite) consciousness entails that consciousness necessarily encounters its ‘products’, and even itself, ‘after the event’. That is, it encounters itself not immediately in its own constituting activity, but mediately, as re-presentation of such activity in conceptually determinate phenomena. Thus, it is mediately given to itself through its finished ‘products’, i.e., conceptually determinate cognition (judgements), higher order judgment forms etc., or as re-­ presentation of its own ‘always already’ synthesized (hence posited) a priori unity. In other words, since the activity of consciousness unfolds in time, it is given to itself (or is self-aware), as the just-past of memorial ‘recognition’ for Kant41 or ‘retentional modification’ for Husserl.42 Here I need not go into greater detail concerning the temporal structure of consciousness, its modes of passive and active synthesis and how  For instance, in the threefold, ‘synthesis of apprehension in intuition’, ‘synthesis of reproduction in imagination’, and ‘synthesis of recognition in a concept’, in the A deduction. Or in the B deduction where Kant writes: 41

The “I think” expresses the act of determining my existence. Existence is already given thereby, but the mode in which I am to determine this existence, that is, the manifold belonging to it, is not thereby given. In order that it be given, self-intuition is required; and such intuition is conditioned by a given a-priori form, namely time, which is sensible and belongs to the receptivity of the determinable in me. Now since I do not have another selfintuition which gives the determining in me (I am conscious only of the spontaneity of it) prior to the act of determination […] I cannot determine my existence as that of a self-active being; […], and my existence is still only determinable sensibly, that is as the existence of an appearance (Critique of Pure Reason, B 158, footnote a). 42  Recall that for Husserl, the structure of retention and protention, which constitutes ‘inner time consciousness’, is the ground for all intentionality, hence of cognition, from the pre-predicative to categorial intuition.

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the latter (through their interconnection), gives rise to determinate cognition, at every level—from the concrete to the abstract, including transcendental-­intuitive reconstitution. A concrete example would suffice to underscore our central claims, that are of immediate relevance to the Crisis; namely that the temporal discursivity of consciousness entails (1) that Husserl’s ‘static’ starting point in already constituted intentional objectivities (or Kant’s, in the forms of judgment), is not accidental or arbitrary; 2) and this necessarily orients the investigation as a ‘return enquiry’, or recovery/reconstitution, which also turns out to be ‘renewal’. In other words, the genetic-historicist methodological orientation of the Crisis (and of Husserlian phenomenology as such, even if it remains implicit and undeveloped in the static phase) has its source in the temporality of processive consciousness. Consider, the Pythagorean Theorem—we all learnt the proof at some point and even intuitively ‘saw’ its validity. Yet, ordinarily we do not intuitively accomplish or perform the proof every time we use the theorem for any calculations. We take its validity for granted—with the knowledge that we can always return to its ‘proof ’ (intuitive reconstitution). The theorem, once intuitively constituted/performed, becomes part of the furniture of our conceptual world—a sedimented (ideal) objectivity in Husserl’s sense. This ‘sedimentation’ holds even more immediately for the concrete cognitive functioning of consciousness. Unlike second-order mathematical and logical objectivities, which, since they are abstractions from first order cognitive objectivities, have a certain reflectivity ‘built into them’— although ‘reflectivity’ in this sense need not be ‘transcendental’, that is, foreground the abstractive, reflective activity of consciousness as constitutive of ideal objectivities—this is not the case with ordinary, say, perceptual cognition. The latter goes on in ‘passive’ fashion, in the mode of immediate familiarity with, and recognition of, always already conceptually determined, or articulated (constituted) objects43; and we are not called upon to explicitly ‘apply’ concepts, or justify their application. This inevitable tendency towards ‘familiarity’, whereby constituted (formal or empirical) objectivities of cognition become part of the  Again, it should be clear from the context that the ‘passivity’ in question is not that of pre-­ thematic, pre-conceptual ‘passive synthesis’ that Husserl elaborates as the genetic ground for conceptually determinate cognition/phenomena; rather, I mean here the secondary passivity arising from the hypostatization of the ‘products’ of such synthetic activity. 43

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‘givenness’ of the world, contains the possibility of their distortion and hypostatization. These objectivities appear pre-given as ‘facts’, and we lose sight of their emergence in the constitutive activity of consciousness. It is due to this inevitable process of hypostatization, owing to the temporal discursivity of thought that for Husserl, the ‘meaning’ of the quantified ‘positive sciences’ (which come to embody the very notion of ‘universal reason’) for an enlightened humanity that seeks to fashion itself in freedom and rationality,44 and thus take responsibility for itself, emerges as a problem in the Crisis.45 In response to the second question, concerning how consciousness breaks from its passive immersion in the ‘in-itself ’ of the world, the Crisis registers a growing, though initially inarticulate and implicit dissatisfaction, with the shape that reason comes to acquire in enlightenment modernity. This dissatisfaction arises from the apparently exhaustive, and thus, exclusive determination of reason in terms of the positive(istic) sciences. In locating the source of this dissatisfaction (leading to a ‘crisis’ of meaning and ‘faith’), in the exclusivity with which scientific reason comes to shape and dominate the modern world-view, the Crisis historicizes its own point of departure, that is, it situates itself within the arc of a certain historical unfolding. In this respect, the Crisis is distinct from Husserl’s earlier texts (from the Ideas onwards), which address the problem of the ‘how’ predominantly as a problem of method, through the immediate introduction of the ‘epoché’. The historicization of its own starting point—the reflective awareness of its own situatedness within a historical trajectory, that the text will trace—also brings to the fore the absolute negativity of thought, in the structural sense that I have been emphasizing. In other words, instead of offering an ahistorical ‘methodological’ response to the question of ‘how’, the Crisis uncovers the deeper tendency (which is constitutively historical)  Cf. Husserl (1970, p. 12ff; cf. Krisis, p. 12ff).  For Kant, this problem is indicated in the question of the ‘a priori applicability’ of formal logic to experience, For both Kant and Husserl, the restriction of rationality to its formal articulation in the prevalent ‘logics’ (Aristotelian and Fregean) of their times (where for Husserl, in Leibniz’s idea of ‘mathesis universalis’, the ‘internal unity’ of logic, as ‘formal apophantics’, and mathematics, as ‘formal ontology’, becomes visible) calls for a transcendental critique that initially aims to trace these logics back to the synthetic activity of consciousness, and thus restore (formal) intuitiveexperiential content to them. 44 45

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on the part of reason to ‘break’ with the world of ‘immediate familiarity’—its immersion in the world it encounters as ‘given’—and that means, its own ‘sedimented’ (reified) conceptual determinations/products. Thus, as I will elaborate, the ‘inarticulate dissatisfaction’ that the Crisis uncovers, is only the first ‘outward sign’ of reason’s own fundamental negativity that seeks to go beyond its limited self-formation in the positivity of the ‘initself ’. What emerges from this ‘going beyond’, in terms of the ‘final establishment’ (Endstiftung) of apodictic reason, which, for Husserl is the true beginning of philosophy as an ‘infinite task’, remains to be seen. The apodeicity of reason would encompass, in their inner continuity, the normative ideals of apodictically founded science (which is nothing but phenomenology), and a life lived in and through ‘reason’—both now explicitly understood as the ‘infinite task’ of a continuous rational shaping and self-shaping that is self-aware and takes responsibility for itself. Yet, such a possibility raises many questions. If the movement of reason is historical in a constitutive sense, that is, if reason is nothing but its own historicity, then how is this ‘break’ from, and transcendence of, its own historical self-formation possible? Further, even if the break, understood as the moment of absolute negativity, is contingent, and thus unaccountable, how can it remain indifferent to its own historicity—its genesis in historical becoming and the historically relative forms it generates? In other words, must not the absolute negativity of reason, discernible in Husserl’s conception of a “final establishment”, in turn be claimed by a determinate, hence, relative, and ‘closed’ negativity? These concerns again indicate the entanglement of the absolute and relative aspects of negativity, which reemerge here in relation to the historicity of the proper ‘beginning’ of phenomenology, that is, ‘reason’ in its apodeicity. The problem of ‘transcendence’, which is simultaneously that of the (correct) ‘beginning’, is central to our concern of articulating the possibility and shape of unalienated life. It is this problematic that is addressed by the thinkers under consideration, including of course, Husserl. With this set of conceptual interconnections, both within Husserlian phenomenology, and in relation to other positions that take the historicity of thought into account (such as those of Hegel, Marx, Adorno etc.), in mind, we are now in a position to turn to a closer examination of certain sections of the Crisis.

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4.4 ‘Crisis’, Negativity and Historicity Despite its obviously Eurocentric perspective—a criticism to which Husserl is easily susceptible—the insights and the systematic arguments developed in the Crisis, are not restricted to the merely parochial, but bring to light certain issues and problematics of universal significance. Moreover, at first glance, the source of the ‘crisis’ that Husserl identifies, namely, the crisis of ‘meaning’ and ‘faith’ owing to the “positivistic reduction of the idea of science to merely factual sciences”, seems continuous with, for instance, Gandhi’s critique of modernity that Bilgrami elaborates. However, this is only a superficial resemblance, since Husserl has in mind something entirely different—the ‘reestablishment’ or recovery/ renewal and ‘final establishment’ (Nachstiftung and Endstiftung) of the true sources of enlightenment modernity—its ‘original establishment’ or beginning (Urstiftung) in Greek philosophy—covered-over and distorted in the positivistic configuration of rationality in the natural sciences. I will discuss the interrelations between these three types of ‘establishment’ in greater detail below. In a preliminary and minimal sense, ‘recovery’, which is also ‘renewal’, refers to a mode of reason that is not sedimented and ossified in its positivistic figuration in the natural sciences, constitutive of enlightenment rationality. In other words, it brings to light an ‘unreified’ (Husserl does not use this term) notion of reason, as the source of ‘meaning’ and ‘faith’ that emerged explicitly, but was also covered over in enlightenment rationality—in the manner in which reason splits into the empirical (based on a physicalist ontology) and objective universalism (‘forces’, ‘laws’ etc.). Thus, the ‘meaning’ in question is not derived from a sacralized or enchanted world-view, and ‘faith’ is not of the religious variety, seemingly beyond reason—at least in an explicit sense.46 Rather, for Husserl, ‘meaning’ refers to the meaning conferred to human existence by the very pursuit of reason—of a rational world-view that at the same time, is inseparable from the processes of rationality,  Husserl argues, as I will elaborate that religious consciousness, insofar as it posits an absolute, unconditioned ground for the phenomenal realm, is also a response to the ‘problem of reason, that is, the problem of ‘universality’, which must ultimately be understood in terms of its negative, transcending movement. However, for religious consciousness this movement remains implicit, and is not seen as a movement of rational thought. 46

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which include freely shaping one’s life in (self ) responsibility; and ‘faith’ consists in the faith in ‘reason’, understood as this very pursuit, or ‘task’. Yet, to talk of a “crisis” of the positive sciences, appears to be an exaggeration, and quite incongruous with their methodological rigor and obvious theoretical and practical success. However, it is perhaps at the very height of their success that a certain, at first inarticulate, sense of discontent begins to make itself felt. It stems from the very ‘obviousness’ of the fundamental ontological and theoretical commitments that constitute the framework of the natural sciences, and which therefore, are not even seen as “commitments” or “presuppositions”. It follows that the latter cannot be questioned from within the scientific framework. The ‘obviousness’ of the scientific paradigm seems to imply that its positivistic, quantified ontology and cognitive approach is exhaustive of our understanding of nature and rationality, and thus excludes a whole range of human experience and concerns, as merely ‘subjective’. It is in this sense that the ‘crisis’, pertains to the very meaning of human existence—the modern sciences, which come to stand as the highest expression of universal reason, of which human thought is capable, have nothing to say concerning questions that are closest to us, questions concerning how humanity should shape and orient its existence as a rational and free, self-­determining being. The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences, and be blinded by the “prosperity” they produced, meant an indifferent turning away from questions decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people. […] In our vital need —so we are told—this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle, questions which man […] finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence. Do not these questions, universal and necessary for all men, demand universal reflections and answers based on universal insight? In the final analysis they concern man as a free, self-determining being in his behavior towards the human and the extra-human surrounding world; and free in regard to his capacity for rationally shaping himself and his surrounding world.47

 Husserl, Crisis, 1970, pp. 5–6.

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If the first part of the passage invokes a familiar trope—our ‘alienation’ from nature (Husserl does not use the term)—owing to its modern scientific understanding, then the latter part suggests a radically alternative response. It does not advocate a return to a pre-modern sacralized conception of nature, as the only source of ‘meaning’; but the reimagining of rationality itself, that is, universality, ‘beyond’ its reified positivistic configuration in the contemporary natural sciences. As Husserl would argue (in an analogous sense to Hegel and Kant), the pre-modern sacralized world-view in turn, is not simply ‘irrational’, rather, it is also concerned with the ‘problems of reason’, and that means, with ‘universality’—with all that is ‘ultimate’ or ‘absolute’, and goes by the name of ‘metaphysics’. Within the sacralized world-view however, the very need for an ‘absolute’, ‘unconditioned’ ground is usually not questioned—it remains the unquestioned presupposition that articulates religious consciousness. When the latter does attempt to justify its always already presupposed ‘transcendent ground’, through rational argumentation from within its framework (for instance, in the writings of Augustine or Descartes), either rational argumentation must fall short, or it ends up being circular. For, either “God” remains ‘beyond’ reason—a matter of pure ‘faith’ that is the source of all reason (Augustine), or, it must end up serving as a guarantor for its own ‘proof ’ (Descartes). In either case, the processive, transcending movement of reason (negativity) as the source of the posited ‘transcendent ground’ (the ‘unconditioned’, ‘absolute’ etc.), does not become explicit, or aware of itself qua movement, resulting in its reification in an onto-theology.48

 In Descartes’ case, as Husserl argues, despite the radicalness (which amounts to a ‘primal establishment’) of his point of departure in methodological doubt, and of his aim of grounding knowledge in apodicticity, he misinterprets his own discovery of the ‘pure ego’ in psychologistic terms, thereby succumbing to dualism (Ibid. pp. 74–82). This process of ‘psychologistic falsification’ of the pure ego, is what I am identifying as the reification of the transcendental dimension of experience, opened up through the transcending critical-reflective movement of thought. It is clear that once ‘dualism’ is taken for granted, based on this self-misinterpretation, the gap between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ becomes impossible to bridge, and ‘God’ must be posited not only as a guarantor of the correspondence between the two, but as reified representation of the ‘objective beyond’. This more fundamental ‘dualism’ must lead to circularity in the proof of ‘God’, since Descartes cannot explicate/accommodate the co-presence of immanence and transcendence in one consciousness, within a reified, dualistic system. 48

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It follows, as I have been emphasizing that the reimagination of rationality or universality, ‘beyond’ its present configuration in the natural sciences, can only be a recovery/renewal, of this movement of reason in an unreified sense that is, qua movement. And the ‘universality’ in question, which is brought to intuitive-apodictic clarification, in and through this movement, in a “final establishment” that for Husserl is also the ‘true beginning’ of philosophy qua (transcendental) phenomenology, can only be a “universality in becoming”. In Husserl’s terminology, humanity’s ‘rational shaping’ of itself and its ‘surrounding world’ can only be an ‘infinite task’. To bring to light this unreified dimension of reason, implicit in scientific rationality, calls for a certain historical reflection that disturbs the sedimentations of the past. However, the geological metaphor of ‘sedimentation’ that Husserl employs, is open to misinterpretation. It should not be understood as layers or strata of historical epochs that are deposited and build up over time, while still retaining their distinctness.49 If by ‘sedimentation’ this linear conception of history/time was being invoked, then the phenomenologist-historian would be akin to an archeologist or geologist, who excavates “the sense depths of the cultural world we inhabit as historical beings”,50 by reading it off each distinct strata that cumulatively form our present socio-cultural world. Instead, the metaphor of “sedimentation” may be understood in terms of the “obscure mass of the earth” or the densely packed “ground beneath our feet”51—the ever-present, entirely familiar, obvious, ‘taken-for-granted’ manner in which our surrounding world is encountered or ‘given’ to us. It is the unquestioned familiarity and obviousness of our surrounding world that constitutes its historical mass and density, where history functions as a force that “bears down on the present” and packs it into an undifferentiated whole. Historical-phenomenological reflection then, is not a matter of unearthing and reading different strata, but of making us aware of the weight of history “bearing down on the present”, by (analogous to the epoché)

 Cf. Dodd (2004, p. 67).  Ibid. 51  Ibid. pp. 67–68. 49 50

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defamiliarizing us with the familiar, or the “immediately given”, and making it a theme of inquiry. As we know, this theme of the historical density of the world we encounter in scientific modernity, along with the need to ‘defamiliarize’ ourselves with it in order to show up both its historicity (hence, contingency) and uncover alternative possibilities of ‘world disclosure’, is pursued by Heidegger as well. I will take up this theme in relation to Heidegger’s thinking in the next section, by elaborating his critique of modern techno-science (in “The Question Concerning Technology”), and showing how such a critique amounts to a modernist critique of modernity. In the context of the Crisis, Husserl begins the initial task of opening up a certain reflective distance that allows us to glimpse the historicity of the world we inhabit and encounter, when he points out that “it was not always the case” that the sciences understood themselves in a positivistic sense, where the “specifically human questions” were excluded and relegated to the ‘merely subjective’.52 There was a time when the sciences constituted the expression and articulation of the continuity and intertwinement of the cognitive-rational and the ethical-normative. This intertwinement lay, I noted, in the ideal of a rationally constituted humanity in self- reflective freedom, that is, a humanity that would determine itself and its surrounding world according to universal principles. Husserl contends that on the one hand, the ideal of unconditioned, universal reason animates ancient philosophy, and constitutes the ‘arche’ of the teleological unfolding of reason that again finds expression (in a “Nachstiftung”) in the Renaissance. On the other, he also recognizes that the very pursuit of this ideal, and the historical accretion of the results of this pursuit into a concrete mass, leads to its inevitable transformation and distortion, until in its modern, positivistic, and eventually skeptical variant, it is so far removed from its original animating sense, that the latter is almost unrecognizable in it.53 However, this animating ideal, is still implicit in the sciences, even if in an undifferentiated, ‘sedimented’ 52 53

 Husserl (1970, p. 7).  Ibid. pp. 11–14; Krisis, pp. 11–14.

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form. Thus, modern, scientifically conditioned consciousness, despite its immersion in the reified positivistic expression of reason in the sciences and the way in which it reveals ‘nature’, experiences this sense in a symptomatic manner—initially in the form of an “inarticulate dissatisfaction”.54 What makes Husserl’s critique of scientific positivism a specifically modernist critique of modernity is the understanding that this dissatisfaction is not the symptomatic manifestation of a yearning for an original state—a posited ‘lost unity’ with purposive, inherently meaningful and thus, ultimately sacralized ‘nature’. Rather, it is the indirect manifestation of freedom, as the processive, transcending movement of reason, which in retrospect—once it becomes aware of itself qua movement—turns out to be also the source of our conceptions of the divine, as ‘absolute’, ‘eternal’ ‘unconditioned’ etc. To see these connections between (1) freedom, as an ethical ideal, (2) reason as a negative striving, and (3) ‘onto-theology’ (or in its secularized version, ‘metaphysics’), each link in the chain must first be analyzed separately. With respect to the first link—the link between freedom and reason—although reason, in its ‘positivistic’, restricted sense embodied in the modern natural sciences, come to dominate and shape the modern world-­view, (or as Heidegger also emphasizes, the very manner in which we encounter the world, the way it shows itself to us), it still leaves open the possibility of freedom, in the form of critical-reflective reason, which begins to manifest itself in the discontent that gathers force in modern subjectivity.55 This entails, in a manner analogous to Kant’s thinking (in the ‘Antinomies’, for instance), and to Heidegger’s (in the notion of the ‘saving power’ inherent in the techno-scientific mode of revealing) that this space of freedom is nothing but the space opened up by the negativity of thought that instigates reason to transcend its own positivistic  Dodd (2009, p. 37).  This emergence of freedom must be understood in the transformed sense of an ‘Endstiftung’ (final establishment), following the ‘Nachstiftung’ (re-establishment) beginning with the Renaissance, and its ‘inner dissolution’ owing to the ‘positivistic restriction of reason’ in the natural (and social) sciences. The Nachstiftung in turn, is only the rediscovery and renewal of the Urstiftung (original establishment)―of the ancient ideal of a life of reason and reflection, which is nothing but the philosophical mode of life, as the highest possibility of human existence. On the interrelation between Urstiftung, Nachstiftung, and Endstiftung, see Crisis, pp. 70–73. (Cf. Dodd 2004, pp. 61–72). 54 55

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self–determination. In the previous section, I introduced this idea of the (absolute) negativity of thought or rational striving, as a response to the question of ‘how’ critique gets under way. I further noted that in situating this negativity in the emerging discontent directed towards the ‘positivistic restriction of reason’ in the scientific rationality that comes to dominate and determine modernity, the Crisis locates it within a certain historical trajectory, instead of understanding it simply as a ‘methodological’ process. In the Crisis, the fundamental imbrication of the cognitive-rational and the ethical-normative that begins to emerge in explicit fashion in modernity, accounts for why a self-aware, and thus, responsible ethical-­ rational subject can encounter its own freedom only as a life to be continuously accomplished, i.e., as an infinite task. In other words, for Husserl (unlike Kant), the ethical task of shaping one’s life in rational freedom, though constant self-examination, and thus, taking ultimate responsibility for one’s commitments and for oneself, is continuous with the cognitive task of phenomenological (self )clarification through intuitive insight into (reconstitution of ) ‘given’ objectivities. Through such intuitive reconstitution consciousness in a sense “takes responsibility” for its cognitions, insofar as these objectivities are revealed as products of its own transcendental constitutive activity, and at the level of formal or categorial objectivity, re-enacted in their apodicticity. Further, with the genetic turn, consciousness comes to the explicit realization that this cognitive task of phenomenological (self ) clarification through reflective-intuitive reconstitution, that is, the task of tracing the very emergence of intentional-ideal objectivities/possibilities in passive (pre-thematic, pre-conceptual) synthesis, within the transcendental field of experience (qua potentiality) is an infinite task. For, on the one hand, there is no fixed ‘origin’ in time and place, (a ‘first geometer’, for instance), for these ‘sedimented’ ideal-intentional objectivities it encounters. And on the other, these objectivities themselves are not ‘fixed’ (unlike Kant’s categories), since potentially infinite a priori possibilities of objectification, or categorial shapings, which bring to light different possible a priori relations and combinations, can be pursued/constituted. This infinitization is at the root of the continuity between the cognitive and the ethical in Husserl’s writings. For, the ethical concern with

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taking responsibility for ‘who one is’, by tracing the sedimented “sources of the self ”, through constant self-examination, on the on hand, and with our self-shaping in rational freedom, through a life governed by reason, or universal principles, on the other, is necessarily an ongoing process, which, given our inescapable immersion in historical becoming, must always begin anew. Thus, like Kant, for Husserl, our ‘rational autonomy’ in this negative-universal sense, cannot have any determinate content. Rather, it is the very recognition and articulation of this fundamental indeterminacy that is constitutive of autonomous ethical subjectivity. The Crisis, in articulating the source of the discontent symptomatic of modernity, also uncovers the self-fashioning emergence of a self-­ responsible ethical/rational subjectivity56—a subjectivity, which is aware of itself as a historically constituted self-fashioning, and further, aware of its own self-fashioning as an infinite task. This hints at a partial structural analogy between Husserl’s conception of the cognitive-ethical task of thinking as infinite, and Kant’s conception of the ideas of reason as regulative.57 The infinite and the regulative dimension of reason, uncovered in the negative-reflective movement of thought, form the basis for the possibility of what Husserl in his Kaizo articles (1923–24) terms renewal (‘Erneuerung’)58 and what, for Kant, amounts to the recovery of a critical metaphysics (a ‘metaphysics’ that is explicitly aware of itself as merely regulative and not ‘substantive’ or as positing and not making ontological claims) in the face of the skeptical challenge that arises owing to the positivistic conception of reason that comes to dominate modernity. Both recognize the skepticism of reason as naïve and self-contradictory, insofar as, while directed against its own objectified self-formations, in asserting itself as “absolute” (that is, in transitioning to nihilism), it remains caught in the very logic of objectification/reification.

 Cf. Ibid.  The analogy is only partial because, as I noted, Kant leaves open the possibility of a transcendent, though in principle unknowable, realm, whereas Husserl’s infinitization of sense entails that the infinity of the ‘task’ (of reflective-phenomenological transcendental clarification) remains a ‘closed’ infinity. 58  Cf. Husserl (1989). 56 57

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Thus, Husserl’s earlier conception of “renewal” (Erneuerung) from the Kaizo articles, which he refines and develops in the Crisis, in terms of the re-establishment/recovery of our sense of autonomy in its historical situatedness and becoming, also attempts to resist the tendency to succumb to either of these modes of reification—the metaphysical/onto-­theological and the skeptical—that govern the unfolding of reason. In other words, these tendencies manifest themselves in the course of the development of Husserl’s own thinking, and a growing reflective awareness of the possibility of objectification or reification, differentiates Husserl’s initial and subsequent treatment of these themes. Thus, while the idea of the constant movement towards self-articulation in rational freedom, marks the continuity of the Kaizo articles, with Husserl’s later analysis in the Crisis, in the latter we find a considerably refined view of this movement—one that, while posing the question of its ‘inner teleology’,59 transforms its significance in a manner that does not appear to presuppose an ideal essence of humanity, as its guiding telos. The ethical ideal does not appear at the outset, to stand over and above the historicity of reason. Instead, Husserl’s emphasis on the self-­ articulation of a life, as a rational life, means that the latter is inseparable from the immanent historical unfolding of reason, which in and through this unfolding, comes to reflectively grasp its own inner movement. In becoming aware of its own historicity, reason becomes aware of its own latent possibilities.60 To the extent that reason is “[…] an entelechy which has come to itself, become manifest to itself […]”,61 cognitive-theoretical reason is inherently ethical-practical. However, its practicality consists not in a direct determination of the will, according to a pre-established “objective” ideal, but in letting the space of reflective autonomy emerge within the horizon of its own unfolding.62 Thus, in the Crisis, the notion of “renewal”, now understood within the horizon of historical unfolding, as the possibility of Nachstiftung and Endstiftung, consists in reason becoming aware, and ultimately  Cf. Husserl (1970, p. 15, pp. 8–18; Krisis, p. 15).  Cf. Dodd (2009, pp. 36–37). 61  Husserl (1970, p. 15; Krisis, Ibid). 62  Ibid. pp. 15–16; Krisis, pp. 15–16. 59 60

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constantly living in this awareness, of the principle of its own movement, and therefore, the source of its repeated failures to reach the “absolute” or “unconditioned”. In becoming self-aware, reason becomes aware of the character of its striving and self-shaping as ‘infinite’ (or for Kant, its ideas as ‘regulative’). Two complementary passages from the opening sections of the Crisis illustrate the (dialectical) interrelation between the “critical” and “metaphysical” dimensions of rational striving, which I have been elaborating in terms of the continuities between ‘reason as a negative striving’, ‘freedom, as an ethical ideal’, and ‘onto-theology or metaphysics’. The first passage brings to light the inner relation between rational striving and (posited) onto-theological/metaphysical concepts, qua “problems of reason”, while hinting (analogous to Kant’s ‘Transcendental Dialectic’) at the reification, in its positivistic variant (either as empirical or transcendent objectivities), to which such striving is always subject. Thus, the positivistic concept of science in our time is, historically speaking, a residual concept. It has dropped all the questions which had been considered under the now narrower, now broader concepts of metaphysics, including all questions vaguely termed “ultimate and highest.” Examined closely, these and all the excluded questions have their inseparable unity in the fact that they contain, whether expressly or as implied in their meaning, the problems of reason—reason in all its particular forms. […] here reason is the title for “absolute”, “eternal”, “supertemporal”, ­“unconditionally” valid ideas and ideals. […] The problem of God clearly contains the problem of “absolute” reason as the teleological source of all reason in the world—the meaning of the world. Obviously even the question of immortality is a question of reason, as is the question of freedom. All these “metaphysical” questions, […] surpass the world understood as the universe of mere facts.63

The second passage shows how, when such rational striving itself, that is, when the very negativity that instigates this striving or movement of  Husserl (1970, p. 9); (Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, hrsg. Von Elisabeth Ströker, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 2012, p. 9; Original text: Husserliana VI, ed. Walter Biemel, Hague 1954). 63

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reason towards the ‘absolute’, ‘unconditioned’ etc. is reified, it leads to “loss of faith” in reason—to skepticism and ultimately nihilism. Further, such ‘loss of faith’ is not merely an ‘external’ event—a matter of a purely cognitive-theoretical realization concerning the impossibility, in principle, of any such “objective”, “absolute” rational ground, to which we can somehow remain indifferent, in our “subjective” being. Such rational striving is constitutive of “who we are” as human beings—it is we who strive to find some non-contingent ground in which to anchor our lives, and find meaning in it. To “lose faith” in reason, understood as this striving oriented by a non-contingent, unconditional notion of “truth”, amounts therefore, to a loss of faith in ourselves—our own “true being”, precisely as this striving, or “struggle for one’s truth”. If man loses this faith [in the ‘absolute’ ground of reason] it means nothing less than the loss of faith “in himself,” in his own true being. This truth is not something he always already has, with the self-evidence of the “I am,” but something he only has and can have in the form of a struggle for his truth, the struggle to make himself true. […] But this pre-figuration [of being true to oneself, as a task] is surpassed by philosophy: in its first, original establishment, ancient philosophy, it conceives of and takes as its task the exalted idea of universal knowledge concerning the totality of what is. Yet in the very attempt to fulfill it […], the naïve obviousness of this task is increasingly transformed […] into unintelligibility. More and more the history of philosophy seen from within, takes on the character of a struggle […] between the philosophy which lives in the straightforward pursuit of its task―the philosophy of naïve faith in reason and the skepticism which negates or repudiates it in empiricist fashion. Unremittingly skepticism insists on the validity of the factually experienced world […] and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas. Reason itself, and its object […], become more and more enigmatic―reason as giving, of itself, meaning to the existing world, and correlatively, the world as existing through reason―until finally the consciously recognized world-problem of the deepest essential interrelation between reason and what is in general, the enigma of all enigmas, has to become a theme of inquiry.64

64

 Ibid. p. 13.

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It is clear from the latter part of the passage that the structural dialectic that I have presented in bare outline, between the ‘critical’ and ‘metaphysical’ sides of the movement of reason, and its inevitable splitting into two (owing to reification, or what Hegel terms dialectical one-sidedness) underlies the history of ideas, of which the historical development of western philosophy is the most immediate expression. Consequently, this ‘structural dialectic’ is latent in the sedimented history of philosophy, which the Crisis will uncover, on its own terms (Husserl does not employ the notion of ‘dialectic’), by underlining some of its crucial, representatively transformative conjunctures (in the thinking of Galileo, Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant). Here, we find a preliminary indication of the main lines of the historical dialectic of western philosophy. After the “original establishment”, or emergence, of the rational ideal of universal, unconditioned knowledge of all existence (metaphysics), in Greek philosophy, reason, in the very “pursuit of this task”, in the very attempt to achieve this ideal it sets for itself, comes to see its ‘unintelligibility’, and thereby, splits into two. And the history of philosophy, “seen from within”, bears testament to the “struggle” between the two modes of rationality that emerge. The first consists in the modality of reason that continues to “live in the straightforward pursuit of this task”—continues to have ‘naïve faith’ in its own striving oriented by the metaphysical ideal; and the second consists in skeptical reason, which negates this ideal in favor of the phenomenal/ experienceable world. The ‘struggle’ between these ‘metaphysical’ and ‘critical’ (skeptical) impulses of reason are two sides of the same coin, but the split leads to their ‘reduction’ (dialectical ‘one-sidedness’) to ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’, where each ‘side’ is (mis)understood as excluding the other. In my brief discussion of the ‘Force and Understanding’ section in Hegel’s Phenomenology, I explicated the manner in which this ‘reduced’ and mutually exclusive conception results in a constant back-and-forth movement between “description” and “explanation”, “law” and “force”, the “sensible” and “supersensible” world etc., where each is transformed into the other. This sets up the ‘undecidable oscillation’ between these ‘entities’ and ‘domains’ that eventually leads to their reflective thematization as conceptual posits, arising from the dialectical movement of

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thought, when the latter remains unthematized. In the Crisis this back-­ and-­forth movement, which manifests itself in an unthematized manner in the ‘struggle’ and the seemingly mutually exclusive character of ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ (based on skeptical reason), eventually forces the conscious recognition of the “enigma of all enigmas”—the relation between ‘reason’ and ‘being’—and makes it an explicit theme of enquiry. Here the question of whether the Husserlian response to the problem of the relation between ‘reason’ and ‘being’, in terms of an intuitive-­ reflective, and thus, apodictic grounding of knowledge in transcendental phenomenology (“science” in a non-positivistic, all-inclusive sense)— which would constitute an ‘Endstiftung’—is structurally analogous to its Hegelian ‘dialectical resolution’, in ‘absolute knowing’, must remain open. However, with Husserl’s turn to the historicity of reason in the Crisis, along with the idea of the ‘Endstiftung’ as the proper beginning of ‘philosophy’, the ‘family resemblances’ between the two positions are unmistakable. Just as for Hegel, for Husserl, the idea of the proper beginning of philosophy, qua apodictically grounded phenomenological rationality, requires as its necessary prerequisite a mode of reason, and therefore, a ‘selfhood’ that is explicitly aware of itself as nothing but its own historical becoming. However, here I will not pursue the comparison between Husserl’s and Hegel’s positions further. I will also not pursue, in its details, Husserl’s concrete analysis of the history of western philosophy through its transformative moments and representative figures. However, before I turn to Heidegger’s treatment of the historically governed techno-scientific disclosure of nature, and its connection with the guiding thread of my argument concerning the negative movement of thought (in relation to which the thinkers under consideration are being discussed), it would be helpful to present, in brief outline, the relation between Urstiftung, Nachstiftung and Endstiftung that determines Husserl’s conception of Historicity, and which I have referred to only in passing so far. The clarification of the sense and purpose of Husserl’s ‘historically’ oriented investigations would provide the basis for an engagement with Heidegger’s approach, within the overall context of the central concern of this study—that of elucidating the negative movement of thought and the forms it takes.

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4.5 Urstiftung, Nachstiftung, Endstiftung In §15 of the Crisis, titled, ‘Reflection on the Method of our Historical Manner of Investigation’, Husserl pauses and ‘takes a step back’,65 to explicate the sense of his overall project and historical approach. This section is thus, pivotal for the analyses presented in the book. On the one hand, it clarifies the motivations for taking up the preceding discussion (in §§8–14) concerning the emergence of early modern science, based on a “new idea of universality” represented in Galileo’s mathematization of nature. On the other, it provides the rationale for its further course of development, which, through analyses of Descartes’ and Kant’s positions, introduces the themes of transcendental phenomenology, via the methodological epoché, and the explication of the claim (in §9) that the ‘lifeworld’ is the “forgotten meaning-fundament” of the natural sciences. In the opening paragraph of the section then, we find the following programmatic assertion; Our task is to make comprehensible the teleology in the historical becoming of philosophy, especially modern philosophy, and at the same time achieve clarity about ourselves, who are the bearers of this teleology, who take part in carrying it out through our personal intentions. We are attempting to elicit and understand the unity running through all the [philosophical] projects of history that oppose one another and work together in their changing forms.66

Here the idea of a teleological unfolding of history, in which one participates, even at the level of one’s “personal [philosophical] intentions”, is open to serious misinterpretation and distortion. To avoid the strictly deterministic view of history that seems to be implied here, it is necessary to clarify the relation between ‘historical teleology’ and the philosophical research or problem sets, that ‘we’ philosophers undertake or work on, as ‘bearers of this teleology’. The clarification of the relation between the ‘personal-philosophical’ and the historical-teleological, is inseparable, as I  Dodd (2009, p. 63).  Husserl (1970, p. 70).

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will elaborate, from the clarification of the relation between the three types of ‘foundation’ (Stiftung) that Husserl articulates. Recall that in response to the question of why is it that consciousness forgets its own constitutive activity and encounters the phenomenal/ meaningful world as ‘given’, I had invoked the temporal discursivity of the (synthetic) activity of consciousness—the fact that such activity unfolds ‘in’ time. The latter entails that consciousness is necessarily late with respect to its own constitutive-synthetic activity, and encounters itself in a mediated manner—through its constituted conceptual-­ phenomenal, (and historically sedimented) ‘products’. I also noted that this is only a partial response—since it merely highlights the abstract temporal structure of conscious activity (unfolding in an immanent ‘flow’) that forms the common background of most of Husserl’s writings (at least from the early 1900’s). In the Crisis, this abstract temporal structure—the interrelation between protentional and retentional intentional modifications (where every protention is possible on the basis of past retentions, and every retention has a protentional form, since it was once a protention)—is understood at the more concrete level of historical becoming. However, ‘concrete’ here does not imply that the temporal structure of consciousness is merely ‘filled out’ through a ‘history of ideas’, as if ‘ideas’, now understood as historical in their genesis, simply form the ‘content’ of temporally conditioned consciousness, where ‘temporality’ is also suitably extended to a past (and future) beyond my own lived past (and future). Rather, the transcendence of temporal becoming, relative to the ‘I’ or my individual experience, which extends only to my egoic life-history, is thought of in a constitutively historical sense. There are at least two modalities of transcendence relative to my egoic life that are thought in their continuity here, to form Husserl’s notion of historicity (in this transcendental-­constitutive sense). The first concerns the transcendence of the concept that forms the starting point for Husserl’s phenomenology and its initial ‘static’ articulation in terms of the structure of (conceptually mediated) ‘intentionality’ and its (perceptual) ‘fulfillment’, and then, through the realization of the ‘recognitive’ character of perceptual fulfilment, its extension to categorial intuitive fulfilment, and the transcendental, and eventually genetic

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themes it opens up. The second concerns my sense of the continuity of time—my awareness of a time ‘before’ and ‘after’ my own life-span— which is fundamental to my sense of being ‘in’ time—that is, to my sense of a ‘past’ and ‘future’ that transcends my own past, immediate, or future ‘present’. However, it must be kept in mind that these two senses of transcendence that Husserl comes to see in their inner continuity and unity, are necessarily relative to my egoic life, and its ‘history’. That is, in keeping with the very idea of the ‘transcendental’, as opposed to the ‘transcendent’, such transcendence gets its sense from my conscious experience— the element of ‘mineness’, or the first-person perspective, remains irreducible. If historicity (as this ‘sense of transcendence for me’), remains a transcendence in, and through, immanence, then this opens up the possibility of a more nuanced understanding of the interrelation between the historical-teleological and the personal-philosophical—one that does not immediately lead to a deterministic conception of historical becoming, and our intellectual commitments within it. More specifically, it opens up the possibility of posing and responding to the kind of questions that Husserl deals with here—as James Dodd puts it, fundamental questions such as “in what sense is an “idea”[the idea of ‘science’, for instance], present to consciousness thanks to its history? In what way does an idea owe its manifestation to history, such that it makes sense to approach it in a historical reflection, as opposed to a purely conceptual reflection?”.67 The unity of the ‘conceptual’ and ‘historical’, constitutive of the notion of the ‘transcendental’ (the sense of transcendence arising in and through immanence/self-awareness), at work here, finds expression in the notion of a ‘task’ that is at once historically ‘assigned’ and personally felt, as a ‘calling’. In a constant critique, which always regards the total historical complex as a personal one, we are attempting ultimately to discern the historical task which we can acknowledge as the only one which is personally our own. This we seek to discern not from the outside, from facts, as if the temporal becoming in which we ourselves have evolved were merely an external  Ibid. p. 61.

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causal series. Rather, we seek to discern it from the inside. Only in this way can we who not only have a spiritual heritage but have become what we are thoroughly and exclusively in a historical–spiritual manner, have a task which is truly our own. We obtain it not through a critique of some present or handed-down system, of some scientific or pre-scientific “Weltanschauung” (which might as well be Chinese, in the end), but only through a critical understanding of the total unity of history—our history.68

However, even if such a historically ‘assigned’ task, is not merely imposed from ‘outside’, or arrived at through a critique of some historically contingent Weltanschauung, but is felt from the ‘inside’—in a deeply personal sense—as a kind of ‘calling’, or commitment, this still does not quite tell us why the latter is not a mere internalization of a certain, ultimately contingent, historical trajectory. The latter problem points to two interrelated issues that Husserl’s analysis must address. On the one hand, from the ‘personal’ perspective, the sense of ‘calling’ could be determined by the historical tradition in which it is immersed, and on the other, the tradition itself could be a regional, and thus, contingent historical tradition, with no ‘universal’ element, at least in any explicit, self-conscious sense. After all, the ‘Chinese’ Weltanschauung is also located within a certain historical trajectory, which is presumably deeply felt and internalized by (at least some) of the Chinese people. And yet, for Husserl, there is something unique to the “European spirit”, whose birth he traces, through a continuous intellectual history all the way back to its Greek ‘origin’. Husserl is of course no historian, and it would not be too difficult to show how the imagined entity of a unified “European Spirit” and its unified history is a retrospectively posited, constructed ‘unity’ that ignores all the details and ‘messiness’ of empirical history. These include the hostilities and conflicts between “European” nations and nationalisms; the differences in cultures, religious beliefs etc. Further, Husserl’s reconstruction ignores, for instance, not only what the Greeks took over from other cultures (Egyptians, Babylonians etc.), but the manner in which “Greek thought”, was preserved, interpreted and transmitted through medieval Arabic  Husserl (1970, pp. 70–71).

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philosophers (such as Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi) before being adapted by Maimonides and entering European discourse through Latin translations that became available with the emergence of the scholastic tradition in the twelfth century. Husserl’s distinction between the “European” and the “non-European” (he refers to Indians, Chinese, Eskimos and ‘Gypsies wandering about’ in Europe) is not based on any ‘naturalistic’-racial or even ‘physical’-geographical criteria. Rather, the immanent historical-teleological idea of Europe indicates a certain “spiritual unity”, and various communities are either ‘internal’ or ‘external’ to this historical-spiritual unity of Europe. And yet, at the same time, Husserl insists that the “European spirit” is the “standpoint of universal humanity as such”, and thus “we” (European philosophers), who inhabit this history and are its spiritual heirs, are “functionaries of philosophical humanity”, and “co-bearers of the direction of will that pervades humanity”. For, we are what we are as functionaries of modern philosophical humanity; we are heirs and co-bearers of the direction of the will that pervades humanity; we have becoming this through a primal establishment [Urstiftung] which is, at the same time, a reestablishment [Nachstiftung], and a modification of the Greek primal establishment. In the latter lies the teleological beginning, the true birth of the European spirit as such.69

Husserl’s Eurocentrism of the “spirit” functions as a ‘one way street’, where its representative ‘universality’ entails that ‘non-European’ peoples can partake of the “European spirit” (science, modernity etc.), but “Europeans” can never become part of the non-European “spirit”, which is understood as ‘provincial’, ‘particular’ and contingent. And inevitably, the ‘abstract purity’ of a non-racial, “spiritual” basis for maintaining the division between “European” and “non-European”, coalesces around the less abstract “materiality”, of socio-cultural, and ethnic markers of difference. This reification of the ‘abstract’ in terms of the ‘concrete’ is reflected in Husserl’s dismissive remarks concerning ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’, Papuan thought in the Vienna Lectures and the Crisis. Not only is such an  Ibid. p. 71.

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approach completely ahistorical, since it treats ‘other’, “non-European” modes of thought as monolithic blocks, with no internal ruptures and differentiation (Husserl provides no indication of any familiarity with Chinese or Indian philosophy, for instance), but dismisses them en-­masse as ‘Weltanschauungen’, and therefore, not ultimately universal-­rational, hence ‘philosophy’ in the ‘true’ sense, to which only the “European spirit” is privy. To this extent, Husserl simply reproduces, at the theoretical level, the standard reified narrative of “western” Enlightenment modernity, and “universal” rationality, with its colonial and neo-colonial overtones, while remaining completely indifferent to the manner in which it plays out in practice—in the actual history of colonial conquest and exploitation, based on violence, subjugation, slavery etc., all undergirded by the expansionary logic of capitalism. In other words, as Eric Nelson puts it, Husserl remains. beholden to an ethnocentric colonial-cosmopolitan idea to the degree that some peoples are perceived to be present in while being excluded from the essence of Europe (e.g., the wandering “gypsies”) and others (e.g., the Japanese) are in need of Westernization in order to discover their genuine humanity. Husserl’s obsession with the “European crisis” obscures his vision of the global crisis of humanity; there is a lack of any comprehension of […] the suffering and paradoxes of modernization and Westernization in the non-Western colonial and semicolonial world.70

What Husserl loses sight of in his “spiritual” Eurocentrism, is the distinction between the notion of an empirical, that is, regional, historical ‘origin’ of the idea of universal reason (which of course, as a matter of empirical history is certainly open to question) and the ‘universality’ of reason as a process. Recall that this distinction forms the basis of our critique (following Partha Chatterjee) of Benedict Anderson’s ‘modularity thesis’, which results from a similar oversight with respect to the emergence of nations and nationalist consciousness in the colonized domains. In other words, what must be stressed, once more, is that it is not a matter of the historical ‘origin’ in an empirical sense, that is, of determining  Eric Nelson, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought: U.S.A. Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 181–82. 70

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historical ‘firsts’, with respect to an ‘idea’, whether in Europe or elsewhere, but the structural processes underlying its emergence. The latter can therefore, be at play in different parts of the world, at different times, and under different circumstances, leading to the emergence of similar ideas or modes of thought.71 And yet, the impossibility, in principle, of isolating an absolute (historical) ‘origin’, is one of the central insights of Husserlian phenomenology, especially with the genetic (and historicist) turn. Moreover, as I will argue, despite the notion of a “primal establishment” that Husserl deploys in relation to Greek thought, this impossibility is inherent in the very interrelation between Urstiftung, Nachstiftung and Endstiftung constitutive of the sense of historicity and historical teleology that he elaborates here. It seems therefore that Husserl’s Eurocentrism, even at the ‘abstract’ ‘spiritual’ level, is in tension with the rest of his phenomenological philosophy, which, in articulating the universal noetic-noematic intentional structures of consciousness/experience, contains no trace of provincialism. We can only speculate about Husserl’s motivations for extolling the ‘European ideal’ and seeking its renewal, in the writings from the mid-­1930s. Perhaps, it was, at least in part, due to a growing sense of dismay in the face of emerging fascism that was rapidly threatening to subvert the ideal of ‘universal reason’. Whatever the reasons, the conceptual interrelation between the three types of stiftung, actually brings to light the basic problem with the attempt to identify an ‘origin’, and therefore, clarifies the sense in which the universality of reason can only be a processive (thus, non-provincial) movement. Explicating this interrelation Husserl writes; But to every primal establishment [Urstiftung] essentially belongs a final establishment [Endstiftung], assigned as a task to the historical process. The final establishment is accomplished when the task is brought to consummate clarity and thus, to an apodictic method which, in every step of achievement, is the constant avenue to new steps having the character of  The problematic with which our study began, namely the reiteration of fascism under the neo-­ liberal capitalist world-order, is simply another example of the ‘patterns’ underlying historical becoming. 71

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absolute success, i.e., the character of apodictic steps. At this point philosophy, as an infinite task would have arrived at its apodictic beginning, its horizon of apodictic forward movement. (It would, of course, be completely wrong to confuse the sense of the apodictic indicated here, and which is the most fundamental sense, with the usual sense taken from traditional mathematics).72

It would be a mistake to understand the metaphor of ‘foundation’ or ‘establishment’, including even “primal foundation/establishment” (Urstiftung), as signifying a “static reservoir of wisdom”, or a fixed base, which already contains the basic principles of scientific inquiry. As James Dodd puts it, “The temptation to reconfigure the metaphor in architectural terms must be resisted”.73 Rather, what the Greek ‘primal foundation/establishment—its ‘breakthrough’ to universal reason in philosophy—does, is to open up and motivate a certain course of thought. It is in the sense of an opening or ‘project’ that Greek “science” (natural philosophy) is the ‘origin’, or ‘foundation’ of the ‘task’ of science, which sets up the subsequent trajectory of the ‘spiritual’ history of Europe. The latter bears testament, both to the historically assigned ‘task’ of realizing universal reason that is felt as an ‘inner calling’, and its ‘reduced’ and distorted expression in the modern positivistic sciences. Thus, the Greek ‘primal foundation’ is the opening of a certain ‘horizon’ of thought that unbeknownst to itself, “assigns a task to the historical process”. As with any horizonal opening, such a ‘foundation’ involves an ever-shifting, yet bounded indeterminacy. The latter leaves room, on the one hand, for its ‘sedimentation’ in the course of its historical unfolding—in a historically handed-down determinate formation/understanding that becomes “so familiar to us as to be invisible”,74 and thus, requires the rediscovery and reshaping of this task at various historical junctures— it calls for beginning ‘anew’, within its projected horizon. This is the sense in which, for Husserl, beginning with the Renaissance, Enlightenment modernity is simultaneously an Urstifting and a Nachstiftung of the Greek Urstiftung.  Husserl (1970, p. 72).  Dodd (2009, p. 63). 74  Ibid. p. 73. 72 73

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On the other hand, the Greek Urstiftung projects a ‘final establishment’ (Endstiftung), as a telos already present in a potential sense, in the Greek ‘beginning’. This Aristotelian arche-teleological schema that Husserl deploys in relation to the historical becoming of (universal) reason in ‘European humanity’, entails that the ‘Endstiftung’ is nothing but the entelechy of reason, and therefore, of ‘humanity as such’—where universal reason as the essential characteristic of humanity, reaches its highest (apodictic) possibility in becoming explicitly aware of its own hitherto implicit processive movement. In its ‘final establishment’, reason qua ‘universal philosophy’, which first manifests itself as ‘metaphysics’, becomes aware of the latter not only as an expression of its universalistic movement, but comes to recognize this movement, and thus, the problem of ‘metaphysics’ itself, as an infinite task. To bring latent reason to the understanding of its own possibilities, and thus to bring to insight the possibility of metaphysics as a true possibility—this is the only way to put metaphysics or universal philosophy on the strenuous road to realization. It is the only way to decide whether the telos which was inborn in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy—that of humanity which seeks to exist, and is only possible, through philosophical reason, moving endlessly from latent to manifest reason […] is merely a factual historical delusion, the accidental acquisition of merely one among many other civilizations, or whether Greek Humanity was not rather the first breakthrough to what is essential to humanity as such, its entelechy. […] if man is rational being (animal rationale) it is only insofar as his whole civilization is a rational civilization, that is, one with a latent orientation towards reason, or one openly oriented towards an entelechy which has come to itself, become manifest to itself, and which now consciously directs human becoming. Philosophy and science would accordingly be the historical movement through which universal reason, “inborn” in humanity as such, is revealed.75

Husserl’s historical and even philosophical naiveite is evident in this passage—in his new-found obsession with locating/identifying a

 Ibid. pp. 15–16.

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historical ‘first’ in Greek philosophy—which is supposed to constitute the ‘breakthrough to universal reason’. The latter then founds the continuity of ‘European humanity’, which thereby comes to represent “what is essential to humanity as such”—the realization of its potentiality (entelechy) for universal reason or the philosophical mode of existence. And yet, despite the obsession with identifying ‘historical firsts’— which, I am suggesting, constitutes the source of Husserl’s ‘spiritual Eurocentrism’—the basic schema which Husserl deploys to understand and articulate historical becoming, namely, the arche-teleological structure characterized by the interrelation between the three types of ‘founding’, points to a recurring motif within the broadly phenomenological-continental tradition. It is a motif running through the Hegelian, and Marxist understandings of history, and, as I will argue in the next section, is also to be found, in a modified sense, in the Heideggerian approach. Husserl invokes it when he characterizes the Endstiftung as the point where the ‘task’ assigned with the birth of (Greek) philosophy is “brought to consummate clarity”, that is, where philosophy becomes aware of itself as an ‘infinite task’ and therefore stands at its “apodictic beginning”. The difference between Husserl’s approach and that of Marx, for example (Heidegger being an exception), is that for Marx, the movement of history and its ‘material’ manifestations in the ‘relations and forces of production’, is understood in a processive, structural-dialectical sense. The latter conception entails, I noted, that the historical dialectic can unfold in different parts of the world and in diverse empirical-historical contexts, with identifiable shapes (feudalism, capitalism etc.) along a continuum; and there is no over-valorization of historical ‘firsts’. Even in Husserl’s own articulation of the basic schema, via the interrelation between the three types of founding/establishment, it becomes clear that the valorization of the ‘Greek beginning’ is quite incidental to the schema as such. For, not only is the ‘Endstiftung’ the proper ‘apodictic’ (in a sufficiently broad sense) beginning of philosophy, now explicitly understood (in a reflective-critical manner) in terms of the infinity of the task of universal reason—in the processive sense of universality, or universality as perennial becoming—but the Greek Urstiftung also turns out

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to be yet another reestablishment (Nachstiftung). The latter point emerges in Husserl’s discussion of the Origin of Geometry, later excised from the text of the Crisis. In other words, the problem of the ‘origin’ or the birth of philosophy/universal reason, embodied in the ‘origin of geometry’ does not signify the empirical problem of identifying the ‘first’ philosophers/geometers. Rather, it is to be understood in the sense previously described, as a horizonal opening up (an ‘advent’ as opposed to a mere ‘event’), which, since all thinking is historically situated, can only be an ‘Urstiftung’ which is simultaneously a ‘Nachstiftung’. Moreover, an ‘advent’ in this sense can in turn, be only perceived retrospectively, from the perspective of our own historical situatedness in the ‘present’. Thus, the hermeneutic circle inherent in the historicity of reason is inescapable at every juncture, or at most, only partially escapable, insofar as in the Urstiftung/Nachstiftung of early modernity, we become aware of this historicity, while still remaining situated within it. Consequently, the irreducibility of the interrelation between the three types of founding/ establishment entails that despite appearances, the significance of Husserl’s arguments does not lie in any empirical historical claims, even ones pertaining to a ‘history of ideas’, understood in terms of their regional empirical ‘origin’. Rather, their significance lies in identifying and articulating certain transformations in thought that bring to light reason’s negative-universal character, and thus, its further possibilities of becoming. Even if Husserl locates these moments of transformation within a specific historical, and retrospectively constructed tradition, it is the ‘critical’ or negative movement of thought that Husserl isolates in these transformative moments that constitute their ‘universal’ significance for “modern philosophical humanity”, and prevents it from being merely a valorization of a regional history. However, our very historical-interpretative situatedness must mean that the reflective distance that the awareness of the historical becoming of reason opens up, constantly threatens to turn into a kind of forgetfulness. On the one hand, such forgetfulness can take the form of a reactive retrogression—in a return to, and total immersion in, pre-modern modes of thinking and being in the face of the critical, universalist (hence inclusive) tendencies of modernity, as we are witnessing today. On the other, it can take the form of a reified understanding of modernity itself, in the

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techno-scientific approach to nature (and social relations). Throughout this study I have been tracing the manifestations of this basic tension and movement between forms of immersion and reflective distance—the processes through which reflective-distance is once again transformed into modes of immersion and forgetfulness—ether in a reactive sense or through its own reification—in relation to the interconnected, historically constituted understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘society’. In the next chapter I explicate this tension and oscillation between immersion and distance characteristic of the (negative) movement of thought, by turning to Heidegger’s writings, with particular emphasis on his well-known essay on technology. Heidegger’s critique of the historically handed-down, techno-scientific mode of world-disclosure again brings to light this processive negative movement of thought in relation to the modern conception of ‘nature’. And in a manner broadly analogous to the movements I have outlined in relation to Kant, Hegel and Husserl, for Heidegger the possibility of reflective-(self ) distancing or negativity of thought sets up not only the possibility of ‘inhabiting’ (being immersed in) a meaningful world in the first place, but also of becoming aware of its historicity, hence, the possibility of alternative modes of world-disclosure. Whether Heidegger’s critique concerning the ‘essence’ of technology, and in a minimal sense, the leeway i.e., the possible alternative modes of encountering ‘nature’, it opens up, can actually provide resources for reimagining our relation to nature (and to ourselves), remains an open question. His own attempts to do so, of-course took the political form of an identification with regressive anti-modern fascist forces asserting themselves in Germany at the time. However, despite Heidegger’s own misidentification of his thought with these forces during that period, the question of a Heideggerian alternative to techno-scientific ‘enframing’ constitutes the central point of contention for ecological approaches inspired by his analysis. In what follows, I will take up some of these considerations in relation to contemporary discourses in environmental ethics. I will argue that even if Heidegger’s analysis does not provide a fully worked out alternative, it does indicate ‘a way out’ of the impasse between the ‘anthropocentric’ and ‘non-anthropocentric’ (biocentric) approaches that continue to frame the environmental debate.

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Bibliography Derrida, Jacques. 1978. From a Restricted to a General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve. In Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dodd, James. 2004. Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Dodd, James. 2009, “Husserl and Kant on Persönlichkeit”, in Santalka: Filologija, Edukologija, Issue no. 3, pp. 29–38, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. Fink, Eugen. 1995. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Trans. Ronald Bruzina. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1989. “Fünf Aufsätze Über Erneuerung”, in Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), Ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp, Husserliana XXVII, Dordrecht, Kluwer. Cf. Husserl, Edmund. 1981. “Renewal: Its Problem and Method”, in Husserl, Shorter Works, Trans. Jeffner Allen, Ed. Peter MCcormick, Frederick Elliston, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1954. (Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, hrsg. von Elisabeth Ströker, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 2012, p. 9; Original text: Husserliana VI, ed. Walter Biemel, Hague 1954). Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1972. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundation of the Sciences. Trans. T. Klein and W. Pohl. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Kant, Immanuel. 1929. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan. Nelson, Eric. 2017. Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought. USA: Bloomsbury. Zahavi, Dan. 2002. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

5 Heidegger’s Modernist Critique of Modernity: The Recovery of Negativity and Finitude

In this chapter, my aim is to trace the inherent interrelation and transformations between the two types of negativity—which I have been calling the ‘relative’ and the ‘absolute’—as it both structures, and is articulated in, some of Heidegger’s writings. By explicating how this structuring interrelation plays itself out for Heidegger, particularly with respect to his critique of the historically handed-down, techno-scientific mode of world disclosure constitutive of modernity, this chapter addresses the theoretical and political possibilities of forging alternative, (unalienated) cognitive and practical/ethical relations to nature and to each other. Heidegger’s own theoretical pronouncements, not to mention his (‘practical’) political track record, are not very encouraging here. However, I will argue that the possibilities of reflective self-distancing that he finds inherent in the essence of modern technology itself—its ‘saving power’, in conjunction with his attempt to situate this self-distancing—the ‘happening of truth’—in the work of art, as a site that is intermediate between ‘nature’ (its self-movement, or ‘inner’ processes) and man-made technological artefacts, inaugurate a fundamental rearticulation of our relation to ‘nature’. Such a rearticulation attempts to overcome the impasse between the anthropocentric and biocentric perspectives, within which © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Patnaik, Modernity and its Futures Past, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32107-8_5

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the environmental debate remains trapped. These perspectives are merely expressions of the subject—object dichotomy that determines modernity in its reified positivistic sense. Thus, as I have been emphasizing, if the critique of techno-­scientifically conditioned, anthropocentric modernity is to move beyond this impasse, it cannot entail a return to some posited ‘original’ pristine ‘purity’, or sacrality of nature (in a transcendent sense). Rather, I will argue, it must take the form of an acknowledgement of our finitude based on the fundamental experience of the “nothing” (nihil) that Heidegger attempts to articulate in various ways. Moreover, if as Heidegger suggests, modern science, more than most other disciplines, is preoccupied with “beings themselves”, or “what is essential in all things”,1 then, I am suggesting, it increasingly reflects this sense of finitude, in the face of the vastness of the ‘beyond’, and the explicit awareness of the contingency and fragility of all existence on earth. Even if the scientific conception of the ‘beyond’ is initially positivistic, along with its experimental methods, in its theoretical approach contemporary scientific thought is removed from the naïve positivism that in part, marked its emergence in the early modern period. From the perspective of the humanities, the critique that characterizes the natural sciences as inherently positivistic, in turn proves to be too facile, insofar as it does not sufficiently take developments in modern theoretical physics into account. By referring to some of the Heidegger-inspired positions in the discourse concerning the environment, I attempt to explicate how this sense of finitude, when restricted to the negativity of experience, can provide a response to the anthropocentric-biocentric impasse. Further, the scientific outlook, on this account, does not merely signify the ‘will to mastery’ based on a positivistic conception of ‘nature’, but facilitates our sense of finitude (arising from the transcending movement of thought) by bringing to light the constitutive entanglement and emergence of “subject” and “object”, or equivalently, the irreducibility of our perspectival opening on to the world.

 Cf. Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farell Krell, San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993, pp. 94–95. 1

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5.1 ‘Ontological Difference’, the Temporality of ‘Care’ and ‘Being-Towards–Death’ I am suggesting that from the outset, Heidegger’s concern with ‘fundamental ontology’ is inseparable from his concern with negativity. The ‘question of Being’ and the question of ‘the nothing’ are inextricably interwoven. This is reflected in the opening pages of Being and Time, where the very possibility of intuitively grasping the ‘ontological difference’ between Being (das Sein) and beings (das Seiende), and thus, posing the question of Being, is tied to the implicit capacity on the part of human Dasein to distance itself from what appears immediately given/ present, including itself. The transformation of the ‘question of Being’, as soon as it is posed, into the question of ‘our understanding of Being’, signals the processive negativity inherent in thinking as movement. For Heidegger, Dasein “is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its very Being that Being is an issue for it”.2 Or again, the “Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being. Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological”.3 “Being ontological” here, means having an implicit, ‘pre-ontological’ understanding of Being, rather than an explicitly worked out theoretical understanding. If ‘being ontological’, in the sense of having such an implicit pre-­ ontological understanding, is itself a ‘definite (ontical) characteristic’ of Dasein’s Being, this amounts to transforming a processive movement into an ‘empty’, non-substantial posit. Such a transformation is always logically possible, and indeed, constitutes the sense of ‘transcendence in immanence’ (even if the field of immanence is no longer confined to first-­ person ‘consciousness’ but is conceived more broadly in terms of the temporality of ‘care’, and later, unconcealment, clearing, historicality, as a “destining of a revealing” etc.) that structures (the sense of ) ontological difference, and more generally, the transcendental turn. However, the processive movement—which in Being and Time is explicated in terms of the temporality Dasein—‘does most of the work’, as it were, in articulating  Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie, Edward Robinson, Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998, p. 32. 3  Ibid. 2

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the ‘question of Being’. Perhaps this explains Heidegger’s famous ‘turn’ (kehre), in the 1930s, where the section ‘held back’ in the publication of Being and Time, namely, Time and Being, brings to light the primacy of temporality as the proper starting point from which “Being and Time is experienced”. The latter, as Heidegger explicates much later in his Letter on Humanism (1947), consists in the “experience of the oblivion of Being”, that is, as I will argue, of the ‘nothing’. The adequate execution and completion of this other thinking that abandons subjectivity is surely made more difficult by the fact that in the publication of Being and Time the third division of the first part, “Time and Being,” was held back… Here everything is reversed. The division in question was held back because everything failed in the adequate saying of this turning and did not succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics… This turning is not a change of standpoint from Being and Time, but in it the thinking that was sought first arrives at the location of that dimension out of which Being and Time is experienced, that is to say, experienced from the fundamental experience of the oblivion of Being.4

Since this ‘reversal’, is “not a change of standpoint from Being and Time”, but a making explicit of (or ‘arrival’ at) its proper point of departure—its instigation in the “thinking that was sought”, the first division of Being and Time is also primarily concerned with temporality. Its task, as Heidegger summarizes in the title, is to provide an “interpretation of Dasein in term of temporality, and explication of time as the transcendental horizon for the question of Being”. Yet, it approaches this task through the existential analytic of Dasein, that is, by laying bare the ‘a priori’ structure of Dasein’s ‘existence’ as ‘being in the world’. The latter is explicated in terms of its temporal horizon, in and through Dasein’s undifferentiated ‘average everydayness’—that is, through the phenomenal/ontic modalities5 that implicitly signify this a priori structure of

 Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, in Basic Writings, pp. 231–32.  The modalities are: “the world in its worldhood”, “Being-in-the-world as Being-with and Being oneself ”, and “Being-in as such”. (Being and Time, p. 65-ff). 4 5

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being-in qua temporality, without however, privileging any particular ontic modality of existence.6 Heidegger begins by asserting that the special ontic characteristic of Dasein, namely that it is ‘ontological’, in that it comports itself towards its own Being, entails that Dasein’s essence “lies in its ‘to be’ (Zu-Sein)”.7 That is, its ‘existence’ cannot be understood in the traditional sense, as ‘existentia’ or ‘mere presence at hand’, but is an ‘existentiale’—a fundamental, (a priori, structural) aspect of Dasein’s being that turns out to be a constitutive condition for both Dasein (qua ‘being-in’ and the (meaningful) world that it encounters. Thus, when Heidegger writes, echoing the existentialist tradition that “the essence of Dasein lies in its existence”, ‘existence’ here is to be understood not in terms of ‘whatness’—either as a set of ‘properties’ of the entity in question (Dasein) or the entity itself, as ‘presence-at-hand’—but (as a first approximation) its possibilities, that is, potential or capacity ‘to-be’. Consequently, Dasein’s ‘existence’ is characterized by two closely interconnected aspects—its priority over any posited/presumed fixed essence, and by ‘mineness’—its existence as its own ‘to-be’ that is, its (self ) fashioning of a life (and its surrounding world) by taking up a particular possible way of existing (and specific dispositions/attitudes/moods in which it encounters/discloses the world in a certain way). […] in each case Dasein is mine to be in one way or another. Dasein has always made some sort of decision as to the way in which it is in each case mine [je meines]. That entity which in its Being has this very Being at issue, comports itself towards its Being as its ownmost possibility. In each case Dasein is its possibility, and it ‘has’ this possibility, but not just as a property (eigenschaftlich), as something present-at-hand would. And because Dasein is in each case essentially its own possibility, it can, in its very Being, ‘choose’ itself and win itself; it can also lose itself and never win itself; or only ‘seem’ to do so.8

 Cf. Ibid. pp. 69–70.  Ibid. p. 67. 8  Ibid. p. 68. 6 7

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While these elements are in line with the existentialist tradition, what distinguishes Heidegger’s approach is his emphasis from the outset on a dynamic, processive and ‘a priori’, structural conception of ‘existence’, where the latter pertains to both Dasein’s ‘existence’ and that of a (historically emergent) meaningful or intelligible world, as two sides of the same coin. Thus, on the one hand, ‘existence’ pertains to Dasein’s ‘ownmost’ possibility—its concern with its own ‘to-be’ that it both passively inhabits (as a historically handed-down possibility) and actively takes up. This sets up Dasein’s existence as future oriented, but from ‘withing’ (or on the basis of ) its own historical situatedness, and the possibilities the latter makes available. Or as Heidegger put it in his later writings, Dasein ek-­ sists, that is, it is an ek-static standing out of itself, from within the (historically governed) clearing of Being. This necessary, structural interdependence between the future and the past (the future as possibility determined by the past and the past as what was once the coming future) that constitutes Dasein’s existence, has temporality as it’s a priori (transcendental) horizon. On the other hand, it is this temporal structure of ek-sistence that makes possible the disclosure of a meaningful world—a world that Dasein ‘inhabits’, represents, fashions and in general, is ‘concerned’ with. Here ‘concern’ is to be understood in an ontological (as opposed to its ordinary ‘ontical’) sense, as the fundamental mode of Dasein’s being-in-­ the-world. “Because Being-in-the-world belongs essentially to Dasein, its Being towards the world [Sein zur Welt] is essentially concern.”9 Later, for instance in his essay on technology, Heidegger would show how the specific, historically governed manner in which Dasein becomes ‘concerned’ with the world reveals/discloses the world in a specific way (as ‘standing reserve’). Here, the groundwork for Heidegger’s critique of the techno-scientific understanding of the ‘nature’ (and human Dasein) is already being laid through a critique of the primacy usually accorded to ‘presence at hand’ or the positivistic/objective understanding of existence. Thus, by way of an immediate contrast, he notes that for entities that are taken to exist wholly as present-at-hand, that is, qua ‘beings’ in an ontic manner, their  Ibid. p. 84.

9

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being can be neither “a matter of indifference” nor of concern to them. Such an entity can never raise itself to the level of the ‘ontological’, where its ‘Being’, in its ‘to-be’ is an issue/question for it. Nor can an entity in the modality of being ‘present at hand’ be said to inhabit or encounter a meaningful world. As Heidegger explicates with a concrete example, when two things are merely ‘present-at hand’ side by side, it is not uncommon to assert that the table is “touching” the wall, or is “by” the wall. But qua mere presence at hand, there is no question of ‘touching’ or being “by”, not because of some factual error in the determination of their respective spatial positions, but because “touching/touched” or being “by” presupposes “that the wall is the sort of thing ‘for’ which a chair would be encounterable “,10 or vice-versa. Objects which strictly exist as ‘presence-at-hand’ are ‘worldless’—they cannot ‘have’ or encounter a world in the manner of human Dasein (or even animal existence). Of course, under certain circumstances, particularly with the advent of modern techno-science and the dominance that its modality of understanding/disclosure of the world comes to acquire, human Dasein can understand even itself (let alone the ‘world’) primarily as mere ‘presence-­ at-­hand’. However, the latter, as Heidegger makes clear in the opening sections of Being and Time, is itself a historically handed down, ‘inauthentic’ possible modality of Dasein’s ‘to-be’. But the fact that ‘Dasein’ can be taken as something which is present-at-­ hand and just present-at-hand, is not to be confused with a certain way of ‘presence-at-hand’ which is Dasein’s own. This latter kind of presence-at-­ hand becomes accessible not by disregarding Dasein’s specific structures but only by understanding them in advance. Dasein understands its ownmost Being in the sense of a certain ‘factual Being-present-at-hand’. And yet the ‘factuality’ of the fact [Tatsache] of one’s own Dasein is at bottom quite different ontologically from the factual occurrence of some kind of mineral, for example. Whenever Dasein is, it is as a Fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein’s “facticity”. This is a definite way of Being [Seinsbestimmtheit], and it has a complicated structure which

10

 Ibid. p. 81.

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cannot even be grasped as a problem until Dasein’s basic existential states have been worked out.11

In other words, if Dasein (mis)understands or (mis)interprets both itself and the world as ‘presence-at-hand’, then it completely overlooks the fundamental import of its own existential state of ‘being-in’. The latter in turn, I noted, is not to be understood as being present-at-hand that is, being ‘in’ space as an entity ‘side by side’ with other entities.12 Rather, Dasein’s ‘being-in’ as its immersive, concernful ‘to-be’, is the very ‘condition of possibility’ for any interpretation/disclosure of the world (and itself ) whatsoever, including therefore, the manifestation of both the world and itself in the mode of ‘presence-at-hand’. As we shall see, for Heidegger, the problems of modernity, in its ‘epistemic’ that is, techno-scientific determination, all flow from the reversal of the ontological priority of the two senses of ‘being-in’—between ‘being-in’ qua Dasein’s “existential spatiality”13 (the meaningful world structured by Dasein’s concernful immersion through its ‘to-be’ existential-­temporal structure), and ‘being-in’ as existence ‘in’ space, ‘side by side’ with things in the usual ‘objective’ or positivistic sense (being present-at-hand). The reversal results in the mistaken view that the latter comes ‘first’—Dasein first ‘exists’ as an object in space and only then, both interprets its surrounding world and fashions a life for itself within it. This reversal leads to the explicit emergence of the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’, and opens up an irreducible gap between them,14 which eventually gives rise to skeptical (and nihilistic) consequences. The reversal therefore, entails that Dasein understands its relation to the world primarily as that of a ‘knower’ cognizing the ‘world’. Here both the knowing ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ (world) are understood as ‘present-at-hand’. The ‘subject’ becomes its pure interiority to which it is immediately present; and the ‘object’ emerges as pure exteriority, that is, existing independently of the particular modality of ‘being-in’ that constitutes the knowing  Ibid.  Ibid. 13  Ibid. p. 83. 14  Ibid. p. 87. 11 12

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­relation.15 It is only with such a dualistic conception that the problem of “[…] how this knowing subject comes out of its inner sphere into one which is ‘other and external’, of how knowing can have any object at all […]”,16 arises. In contrast, Heidegger argues that ‘knowing’ is a specific and founded mode of Dasein’s ‘being-in-the-world’. Thus, it does not require the presupposition of an impossible ‘bootstrapping’ exercise through which the ‘subject’ must pull itself out of its own inner sphere in order to reach the ‘external’ object. Rather, in keeping with Dasein’s being-in or being-­ alongside-the-world, ‘knowing’ is the becoming explicit of what is already so familiar—the world of significance we inhabit, and which is thus closest to us, that ordinarily, in our concernful immersion, it remains in the background. It is only when such concern ‘holds itself back’ for some reason—either owing to some existential modality that Dasein finds itself in, or due to its being ‘interrupted’ (as with Heidegger’s analysis of equipmental breakdown) that it becomes possible to ‘take a step back’, and encounter the ‘world’ (and the network of our concernful dealings in the world) in the mode of presence-at-hand. In this sense, for Heidegger ‘knowing’ is a ‘deficient’ mode of Dasein’s ‘being-in’ qua concern, since it flows from the withholding of our everyday ‘having-to-do’ with the world. Proximally, this being-alongside is not a fixed staring at something that is purely present-at-hand. Being-in-the world as concern is fascinated by the world with which it is concerned. If knowing is to be possible as a way of determining the nature of the present-at-hand by observing it, then there must first be a deficiency in our having-to-do with the world concernfully. When concern holds back [Sichenthalten] from any kind of producing, manipulating, and the like, it puts itself into what is now the sole remaining mode of Being-in, the mode of just tarrying alongside …. [das Nur-­ noch-­verweilen bei …] This kind of Being towards the world is one which lets us encounter entities within-the-world purely in the way they look (είδos)[…].17

 Ibid. p. 86.  Ibid. p. 87. 17  Ibid. p. 88. 15 16

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Once, in this deficient mode of “being-towards-the-world’ (which is still a mode of concern), we are concerned merely with the ‘look’ of things, for Heidegger, this amounts to “interpretation in the broadest sense”, and perception becomes an “act of making determinate”.18 That is, perception leads to concept formation, which can then be formally expressed in first-order, second-order propositions, arguments etc. building up the ideal structure of knowledge. It is clear that the movement between immersion and (reflective) distancing that Heidegger begins to articulate here cannot entail a simple linear temporal priority of the former over the latter. For, to have a ‘world’, that is, “a world already discovered”,19 and which therefore takes on the ‘obviousness’ or background familiarity of the world we inhabit, requires ‘discovering’ (or rather interpreting and constituting) that world of significance in the first place. However, for Heidegger, the latter does not occur through an originally isolated subject somehow transcending its “inner” sphere to grasp an “external” object, where “inner” and “outer” are understood as spatial positions (presence-at-hand) within homogenous (Newtonian) space. Rather, I am suggesting that existential ‘being-in’ as care, with it’s a priori ‘to-be’ temporal structure, which constitutes the very condition for disclosing or ‘having’ a ‘world’, in turn entails, as its necessary, minimal condition, a constant processive negation (which remains wholly contingent). The latter, I noted, is constitutive of Da-sein, and entails that its existence is irreducible to ‘mere’ presence-at-hand. However, in its everyday existential modes of being-in-the-world, negativity is also constantly reappropriated within the temporal structure of care, that is, in the ‘to-­be’ and the ‘in-order-to’ structure constitutive of both Dasein and the ‘worldhood’ of the world. In this sense, as Heidegger puts it here, if Dasein encounters the world and even itself in the mode of ‘observation’, as “merely” ‘present-at-hand’, then since the latter is also a way of Dasein’s concernful being-in (albeit in a deficient manner), Dasein is still “inside”, as “a being-in that knows”; and equivalently in ‘merely’ knowing, or observing or thinking about entities in the world, it is still “outside”,  Ibid. p. 89.  Ibid.

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amongst (or ‘alongside’) them.20 Existential being-in entails the complete breakdown of the ordinary sense of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ as spatial ‘positions’. Existential being-in therefore, involves at least two closely interconnected types of negativity (or ‘transcendence’), and along with it, two modes of (self )-awareness. The first, as I just mentioned, is the ‘absolute’ negativity or ‘nothing’, which must be necessarily posited at the heart of Dasein’s ‘being-in’. For, the latter constitutes, on the one hand, the very possibility of transcending the immediately given (qua ‘presence-at-­ hand’, either of Dasein or ‘things’ in the world), and thus, of encountering/disclosing a meaningful world (the world in its ‘worldhood’) and on the other, of the ‘being-in-itself ’, posited ‘beyond’ it. The second is the ‘relative’ negativity of our immersive, concernful dealings with the world (the ‘in-order-to’ structure) into which this necessarily posited absolute negativity is always already transformed, and in and through which it can possibly manifest itself. If the ‘nothing’ (absolute negativity) is ontologically prior to the relative negativity (negation of the ‘here and now’ but only in relation to some end—the ‘in-order-to’) of our concernful dealings, then ontically it can manifest itself (for Dasein) only ‘later’. That is, Dasein can become explicitly aware of the ‘nothing’ constitutive of its existence and that of the ‘world’—the sense of the ‘totality’ of its involvements—only in and through those involvements, in which such awareness was always implicit. Thus, this totality, in its a priori temporal structure that conditions Dasein’s existence in its undifferentiated averageness, can possibly emerge in a reflectively explicit sense only “post-facto”, in and through Dasein’s ‘facticity’, or the various ontic modes of its concernful immersion in the world—the modalities of existence it takes up and experiences. To reiterate this point, although the ‘nothing’ as the very possibility of transcendence (the ‘standing out of itself ’ of Dasein’s ek-sistence) is the condition for inhabiting a meaningful world (insofar as Dasein is ‘concerned’ with ‘its’ world), and is therefore ontologically prior, it remains ontically implicit. Moreover, if it becomes explicit, which is always a possibility for Dasein, it is not primarily through an act of will, despite the terminology 20

 Ibid.

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of ‘decision’, ‘authenticity’, ‘resoluteness’ etc. that Heidegger uses at this stage (for which he would soon fashion a new vocabulary). Rather, such explicit reflective self-distancing from its immersion in the world is something that can always ‘come over’ Dasein, or that it can ‘find itself in’, in certain moods (Befindlichkeit) through its various ontic modes of being and experiencing. In Being and Time, this interdependence between the implicit and explicit dimensions of ‘mineness’, or between immersion and distance, is expressed in terms of ‘inauthenticity’ and ‘authenticity’. Heidegger makes clear however, that ‘inauthenticity’ is not a ‘lower degree of Being, but is conditioned by the possibility of ‘authenticity’. But only in so far as it is essentially something which can be authentic— that is, something of its own—an it have lost itself and not yet won itself. As modes of Being, authenticity and inauthenticity (these expressions have been chosen terminologically in a strict sense) are both grounded in the fact that any Dasein whatsoever is characterized by mineness. But the inauthenticity of Dasein does not signify any ‘less’ Being or any ‘lower’ degree of Being. Rather it is the case that even in its fullest concretion Dasein can be characterized by inauthenticity—when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment.21

As we know, ‘authenticity’ can in turn, be transformed into an inauthentic ‘ontic’ modality of existence, which then takes on a determinate political content—as with Heidegger’s quest for the realization of an authentic ‘mit-sein’ and its misidentification with the Nazi movement. At this stage of our analysis however, what must be emphasized is that inauthenticity and authenticity are both dependent on ‘mineness’ (which I am suggesting, is the most basic form of self-awareness, hence (self ) transcendence or negativity, even if it remains implicit for the most part) as their constitutive condition. This sets up Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein’s primary mode of being-in-the-world as ‘care’, with its (self ) transcending orientation towards the future (the ‘in-order-to structure’) ‘coming out’ of the past (while the ‘past’ has the very form of the coming future—since it was once ‘not-yet’). When Dasein extricates itself in  Ibid. p. 68.

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explicit self-awareness (existentially, in an ‘authentic’ mode of being) from the various ontic modalities of its existence in which the care structure is embedded (as Dasein’s ek-static-standing-within, or thrown projection etc.), its abstract temporal structure becomes evident, as the transcendental-constitutive condition of ‘care’. What I have articulated so far in schematic fashion, in terms of the irreducible interdependence and possibilities of mutual transformation between absolute and relative negativity (or transcendence), is fleshed out in the existential analytic of Dasein. However, we need not dwell here on the details of Heidegger’s analyses concerning the ontic modalities in which the care-structure shows itself. For the moment, what can be mentioned in passing is that Heidegger elaborates the latter along two interconnected axes—the ‘worldhood of the world’, and Dasein’s inauthentic and authentic modes of existence. The former, as we know, deals with the disclosure and emergence of Dasein’s surrounding world (‘Umwelt’ or ‘environment’) in and through making and manipulating, that is, through the ‘handiness’ of equipment (equipmental being as ‘ready-to-hand’ or Zuhanden), its transparent functioning and breakdown, unserviceability, unavailability etc., which gives rise to a ‘circumspective’ mode of concern. ‘Circumspective looking around’ first brings to light the manner in which the ready-to-hand can be transformed into, or experienced as, merely ‘present-at-hand’, and eventually shows up the ‘totality’ of ‘references and assignments’ that makes up Dasein’s ‘surrounding world’. The latter includes ‘nature’, not as presence-at-hand but insofar as it is of concern/ interest to us, containing both ‘means’ and ‘obstacles’ to our ends; thus, open to our manipulation and production. The analysis of Dasein’s ‘inauthentic’ and ‘authentic’ existential possibilities focuses more on Dasein’s ‘social or interpersonal world’—its modes of ‘being with others’ and ‘being with itself ’. These analyses are quite familiar and have been discussed extensively in the literature. I shall return to certain aspects of Heidegger’s existential analytic towards the latter part of this chapter, when I compare Heidegger’s views on tool use (and the Zuhanden, Vorhanden distinction) in Being and Time, with his later essay concerning technology. This would then bring us to the question of the experience of ‘nature’ in modernity, and the possibilities of rearticulating, within a broadly Heideggerian approach, our relation to nature in a manner that addresses contemporary ‘environmental’ concerns.

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At this stage, it would be helpful to begin to delineate what explicit reflective (self )-awareness (‘authentic existence’) amounts to for Heidegger. The explication of this possibility—that is, of pulling back or distancing from various modes of immersion in the world (Dasein’s ‘fallenness’, inauthenticity etc.), which brings to light the phenomenon of ‘being-in-the-world’ as a whole (in its two intertwined dimensions, namely, the ‘totality’ of our involvements and the worldhood of the world), would then allow us to address the question of the ‘nothing’ more directly. I shall take up the problematic of the ‘nothing’ by turning to Heidegger’s treatment in ‘What is Metaphysics’. In Being and Time, since ‘being-in’ is characterized by its ‘to be’, that is, the care-structure and its temporality, the self-distancing in which ‘being­in as a whole’ manifests itself is also “Dasein’s potentiality for being a whole”. Yet the latter signals a fundamental problem that has both a methodological and conceptual dimension, which are closely intertwined. The “totality of being-in-the-world as a structural whole” has been revealed as ‘care’, in and through the concrete existential analytic of Dasein. Yet the methodological question Heidegger now raises is: on the basis of such concrete analysis how can we ascertain with certainty that the care-structure reveals the ‘whole’ being of the entity in question, that is, constitutes a “primordial interpretation of Dasein”; and moreover, reveals this being in the “structural unity” of its various essential existential possibilities, which have so far been discerned and descriptively fixed only on the basis of concrete phenomena? Even if, as Heidegger emphasizes, the methodological approach is hermeneutical—guided in advance by its ‘fore-having’, ‘foresight’ and fore-conception—the question remains. For, how can we in turn, be sure of the ‘primordiality’ of such fore-having, that is, it’s a priori completeness? Has the existential analysis of Dasein which we have carried out, arisen from such a hermeneutical situation as will guarantee the primordiality which fundamental ontology demands? Can we progress from the result we have obtained-that the being of Dasein is care-to the question of the primordial unity of this structural whole?

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What is the status of the foresight by which our ontological has hitherto been guided?22

This methodological question concerning the status of the existential hermeneutic will be elucidated through Dasein’s possibility for authentic existence. Or more precisely, the requisite change in status, by which the (temporal) care-structure that has so far been merely descriptively characterized in a pre-theoretical ‘fore-having’, which has been exhibited piecemeal in and through Dasein’s concrete (ontic) existential modalities, would be shown in it’s a priori structural unity and ‘completeness’, via the realization of the possibility of an explicit reflective self-distancing.23 In other words, the transformation of the status of the inquiry from an ontic-descriptive hermeneutic to an ‘a priori structural’ (transcendental) one, is inseparable from the possibility of the transformation from inauthentic to authentic existence on the part of Dasein. For, the existential analytic has so far dealt with Dasein’s concrete existential modalities, which as its modes of concernful immersion in the world, remain at the level of inauthenticity. Consequently, the inquiry itself, despite its hermeneutic character, remains at the level of descriptive generalization. To raise the latter (and its methodological grounding) to the status of a priori/structural necessity, requires its ‘demonstration’ in Dasein’s possibility for ‘being a whole’, that is, the possibility of bringing to light the care-­ structure in its totality, as the whole being of Dasein, in an ‘authentic’ mode of existence (which consists in a total reflective distancing from its concernful being-in). One thing has become unmistakable: our existential analysis of Dasein up till now cannot lay claim to primordiality. Its fore-having never included more than the inauthentic Being of Dasein, and of Dasein as less than a whole [als unganzes]. If the Interpretation of Dasein’s Being is to become primordial, as a foundation for working out the basic question of ontology,  Ibid. p. 275.  I cannot but help notice a structural analogy here between Kant’s procedure in the first Critique and Heidegger’s in Being and Time. We may go so far as to say, without explicating further, that what Kant’s transcendental deduction is designed to do for the ‘transcendental status’ of the categories, Heidegger’s notion of authenticity (in being-towards-death) does for the status of the care-structure. 22 23

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then it must first have brought to light existentially the Being of Dasein in its possibilities of authenticity and totality.24

However, the possibility of bringing Dasein’s being as a whole to light, in authentic existence, raises a basic conceptual problem. Dasein’s existence is understood as ‘care’—its ‘to-be’, or its always being ‘ahead-of-­ itself ’. This means that as long as Dasein exists, it comports itself towards its own possibilities, and thus, is never fully ‘actualized’ and thus ‘whole’, or completely at an end. “The ‘ahead-of-itself ’, as an item in the structure of care, tells us unambiguously that in Dasein there is always something still outstanding, which, as a potentiality-for-Being for Dasein itself, has not yet become ‘actual’”.25 As Heidegger explicates, even in utter ‘hopelessness’, or being “without illusions and ready for anything” Dasein is ‘ahead of itself ’ insofar as it takes a particular stance, hence is still oriented towards its possibilities’.26 As I noted, this fundamental ‘incompleteness’ constitutes the absolute negativity that is implicit at the heart of Dasein, from which its own ‘being-in’ and the worldhood of the world stem. However, since such incompleteness is constitutive of Dasein’s existence, it seems to entail the impossibility of Dasein’s being-a-whole, and thus, of an authentic mode of existence where Dasein’s involvements, its being-in, emerges in its totality. For, the moment Dasein exists in a manner where there is nothing ‘outstanding’ left for it, it ceases to exist as ‘being-in-the-world’27 and becomes merely presence-at-hand. In other words, its actual ‘being-at-an-end’ is the death of Dasein, where death, understood biologically, is precisely the transformation of Dasein’s ‘being­in’ to mere presence-at-hand, that is, its transformation into a ‘corporeal thing’, bereft of life, consciousness (mineness) etc.28 Thus, it would appear that there is no ontic phenomenal-existential experience in which Dasein experiences itself as a whole and thus exists authentically.  Heidegger, Being and Time, 1998, p. 276.  Ibid. p. 279. 26  Ibid. 27  Ibid. p. 280. 28  Ibid. p. 281. 24 25

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It is here that Heidegger introduces and develops his famous existential-­ phenomenological conception of death, which forms the basis for authentic being-in; that is, death not as biological being-at-an end qua mere presence-at-hand, but the experiential sense of impending death as part of Dasein’s ‘being-in’ as ‘being-ahead-of itself ’ (care). In other words, ‘death’ is explored not in its actuality but potentiality—in terms of the sense of its ‘looming’ presence on the horizon. Heidegger begins to explicate this phenomenological-existential conception of death by first considering Dasein’s experience of the death of others. Since our own death is not experienceable by us, in the death of others the phenomenon becomes “objectively accessible”, as it were. Further, Dasein’s ‘being-in’, as fundamentally conditioned by its ‘being-­ with’ others, tends to preserve, at least partially, the existential sense of ‘death’ in the death of others. Despite the ‘objective givenness’ of the death of others, Dasein experiences the dead other not merely as a corporeal thing—as pure presence-at-hand’, but as something that ‘has just lost its life’, as ‘unalive’.29 The ‘deceased’ is still treated with respect and mourned by those ‘left behind’, in the form of funeral rites, religious-­ cultural myths of ‘heaven’, the ‘afterlife’ etc. These rituals and myths strive to maintain a continuity between life and death, and thus, attempt to ‘suture’ the rupture of meaning caused by death. As such, the deceased is still an ‘object of concern’, but neither in the deficient mode of mere presence-at-hand, nor in the mode of readiness-to-hand of equipment. However, for Heidegger, even if those left behind are ‘with’ the deceased (even though the latter is no longer factically in the world) in the sense of concernful respect and solicitude, in the experience of loss, grief and mourning, they cannot authentically experience the ‘being-at-an-end’ of the other. The death of the other is experienced as ‘loss’, but precisely for those who remain, and not in the manner in which the ‘loss of being’ occurs for the dying person. In this sense, the death of the other cannot be taken as a substitute, or ‘representation’ for one’s own death. Indeed, unlike all other modalities of ‘being-in’ or concernful absorption in the world, existentially, ‘death’ resists all representation.

29

 Ibid. pp. 281–82.

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In relation to this sort of Being (the everyday manner in which we join with one another in absorption in the world of our concern) representability is not only quite possible but is even constitutive for our being with one another. […]. However, this possibility of representing breaks down completely if the issue is one of representing the possibility of being which makes up Dasein’s coming to an end, and which, as such, gives to it its wholeness. No one can take the Other’s dying away from him. […] Dying is something which every Dasein must itself take upon itself […]. By its very essence death is in every case mine, insofar as it is at all.30

Thus, neither in the case of the other, nor in one’s own, can dying, that is, Dasein’s ‘being-at-an-end’, and thus, its totality, be ‘objectively accessible’ through ‘representation’ qua presence-at-hand. Yet, what does the non-representable existential experience of the possibility of death, which in each case is ‘mine’, hence of the totality of Dasein’s Being (as Being-in-­ the-world) consist in? Heidegger begins to articulate the existential-­ ontological experience of death, understood as Dasein’s being a ‘whole’, by first distinguishing two types of wholeness, and thus, ‘lack’ or what I have been calling ‘negativity’. Dasein’s ‘being-in’, I noted, is constituted by a ‘constant lack of totality’. Yet, this ‘lack’ could be understood in a relative or provisional sense, that is, in the sense of what remains ‘outstanding’ for Dasein as ‘missing’ or ‘unready-to-hand’, analogous to the ‘balance’ remaining from a debt. When the money ‘comes in’, it becomes ‘at one’s disposal’ or ‘ready-to-­ hand’, and what is still outstanding or ‘not yet’, is ‘filled up’. This gradual, piecemeal accrual signifies an original ‘belonging together’ (such as a that of a ‘sum’) or closed relational totality, within which there is merely a relative transformation from un-readiness-to-hand to readiness-to-hand (or vice-versa), or from the ‘not yet available’ to ‘at one’s disposal’. Within this closed totality, the ‘unreadiness to hand’ of that which remains ‘outstanding’, relative to what is immediately available, is still a mode of readiness-to-hand, in the mode of the ‘not-yet’.31  Ibid. pp. 283–84.  Cf. Ibid. pp. 286–87.

30 31

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However, while readiness-to-hand, based on a relative or provisional lack/negativity, is characteristic of Dasein’s ontic being-in as the ‘in-order­to’ structure of care, it does not exhaust the ‘lack’ in the ontological sense constitutive of Dasein (and which comes to the fore in Dasein’s ‘being towards its own death’). Thus, Dasein’s being is not at all that of something ready-to-hand.32 The second, ontological conception of negativity refers to a non-relative or absolute negativity. In the latter, it is not a matter of a closed totality within which the ‘lack’ is provisionally determined as what remains outstanding; rather, through it the totality (wholeness) itself first shows itself, though it is not ‘objectively’ or representationally ‘grasped’ as presence-at-hand, but, as I shall elaborate, indirectly (non-­ representationally) indicated, in and through the ‘not-yet’ in the relative sense. At the ontic-phenomenal level, the provisional ‘not-yet’ is orchestrated by, and thus indicates, in an implicit sense, the absolute ‘not-yet’, which can then emerge in an explicit sense at the ontological-existential level, as the constitutive ‘condition of possibility’ of the former. Moreover, as Heidegger begins to elaborate, the being of this absolute (non-relative, non-provisional) ‘not-yet’, and thus, the being of Dasein as a ‘whole’, is nothing but becoming. That Dasein should be ‘together’ only when its ‘not-yet’ has been filled up is so far from the case that it is precisely then that Dasein is no longer. Any Dasein exists in just such a manner that its ‘not-yet’ belongs to it. […] The not-yet which belongs to Dasein however, is not just something which is provisionally and occasionally inaccessible, to one’s own experience or even to that of a stranger; it ‘is’ not yet ‘actual’ at all. Our problems […] pertains to the possible being or not being of this ‘not-yet’. Dasein must, as itself become— that is to say, be, what it is not yet.33

But here the identity of being and becoming in the ‘not-yet’ is not to be thought in the Aristotelian sense, as a kind of ‘inner’ (arche) teleological structure by which an organism ‘not-yet’ mature, develops into its final, mature form, and thus, arrives at its ‘end’ as the ‘fulfilment’ of its ‘not-yet’ (qua potentiality). Death is not ‘fulfilment’ in this sense. Rather, 32 33

 Ibid. p. 287.  Ibid.

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to say that Dasein is already, and constantly, its ‘not-yet’, means, that “it is already its end too”.34 This ending is not a ‘being-at-an-end’, either in a factical sense, as presence-at-hand, or in the sense of the ready-to-hand, or even as fulfilment; rather, it is a “being-towards-an-end” (Sein zum Ende). In this sense, Heidegger writes, “as soon as man comes to life he is at once old enough to die”.35 Dasein’s being as absolute negativity—its ‘always already’ and constant ‘not-yet’—is to be understood in terms of an existential-ontological interpretation of death, as being-towards-an-end. The latter would then clarify how such ‘being-towards’ an end would be a realization of the possibility of Dasein’s ‘being a whole’, (in the very processive awareness of its constant ‘not-yet’ or becoming) and thereby bring to light the totality and unity of the structural-existential aspects Dasein’s ‘being-in’. The ‘being­in’, which has been explicated in its distinct phenomenal manifestations at the concrete ontic-existential level (average everydayness), thus, in Dasein’s inauthentic modes of concernful existence/absorption in the world, would thereby be raised to the level of authenticity; that is, made explicit in its totality and unity in an authentic mode of existence on the part of Dasein. The concept of authentic existence now receives a clear articulation: it consists in an explicit self-awareness that is inseparable from the very process of its emergence. That is, it consists in the very movement/processive experience of self-awareness that attempts to maintain itself in the absolute (as opposed to relative) ‘not-yet’ as constant becoming. To experience the constancy of the not-yet (its ‘being’ as becoming) is to exist in authenticity, that is, as I shall elaborate, in “anticipatory resoluteness” towards death. If we keep these interconnections in mind, then it is clear that such a conception is grounded in the existential structure of care, understood as the “[…] ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in (the world), as Being alongside entities which we encounter (within the world)”.36 This characterization of ‘care’ contains all the existential structural elements of Dasein’s being that have been ontically distinguished—the (relative) ‘not-yet’ in the  Ibid. p. 289.  Ibid. 36  Ibid. p. 293. 34 35

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‘ahead-of-itself ’, its facticity (being-already-in) and falleness (being-alongside).37 Heidegger begins to explicate how in the experience of being-towards-­ death, that is, the existential sense of one’s impending ‘death’, as one’s ownmost, unavoidable possibility, Dasein disengages from these structural elements of its concrete concernful existence, resulting in their explicit manifestation as a structural interconnected whole. For, if Dasein ‘takes up’ or ‘stands before’ its impending death as its ownmost possibility or ‘potential for being’, then “all relations to any other Dasein have been undone”.38 And in this manner, ‘death’ shows itself to be a non-relational possibility that is “not to be outstripped”. Not only is my impending death ‘mine alone’, in a factical sense, but through this experience it reveals itself in an existential sense, as my ‘ownmost’ possibility for ‘being’, as constant becoming (absolute negativity). As Heidegger clarifies, the existential sense of my impending death “[…] is based on the fact that Dasein is essentially disclosed to itself, and disclosed, indeed as ahead of itself. This item in the structure of care has its most primordial concretion in Being-towards-death”.39 The sense of its impending death—the awareness of the possibility of its ‘not-being’ in the world—is not an occasional or episodic awareness brought about under certain circumstances, but constantly accompanies Dasein. From its very birth, Dasein is “thrown into this possibility”.40 And yet, this factical-ontic awareness of its possibility of ‘not-being’, does not amount to a full-fledged, explicit ontological-existential conception of death, in terms of the absolute negativity constitutive of its ‘being-in’. As a consequence, factical thrownness towards death manifests itself indirectly, in various moods (Stimmungen), such as ‘anxiety’ arising from the sense of the ‘uncanny’ (unheimlichkeit-of ‘not being at home’); and elicits various forms of avoidance and escape (in the face of this awareness of its thrownness towards death), which are constitutive of Dasein’s ‘falleness’ (inauthenticity).  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 294. 39  Ibid. 40  Ibid. p. 295. 37 38

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Inauthentic Being-towards-death, is therefore, characteristic of Dasein’s average everydayness, where Dasein has a factical orientation or comportment towards death—in the sense of its ‘throwness’, as opposed to taking it up as its ownmost possibility of being. Whereas ‘anxiety’ in the face of death, (as opposed to fear) reveals the basic awareness of our thrownness towards death, in our inherent sense of ‘not being at home’, in the mode of inauthentic being towards death, Dasein flees from such ‘anxiety’ or awareness of death as its ownmost, unavoidable possibility of being. In doing so, it flees from its own self (its full existential awareness and comportment towards its own being towards death), and seeks refuge in the ‘they’ (Das Man), and the interpretation of the ‘self ’ and ‘Being-towards-­ death’ that it furnishes. In such inauthentic comportment towards “one’s” death, taken over from the anonymous, generalized and homogenized ‘they’ (or ‘one’) of our ‘public being-with-one-another’, death is thought of as an ‘event’ that is always occurring in the case of others (‘someone or the other is always dying’), and one day will occur in ‘our’ case as well (“one dies”); but until then “it has nothing to do with us”.41 In this generalized ‘public’ manner of interpreting (“one dies”), death remains inconspicuous—a distant event, which does not really concern me as ‘my death’, and mine alone. From this generalized, public perspective, which Dasein can always occupy, death loses its existential significance, since “in no case is it I myself ” who dies, for, “this one is the nobody”.42 Inauthentic comportment towards death, stemming from Dasein’s falleness in the ‘they-self ’ that constitutes its ‘everyday’ mode of existence is therefore, marked by constant evasion and tranquilization of the full existential import of death. Anxiety in the face of death is looked down on as ‘cowardice’, or, as Heidegger puts it, “The ‘they’ does not permit us the courage of anxiety in the face of death”.43 ‘Anxiety’ is precisely anxiety in the face of the ‘nothing’, that is, the mood in which Dasein is brought face to face with the possibility of it impending death—not as an event, but its own constitutive ‘nothing’ (‘not-being-in’ the-world), and thus, the ‘nothingness’ of the (worldhood of the) world.  Ibid. p. 297.  Cf. Ibid. 43  Ibid. p. 298. 41 42

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In the face of its thrownness Dasein flees to the relief that comes from the supposed freedom of the ‘they-self ’ This fleeing has been described as the fleeing in the face of the uncanniness which is basically determinative for individualized Being-in-the-world. Uncanniness reveals itself authentically in the basic state-of-mind of anxiety; and as the most elemental way in which thrown Dasein is disclosed, it puts Dasein’s Being-in-the-world face to face with the “nothing” of the world; in the face of this “nothing” Dasein is anxious with anxiety about its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.44

This passage is taken somewhat out of context, insofar as it comes a bit later in Heidegger’s analysis and serves to introduce the “call of conscience”, through which Dasein is brought ‘back to itself ’, in authenticity, from its inauthentic immersion in the ‘they-self ’. However, it is central to my argument, since it clarifies the links between ‘being-in’, ‘uncanniness’, ‘disclosive anxiety’ and the (absolute, non-relative) ‘nothing’ inherent in the sense of impending death, in relation to the possible movement/transformation of inauthentic to authentic existence. Moreover, in the present context, the juxtaposition of this passage also shows in an immediate manner, how the movement in the other direction, namely, fleeing from our implicit, authentic sense of self/being-in, (qua non-relative nothingness) to the inauthenticity of the ‘they-self ’, is also a constant possibility, which transforms anxiety into ‘fear’ in the face of the nothing/death, insofar as it understands death as an event, and thereby, takes ‘fear’ to be a sign of ‘weakness’. From the perspective of the ‘they’, one ought to overcome one’s fear of the ‘fact’ that ‘one dies’. This tranquilized, “superior indifference” to death, as a “fact of life’, is for Heidegger a source of alienation, where Dasein is alienated from its “ownmost non-relational potentiality of being”.45 Although Heidegger mentions the notion of ‘alienation’, arising from Dasein’s inauthentic being towards death (qua ‘event’ in the ‘they-self ’) only in passing here, it is again crucial to my overall argument. For, the thesis I have been trying to develop throughout, is that ‘what’ we are alienated from, is not our (posited) primordial unity with ‘being’ (of nature, of ourselves); rather, it is precisely the opposite. Alienation consists 44 45

 Ibid. p. 321.  Ibid.

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in the manners in which we fail to acknowledge, and evade or escape our awareness of the ‘nothing’ that constitutes our “interiority”, “autonomy” etc. by attempting to ‘fill the void’ with substantive ‘content’, in order to provide ‘meaning’ and purposive orientation to our lives. In other words, we fail to see that ‘meaning’ and purpose are conditioned upon this constitutive ‘lack’ or ‘nothing’ at the basis of our existence (‘being-in’). The attempt to fill the void can take diverse forms, from traditional pre-modern sacralized articulations, to ‘modern’ empiricist and rationalist variants. In the next few chapters, I shall elaborate this interpretation of ‘alienation’ in its socio-political and economic dimensions, starting with Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production. In the present context, authentic Being-towards-death, as an existential possibility for Dasein still needs to be spelt out. If Dasein’s ‘everyday’, inauthentic orientation towards death involves an evasion of death in its proper existential sense, this also implies its implicit awareness (which remains unacknowledged, or acknowledged indirectly in moods such as ‘anxiety’). Consequently, as I noted, and as Heidegger again emphasizes, the realization of the full existential sense of death in authentic existence is a possibility rooted in Dasein’s inauthentic, ontic modes of comportment.46 However, Heidegger’s analysis so far has only outlined the possibility or concept of authentic orientation toward death. The question now is whether Dasein can realize this possibility, and if so, what shape can a life lived in authenticity take? Is a life lived in constant and explicit acknowledgement of what has always implicitly accompanied it (and thus elicited evasion and escape into inauthenticity) as part of its background awareness, that is, its orientation toward ‘death’ as an absolute ‘end’—a ‘not-­ being’ which is simultaneously its potentiality for being a whole”, where nothing ‘outstanding’ remains for it, nothing for it ‘to-be’, at all possible? “Can Dasein also understand authentically, its ownmost possibility […]? Can Dasein maintain itself in an authentic Being-towards-an-end?”47 Without, at the very least, the concrete existential realization of the ontological possibility of authentic Being-towards-death, that is, “if Dasein never comports itself authentically towards its end”, or “if this authentic  Cf. Ibid. p. 303.  Ibid. p. 304.

46 47

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being must [in principle] remain hidden from others”,48 the ontological possibility remains a “fanciful” projection. Let us recall that the realization of the ontological possibility of death cannot be of the order of the ‘ready-to-hand’ and ‘presence-at-hand’, and the relative possibilities of transformation between them. For, the actualization of the possibility of death, qua event—its transformation to presence-­at-hand—would ‘annihilate’ Dasein, and thus, its being qua possibility—including ‘death’, as its ‘ownmost’ possibility of being. Nor can it mean the apprehension of the possibility of death insofar as the latter remains a mode of the ‘ready-to-hand’—a merely ‘distant event’ which will one day become actual (present-at-hand), and thus at one’s ‘disposal’ and open to ‘calculation’ (we can ‘plan’ for our deaths etc.).49 Grasping the possible in this manner—“picturing to oneself the actuality of the possible”—is to forget it “as possibility”,50 that is, it is to appropriate ‘possibility’ within a closed totality (understand it merely relatively to the actual), rather than as the absolute opening up of ‘possibility’ (‘not-­ being’) in the midst of the actual (‘being’). Instead, the mode of being in which Dasein is oriented towards its possible ‘not-being’, or more broadly, the “possibility of the absolute impossibility of any existence at all”,51 consists in anticipation. The latter indicates the manner in which ‘being’ and ‘not-being’ (when it is understood neither as a present or distant ‘event’, but as Dasein’s ownmost possibility), can be thought simultaneously, without contradiction; namely, in the very movement of transcendence (the very opening up of ‘possibility’) constitutive of Dasein’s ‘Being-in’ and ‘Being-there’ (thus, of the worldhood of the world). “Being-towards-death is the anticipation of a potentiality-­of-Being of that entity whose kind of being is anticipation itself.”52 In maintaining itself in anticipatory Being-towards-death, Dasein exists authentically. It is “wrenched away” from the ‘they-self ’ and its  Ibid.  Ibid. pp. 305–6. 50  Ibid. p. 307. 51  Ibid. 52  Ibid. 48 49

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‘idle-talk’ (inauthentic modes of understanding), and ‘becomes itself ’. That is, it is disclosed to itself as this non-relational, individualized ‘movement of transcendence’, or the very openness of possibility. This openness is felt as uncanniness or ‘not-being-at-home’, at the root of Dasein’s ‘Being-there’ in the ‘world’, and is disclosed in ‘anxiety’. In anxiety, I noted, Dasein is forced to confront “the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence”.53 This anxiety stemming from and disclosing the ‘nothing’ is constitutive of Dasein’s authentic existence as anticipatory Being-towards-death.54 Summarizing these interconnections Heidegger writes, “Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but being itself rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death, a freedom which has released itself from the illusions of the ‘they’, and which is factical, certain of itself and anxious”.55 However, such a characterization of authentic existence still remains a (formal) ‘ontological possibility’—an existential projection of authenticity in anticipatory Being-towards-death—albeit not ‘imposed from outside’, but abstracted and projected from Dasein’s ontic-existential modes of being. However, if this ontological schema is not to remain an ideal ontological projection, it needs to be grounded in concrete ontical-­ existential phenomena, in which Dasein ‘gives testimony’ or ‘attests’ to such an ontological possibility.56 But Heidegger asks, “does Dasein ever factically throw itself into such a Being-towards-death?”57 In response, Heidegger provides a phenomenology of conscience, as the concrete phenomenon in which Dasein bears testimony to its own existential-ontological possibility of authentic existence, that is, factically realizes this possibility in orienting itself towards, and maintaining itself in, its own ‘nothing’. In hearing the “voice of conscience” (Stimme des Gewissens) Dasein is ‘brought back’/ ‘brings itself back’ to itself from its “lostness’ in the ‘they”.58 Again, it is not the particular ontic content of  Ibid. p. 310.  Cf. Ibid. 55  Ibid. p. 311. 56  Cf. Ibid. 57  Ibid. 58  Ibid. p. 312. 53 54

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conscience that is at issue, but the phenomenon of conscience as such, in its ‘givenness’. And the ontological analysis of conscience will show how it ‘is’ inseparable from “Dasein’s kind of Being”59—its ‘to-be’ as the ‘care’ structure, and therefore, also entails an active and passive dimension, along with the possibilities of their mutual transformation. For, on the one hand, the ‘voice of conscience’ is disclosive, and thus, is fundamentally tied to Dasein’s Being as disclosive, that is, its ‘Being-­ there’ and ‘Being-in’. Yet, inauthentic Dasein, in its ‘Being-with’, lets its disclosive possibilities be determined by listening to the ‘they’ (the ‘public’ interpretation of these possibilities), and thus fails to ‘hear itself ’. Insofar as conscience presents itself as a ‘call’ or appeal, it inaugurates “another kind of hearing”. In hearing the call of conscience, this ‘hearing away’ to the ‘they-self ’ is interrupted or broken off, and Dasein is brought back from its fascination with the they, to hearing itself.60 Paying heed to the ‘call’ therefore, involves an element of ‘choice’—“our wanting to have a conscience”—and to that extent is ‘choosing’ a “kind of Being-one’s self ”, which Heidegger would explicate in terms of (anticipatory) ‘resoluteness’.61 For, the call of conscience, which interrupts Dasein’s ‘listening away’ to the ‘they-self ’, and brings it back to itself, “reaches him who wants to be brought back”.62 On the other hand, as a mode of disclosure and discourse, the call is felt from ‘afar’—it compels us to listen. The compelling quality of the call indicates that its disclosive character is rooted in the a priori disclosive structure of Dasein’s ‘Being-there’ and Being-in’ manifested in and through ‘care’. As Heidegger clarifies, the silent discourse of the call that discloses by bringing Dasein back to itself from its lostness/abandonment in the ‘they-self ’, does not disclose the self as an ‘inner object’, in the Cartesian sense, and therefore, does not understand it in psychologistic fashion (as an ‘object’ of analysis, judgment etc.). The ‘self ’ that the call of conscience appeals to and discloses, does not thereby emerge in a withdrawal from the ‘external world’—in an ‘inward turn’—where it  Ibid. p. 313.  Ibid. pp. 315–16. 61  Ibid. p. 314. 62  Ibid. p. 316. 59 60

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‘meditates’ upon itself in silent soliloquy.63 Rather, the call brings to light the self-disclosure and self-understanding that always accompanies Dasein, in the midst of its ‘Being-in’ the ‘world’, and in the midst of its abandonment of ‘itself ’ to the ‘they-self ’. For, this self-understanding, insofar as it is capable of being ‘appropriated’ into a definite manner of understanding, makes such ‘abandonment’ in the ‘they-self ’ possible in the first place, and thus, simultaneously elicits various modes of evasion and escape, while still retaining the capacity to (‘heed the call’ and) return to itself. Thus, even when the ‘self ’ is appropriated in the they-self, it is never appropriated completely, without remainder. But it is essential to Dasein that along with the disclosedness of its world it has been disclosed to itself, so that it always understands itself. The call reaches Dasein in this understanding of itself which it always has, and which is concernful in an everyday average manner. The call reaches the they-self of concernful Being with others.64

With respect to the question of the ‘who’—who does the calling—it is manifestly Dasein itself. Dasein is, at the same time, the ‘caller’ and the ‘called’—in experiencing the call of conscience, Dasein calls itself (from its ‘they-self ’) to itself. And yet, as Heidegger emphasizes, the ‘caller’ and the ‘called’ are ‘there’ in different ways, where Dasein’s implicit, constitutive-­ structural (a priori) disclosiveness with respect to itself—“its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-it-self”, does the calling.65 It is because this disclosive structure is a priori constitutive of Dasein, it is experienced as a call from ‘afar’, which calls “against our expectations and even against our will […] comes from me and yet from beyond me”.66 And just as in the domain of epistemology, the problem of ‘transcendence in immanence’ (which inaugurates the transcendental problematic) discernible in the call of conscience, is liable to be misrecognized—understood either as an ‘alien power that dominates man’ (“God”), or in naturalistic-‘biological’ terms. Both these forms of misrecognition, reduced/reify the ontological-­transcendental  Ibid. p. 318.  Ibid. p. 317. 65  Ibid. p. 320. 66  Ibid. 63 64

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dimension of phenomenal experience to (transcendent) ‘objectivity’, understood in a positivistic sense (as present-at-hand).67 Yet, if the call that is experienced as coming from afar, as the ‘it’ ‘beyond me’ that calls, does not have its source in some transcendent entity (presence-­at-hand), but emanates from Dasein itself, then how is the ontological-existential status of Dasein as the entity ‘who’ does the calling, to be conceived? I have already indicated Heidegger’s response to the question of the ‘who’ in terms of Dasein’s fundamental Being as ‘nothing’ (or transcendence). As he again emphasizes here, while Dasein exists factically as ‘thrown’ in the world, it does not exist as mere ‘fact’ in the mode of presence-at-hand; nor can it encounter itself wholly ‘objectively’ as ‘present-at-hand’, since in this very (possibility of ) encounter, it misses its ‘self ’. Rather, Dasein is fundamentally disclosed to itself, and as such, encounters itself (even as it tries to evade this encounter) in its thrown facticity—in its “that-it-is”. Such an encounter includes an awareness of its contingency—not only of its potential ‘to-be’ but also of its inevitable ‘not-being’. In encountering itself in its thrownness, in the awareness of the full contingency of its existence, Dasein faces its inescapable and constitutive ‘not-Being-at home’ (‘uncanniness’) in the world.68 The sense of not-Being-at-home, manifested in anxiety, bring Dasein “face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the world”. Heidegger asks; What if this Dasein, which finds itself [sich bifindet] in the very depths of its uncanniness, should be the caller of the call of conscience? […] In its ‘who’ the caller is definable in a worldly sense by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the “not-at-­ home”—the bare ‘that-it-is’ in the “nothing” of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien voice.69

At this point I have sufficiently outlined the manner in which the irreducible interrelation between the ‘absolute’ and relative notions of negativity, and the possibilities of their transformation from one to the other

 Ibid.  Ibid. p. 321. 69  Ibid. 67 68

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(the modalities of ‘inauthentic’ immersion and ‘authentic’ distance), play themselves out in the existential analytic of Dasein. We can now turn to What is Metaphysics, where Heidegger addresses the question of the relation between the two types of negativity more directly, before taking up The Question concerning Technology, where its scope is widened to include the historicality of the techno-scientific mode of disclosure of ‘nature’. I will then be in a position to discuss the possibilities and limits of a specifically Heideggerian approach to the ‘environmental’ discourse. However, with respect to Being and Time, one question still remains to be addressed—how can the fundamental existential experience of uncanniness (in anxiety and Being-towards-death), that radically individualises Dasein, by bringing it back to itself from its fascination with the ‘they-­ self ’, allow for the possibility of a collective realization of authenticity— an authentic Being-with others (mit-sein)? Quite independently of the issue of Heidegger’s purportedly mistaken identification of ‘collective authentic mit-sein with emergent National socialism, the very possibility of collective authenticity seems to be ruled out in principle, given the structural features of the existential analytic of Dasein. I will address this problematic towards the end of this chapter, in transitioning to the manner in which the movement of negativity shapes the socio-political domain and the possibilities of reflective acknowledgement (and its failures) within it.

5.2 The Question of Metaphysics The essay “What is Metaphysics?”, derives almost unchanged, (except for the afterword and Introduction appended to it much later in 1943 and 1949) from Heidegger’s inaugural lecture at Freiburg University in 1929. Given its temporal proximity to Being and Time (1927), we find many points of continuity between the two texts, but also the rearticulation and broadening of certain themes in relation to the standardized understandings prevalent in the domain of traditional metaphysics, and the natural sciences. In particular, Heidegger again takes up the theme of the ‘nothing’ in its ‘equivocity’ (between the relative and the absolute), to bring to light the processive character of ‘metaphysics’ (that is, as

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‘metaphysical enquiry’), and thus, to critique its predominant understanding presupposed in the natural sciences (insofar as they are concerned with ‘beings themselves’). Given the immediate manner in which the theme of the nothing is introduced in relation to the unquestioned ‘metaphysical’ basis of the sciences (as opposed to its elaboration in terms of the existential conception of ‘death’), it is not surprising that this essay, more than others, has occasioned (and continues to occasion) misreadings that are nothing short of ‘spectacular’. The ‘spectacular’ nature of these misreadings is itself indicative of how a certain framework can come to dominate the understanding, such that from within it, an alternative frame of reference appears not only incompatible but incomprehensible. The most memorable of these misunderstandings of course, is to be found in A. J. Ayer’s critique. Since it is situated within the logical positivistic frame, Ayer’s approach simply cannot accommodate/comprehend the equivocity of negativity Heidegger invokes70 as the condition for any conception of ‘beings’, thus, of ‘metaphysics’ and the natural sciences. Heidegger begins by making two closely interrelated claims: that “[…] any metaphysical question encompasses the whole range of metaphysical problems; therefore every metaphysical question can be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such is present together with the question, that is, is placed in question”.71 There two claims, as Heidegger would elaborate, indicate how ‘metaphysics’ as an inquiry “beyond or over beings” (meta-ta physika) is concerned with grasping/revealing beings in their totality, such that any metaphysical question already implicitly includes all other such questions. The latter, therefore, involves a transcending movement of thought,72 which is inseparable from the transcending movement inherent in the questioning itself, thus, from Da-sein, understood as (the potentiality for) transcendence. It is clear that this interconnection between the two claims is continuous (as Heidegger will elaborate shortly) with the existential analytic of  Ayer directs his ire at Heidegger’s conception of metaphysics in general and the assertion that the “The nothing nothings” in particular, accusing him of “surprising ignorance”, “wilful distortion” and “charlatanism”. (Cf. A. J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, 1984, pp. 228–29). 71  Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, in Basic Writings, 1993, p. 93. 72  Ibid. pp. 106–07. 70

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Dasein, which holds that Dasein’s constitutive Being-there and ‘Being-in’ the world lies in its ‘Being-ahead-of itself ’ in the care structure. The latter, as I discussed in the previous section, can become manifest in its totality (as “beings as a whole”) in Dasein’s authentic ‘Being-towards-death’ (existentially manifested in the call of conscience, anxiety etc.). Moreover, these closely interconnected claims should also remind us of the passage concerning metaphysics in Husserl’s Crisis that I discussed in the preceding chapter. Husserl makes a similar argument, where all metaphysical problems are ultimately understood as problems of ‘reason’, and ‘reason’ itself is nothing but the negative-critical or transcending movement of thought. These structural similarities indicate the broader affinities with the transcendental-phenomenological tradition in which Heidegger’s thought is located. As I have been emphasizing, these affinities, which constitute the tradition as a tradition, lie in the processive transcendence or negative movement constitutive of human thought, that is, of thought that is temporally discursive, thus finite. With respect to the more immediate proximity to Being and Time, we can anticipate the role that the absolute sense of the ‘nothing’ will play here, in relation to metaphysical enquiry. For, the ‘nothing’ is but another name for the transcending movement as such, constitutive of ‘metaphysics as critical-reflective questioning. At this preliminary stage of the analysis, after stating the “twofold character of metaphysical interrogation”, Heidegger immediately moves to a consideration of the natural sciences. Today, the dominant form that Dasein’s (“metaphysical”) questioning concerning ‘beings’ takes, is that of science. The latter, despite its proliferation in different branches and specializations, still provides an inkling of its underlying original unitary intention, which consists in uncovering “what is essential to all things”.73 Heidegger asks, “What happens to us, essentially, in the grounds of our existence, when science becomes our passion?”.74 The prevailing, dominant idea underlying our understanding of the sciences is that scientific enquiry constitutes a relation to the world that arises from a “freely chosen attitude of human existence”, in which  Ibid. p. 94.  Ibid.

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humans allow beings themselves to ‘speak’, as it were. Thus, in contrast to the modes of relating to beings in our pre-scientific and extra-scientific attitudes to the world (which, on this view, includes our technological interests, and approach to nature), in the scientific attitude, based on ‘impartial’, ‘objective’ observation, human Dasein claims to give “[…] the matter itself, explicitly and solely, the first and last word”.75 The scientific attitude, and the modes of enquiry, activities etc. it permits, therefore, constitutes a definite response to traditional metaphysical problems. In its conception of ‘objectivity’ and exactness, the sciences provide a definite and apparently exhaustive interpretation of what it is “to be”. In short, they reduce the notion of Being to ‘beings’ in the positivistic sense. Heidegger both hints at the “positivistic restriction of the sciences” (to use Husserl’s phrase) and introduces the theme of the ‘nothing’ that is thereby left out. Characterizing the “pursuit of science” as the “irruption of […] man into the whole of beings”, where “beings break open and show what they are and how they are”,76 Heidegger writes; That to which the relation to the world refers are beings themselves—and nothing besides. That from which every attitude takes its guidance are beings themselves—and nothing further. That with which the scientific confrontation in the irruption occurs are beings themselves—and beyond that nothing.77

The repetitive character of these assertions is meant to underline the intertwinement of (the senses of ) ‘being’ and ‘nothing’, such that the moment the sciences claim to concern themselves ‘exclusively’ with ‘beings’, the ‘nothing’ is already at work, as their necessary condition. Thus, in ‘excluding’ the nothing scientific enquiry already concedes it. In attempting to ‘define its essence’ in terms of its concern with ‘beings’, scientific enquiry must necessarily take “recourse to what it rejects”.78  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 95. 77  Ibid. 78  Cf. Ibid. p. 96. 75 76

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However, if the positivistic conception of ‘beings’ is necessarily dependent on the ‘nothing’ (such that the sciences, in their ‘exclusive’ focus on beings presuppose what they reject), the same can be said for the question of “the nothing”. Within the positivist frame it is equally impossible to enquire after the nothing without immediately transforming it into an ‘object’. “What is the nothing? […] In our asking we posit the nothing in advance as something that ‘is’ such and such: we posit it as being.”79 Thus, just as the question concerning the nothing—“what is …” turns the ‘nothing’ into its opposite, any answer of the form “The nothing is …” does the same. Consequently, Heidegger writes, “With regard to the nothing question and answer alike are inherently absurd”.80 This indicates a contradiction and thus, seems to contravene the foundational principle on which universal logic/reason rests. All thinking is about something, and in thinking about the nothing, it seems to go against its own essence.81 The positivistic frame, therefore, runs deep—it is not restricted to, or first encountered in, the sciences, but indicates an essential characteristic of thought—its ‘aboutness’ or object directedness. Yet since thought cannot direct itself toward “the nothing” as an ‘object’, it seems ‘logically’ impossible to even pose the question, and the enquiry appears to come to an end even before it can begin. But Heidegger asks, “are we allowed to tamper with the rules of logic?”.82 Although these sections rearticulate the problematic of ‘death’ in Being and Time, they have occasioned much debate, since they seem to be explicitly directed against ‘logic’ itself, leading to the charge of ‘irrationalism’ against Heidegger. But such accusations are too hasty, for not only do they fail to consider Heidegger’s own systematic development of the argument, but also fail to take into account developments in logic, beyond traditional two-valued logic, to many-valued logics, paraconsistent logics and modal logic in particular. While I cannot elaborate these developments here, the question of the extent to which the transcendental problematic is amenable to formal-modal articulation, has recently  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 97. 81  Ibid. 82  Ibid. 79 80

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received renewed attention and is certainly worth pursuing further. In the present context, in relation to traditional logic, Heidegger remarks that the latter comprehends the ‘nothing’ as ‘negation’, that is, in a sense relative to beings—as a “specific act of the intellect” that negates the “totality of beings”. Thus, on this understanding the “nothing” is “non-being, pure and simple”.83 The central problematic that Heidegger is dealing with, both in this essay and elsewhere, emerges more clearly: is the nothing to be understood solely in a relative (“logical”) sense, as the act of negation in relation to beings, or does the very possibility of the act entail a non-relative conception of the ‘nothing’ as its prior condition. Is the nothing given only because the “not”, i.e., negation is given? Or is it the other way around? Are negation and the “not” given only because the nothing is given? […] We assert that the nothing is more original than the “not” and negation. […] If this thesis is right then the possibility of negation as an act of the intellect, and thereby the intellect itself, are somehow dependent upon the nothing.84

But if the (act of the) intellect is essentially dependent on the nothing, as its ‘condition of possibility’ then how can it comprehend the nothing, since it cannot grasp it as an ‘object’? The “formal impossibility” of the enquiry into the nothing, as I indicated, arises only within a two-valued logic, but perhaps not in a modal logic. This classical transcendental problematic, which appears in different guises in the history of philosophy (the problem of grasping ‘infinity’ in Descartes proofs of God for instance), far from being “irrational”, points to a priori “logical” processes of thought, provided logic is understood in a sufficiently enlarged sense to include paraconsistent and modal (and dialectical) transformations. Even if the symbolic formalization of necessity, possibility etc. derive their sense from an ‘intuitive’ grounding (such that a ‘transcendental logic’ in the Kantian or Husserlian sense cannot be fully symbolized in a modal logic), the intuition itself remains formal. The formal-intuitive ‘condition of possibility’ for posing any question is that what is sought 83 84

 Ibid.  Ibid. p. 97.

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must somehow be implicitly ‘given’ beforehand. Consequently, the possibility of posing the question of the nothing requires that it must have been encountered and is encounterable in some manner, albeit not in the manner of an ‘object’.85 As a preliminary to elaborating this possibility, Heidegger points out that even in the relative conception of the nothing qua negation of the totality of beings (non-being) the ‘totality of beings’ cannot be given as ‘object’. There is a basic distinction, Heidegger writes, between. […] comprehending the whole of beings in themselves and finding oneself in the midst of beings as a whole”. The former is impossible in principle. The latter happens all the time in our existence. […] No matter how fragmented our everyday existence may appear to be, however, it always deals with beings in a unity of the ‘whole’, if only in a shadowy way.86

How can we, situated in the midst of beings (Da-sein), have a sense of “beings as a whole”? Here Heidegger’s analysis explicitly returns to the existential analysis articulated in Being and Time. Precisely when we are not immersed in our concernful dealings with beings, or immediately in ourselves—for instance, in the ‘indifference’ induced by profound boredom, which can always overcome us, “beings as a whole” reveal themselves. Such ‘moods’, as ‘founding modes of attunement’ (Befindlichkeit der Stimmung), are, we saw, constitutive of Da-sein—of our ‘being-there’ and ‘being-in’ the world. However, the negation inherent in the withdrawal of ‘beings as a whole’, in the indifference of boredom, hides the original source of negation in the experience of the ‘nothing’. The latter, as Heidegger again explicates here, shows itself in another, more original mood (mode of attunement), namely, anxiety. To recall, anxiety (in contradistinction to fear) is always anxiety in the face of the ‘nothing’. It reveals the ‘nothing’ in the fundamental experience of ‘uncanniness’—the ‘not being-at-home’ (unheimlichkeit)—in which ‘beings as a whole’ ‘recede’ or ‘slip away’ from us. In this altogether ‘unsettling’ experience (akin in some respects, to the experience of vertigo), we lose our bearings,  Cf. Ibid. p. 98.  Ibid. p. 99.

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our ‘grip’ on things, and on ourselves, and the sense of the ‘strangeness’ of beings (and ourselves) overwhelms us in the very midst of beings. If the ‘nothing’ is experienced in the midst of beings—in the becoming strange, and ‘slipping away’ of beings as a whole in anxiety, then the latter cannot entail an “annihilation” of beings. To think of anxiety as annihilation would again amount to another mode of negation, and thus, attribute primacy to ‘negation’, which in negating the totality of beings would first ‘produce’ the ‘nothing’ (qua non-being). Rather, for Dasein negation always “come too late”, with respect to the nothing. The latter is always at work and encountered in the midst of beings, and is made explicit in the fundamental experience of anxiety where beings as a whole recede. That is, in the becoming unfamiliar, slipping aways etc. of beings, the nothing announces itself initially in the mode of uncanniness—in the experience of the fundamental contingency of all existence, including our own. This experience of contingency, expressed in the question “why is there something rather than nothing?”, spurs Dasein’s metaphysical (and scientific) pursuits. The ‘nothing’ then, consists neither in annihilation nor negation, but nihilation; or as Heidegger asserts, in a formulation that has caused much consternation (and also merriment), “The nothing itself nothings” (Das nichts selbst nichtet).87 However, following the exposition so far, this statement should no longer appear meaningless, or even paradoxical. As Heidegger explicates, in this nihilitive experience of nothingness (in the ‘active’ sense) in anxiety, “the ‘original openness of beings as such arises”,88 that is, the original ‘distance’ that allows both the ‘world’ and the ‘self ’ to emerge. Or, as I noted in relation to the existential analysis in Being and Time, the nothing qua nihilation is Dasein qua ‘pure transcendence’, that is, as this transcending movement. Heidegger again underlines the point here. Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing. Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call “transcen87 88

 Ibid. p. 103.  Ibid.

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dence”. If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it will never be related to beings nor even to itself. Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.89

If the nothing, understood as this transcending movement is constitutive of Da-sein’s existence, and its ‘having’ a world, and if it is revealed in anxiety, then Heidegger asks, must we not be ‘anxious all the time, in order to exist at all’? In response, the emphasis on the ‘distortion’ and ‘repression’ of the constant processive nihilating of the ‘nothing’, in and through Dasein’s preoccupation with beings, recalls the modes of inauthentic existence discussed in Being and Time. Thus, while the “the nothing nihilates incessantly without our really knowing of this occurrence …”, in the present context, the distortion of this processive character of the nothing constantly and implicitly at work in Dasein’s (transcending) existence (qua ek-stasis), presents itself in the guise of ‘negation’, relative to beings. However, it is clear by now that negation cannot first produce the ‘not’/‘nothing’, since negation requires the possibility of transcendence, of ‘being held out into the nothing’ (or ‘deniability’). How could negation produce the not from itself when it can make denials only when something deniable is already granted to it? But how could the deniable and what is to be denied be viewed as susceptible to the not unless all thinking as such has caught sight of the not already? But the not can become manifest only when its origin, the nihilation of the nothing in general, and therewith the nothing itself, is disengaged from concealment. The not does not originate through negation; rather negation is grounded in the not that springs from the nihilation of the nothing.90

The argument moves in two directions, which might, at first glance, appear to be in conflict with each other, but actually entails a constant back and forth movement between activity and passivity. On the one hand, it moves from ‘active’ negation to its ‘condition of possibility’,  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 105.

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namely the ‘nothing’, which therefore, suggests that the latter is to be understood as the passively pre-given ‘capacity’ or ‘potentiality’ for negation. Talk of ‘capacity’ or ‘potentiality’, even if the latter is not conceived as an ‘object’ in a positivistic sense, immediately suggests the ‘objective’, and thus, passive ‘givenness’ of the ‘nothing’ (qua capacity for transcendence). On the other, the argument moves from the ‘incessant nihilation’, hence actuality/activity of the ‘nothing’ to (the possibility of ) negation. This suggests, analogous to the movement I have been tracing in Hegel and Husserl (and the transcendental tradition more generally) that the same process of transcendence can be viewed, and in fact, (en)acted, actively or passively, depending on one’s thematic orientation. Yet, putting the matter in this way appears to imply that we have a ‘choice’ concerning which thematic orientation to adopt. However, Heidegger’s emphasis on the various moods in which the nothing can manifest itself (such that negation is by no means the sole or primary mode of nihilitive behavior)—most originally in anxiety—means that far from being a matter of ‘choice’, the thematic orientation towards the nothing brings to light one’s fundamental finitude. For, repressed ‘anxiety can come to the surface at any moment’, and be occasioned by the most trivial occurrences. Being held out into the nothing—as Dasein is—on the ground of concealed anxiety, makes man the lieutenant of the nothing. We are so finite that we cannot even bring ourselves originally before the nothing through our own decision and will. So profoundly does finitude entrench itself in existence that our proper and deepest limitation refuses to yield to our freedom.91

In relation to Being and Time, the terminology, if not its meaning in its entirety, seems to undergo a shift here. Talk of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, ‘authenticity’ etc., although still tied to the experience of the uncanny and anxiety, is substituted by that of ‘finitude’, and transcendence and freedom thought in terms of the incessant nihilation of the nothing that is always at work, and can come to the surface at any moment, in the 91

 Ibid. p. 106.

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contingent irruption of anxiety. But once submerged anxiety surfaces, Dasein’s ‘being held out into the nothing’, that is, its existence as transcendence, entails its “surpassing of beings as a whole”.92 Thus Dasein, qua pure processive transcendence/nothingness is in thematized anxiety, “brought face to face with metaphysics itself ”,93 that is, with its own incessant nihilating, transcending movement. The two aspects of metaphysical enquiry that Heidegger underlines at the beginning of the essay, namely that each metaphysical question/problem includes all metaphysical issues (thus, metaphysics as a whole); and that every such metaphysical questioning or problematic necessarily implicates the Dasein who questions, can now be understood in their interconnection, as two aspects of this transcending movement. In relation to the first claim, Heidegger analyzes what metaphysics has to say concerning the nothing in terms of the long-held proposition; “ex nihilo, nihil fit” (from nothing, nothing comes to be). For Heidegger, the historical interpretation of this proposition in Greek thought and then in Christian theology, leaves the question of the nothing untouched, insofar as it treats the concepts of ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ on par, such that they appear as immediate counterparts of each other, where the ‘nothing’ is understood as the negation of beings. However, with the recovery/renewal of the understanding of the nothing as Dasein’s pure transcending/nihilating movement, ‘metaphysics’ itself is understood in its proper determination, as concerned with the “Being of beings”. That is, it is understood in terms of the ‘ontological difference’, implied in its status as an enquiry “beyond beings as a whole”. The latter, in turn, (and in relation to the second claim) is tied to the nothing, as the nihilating/transcending movement of Dasein’s being. Thus, Heidegger writes, Hegel is ‘correct’ when he claims in the Science of Logic that “Pure Being and Pure Nothing are therefore the same”.94 However, for Heidegger, the unity of Being and nothing’ does not arise due to their ‘indeterminateness and immediacy’, as in the Hegelian conception of thought, but “[…] because Being itself is essentially finite and  Ibid.  Ibid. 94  Quoted in, Ibid. p. 108; Cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, Vol. I, Werke III, p. 74. 92 93

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reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing”.95 Yet, as I noted, the Hegelian dialectic also gets underway, and is essentially dependent on, the transcending movement of thought, and it is the latter that then leads to the ‘determinate negation’ in which ‘Being’ (akin to ‘force’ that I discussed) is posited as an ‘empty’ (contentless, thus wholly indeterminate), concept. Heidegger’s assertion concerning the finitude of ‘Being itself ’, such that it is merely revealed in Dasein’s transcendence, appears to echo the Kantian position. If so, it would have to contend with a critique similar to the one Hegel brings to bear on Kant’s system. For example, it would have to show how the ontological difference between ‘Being’ and ‘beings’ can be maintained without the former, owing to its ‘finite’ character, being understood in terms of a higher ‘type’ of which beings would be tokens. The latter position would clearly lead to an infinite regress. Despite Heidegger’s rejection of ‘logic’ in the narrow positivistic sense, which conceives the nothing immediately in terms of the negation of beings, the ‘finite character of Being itself ’ would result in its ‘positivistic restriction’ (at a ‘higher’ level), and thus give rise to the old problems of ‘self-membership’ of a concept (or in a set), hence infinite regress —problems which are familiar to us at least from the time Plato set down his ‘theory of forms’. Leaving the question of the status of ‘Being’ open here, we can see that Dasein’s transcending movement does most of the work in the argument. The question of the ‘nothing’, insofar as it encompasses all metaphysics, “forces us to face the problem of the origin of negation”,96 ‘going beyond’ the prevailing interpretation offered by (traditional) logic (and the positivistic sciences). Thereby, the old ‘metaphysical proposition’—‘ex-nihilo nihil fit’—manifests another sense, which Heidegger expresses as, ‘ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit’ (“from nothing all beings as beings come to be”). The latter signifies that “Only in the nothing of Dasein do beings as a whole, in accord with their most proper possibility—that is, in a finite way—come to themselves”.97  Heidegger, Ibid.  Ibid. 97  Ibid. 95 96

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Returning to the question of the status of the natural sciences, Heidegger again underlines that they constitute the dominant mode of relating to beings that prevails in modernity—one that characterizes our understanding of existence, including our own. The specific manner of relating to beings consists in (the metaphysical mode of ) “disinterested objectivity”. We can now see how the latter conception, thus the scientific enterprise as such, is possible only on the basis of the ‘nothing’ qua Dasein’s ‘critical’ transcending movement. Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder—the revelation of the nothing—does the “why?” loom before us. Only because the “why” is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds and ground them.98

If metaphysics, in the unreified processive sense, as this nihilitive ‘going beyond’ or transcendence, belongs to the “nature of man”, and is at the root of the natural scientific mode of relating to beings, then (despite the limited/reified way in which the sciences, at least initially, conceived this relation), it testifies to the fundamental experience of contingency and finitude. Metaphysics ‘gets under way’ with the question “why are there beings at all, rather than nothing?”99 However, this awareness of the contingency and finitude of all existence, including our own, (the awareness, therefore, that there is no ultimate meaning/purpose to existence; rather, ‘meaning’ arises in and through this sense of contingency), stemming from the experience of the ‘nothing’, or transcendence; although in accord with the initial animating impetus of enlightenment rationality, seems to represent a rather meager return. Can it provide a basis for fundamentally rethinking our relation to nature (and society)—one that could escape the contemporary impasse between the anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric

 Ibid. p. 109.  Ibid. p. 110.

98 99

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positions, and articulate an alternative approach? Thomas Sheehan, for instance, warns against an overly optimistic reading of Heidegger’s position, which imputes to it the project of ‘overcoming’ modern techno-­ scientific nihilism. Since the latter represents the culmination of the positivistic understanding of metaphysics (the forgetfulness of the ontological difference and the reduction of the question of Being to beings constitutive of the history of western metaphysics), ‘overcoming’ positivism would entail a reconstruction of our understanding of nature and society in its political, economic organisation, in ‘transparent’ (“authentic”) self-awareness.100 Despite Heidegger’s own ‘disastrous’ political engagement, for Sheehan such an interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking is illusory. For, as I have just outlined, for Heidegger, there can be no ‘overcoming’ nihilism, since the nihil/nothing as the ‘essence’ of nihilism/ negation, is the constitutive condition of Dasein and the worldhood of the world. In keeping with this insight, my aim here is not to immediately locate the rearticulation of the relation to nature and to each other in society, in Heidegger’s thinking, but to extrapolate and develop the possibilities that it opens up, stemming from his notion of original (absolute) ‘nothing’, towards such a rearticulation. To this end, let us again turn to a consideration of Heidegger’s essay on technology, but this time, with a view to the operation of the ‘nihil’. Heidegger understands the modernist, specifically techno-scientific mode of revealing/concealing, of ‘nature’ (and ourselves), as ‘nihilism’, in the relative sense of the ‘nihil’, that is, as the negation of beings, and moreover, understands this mode of (nihilistic) world-disclosure in terms of the historicality of thought. Historicality, as a mode of revealing/concealing, is constituted in the ‘event of appropriation’ (Ereignis), which in the present epoch discloses ‘nature’ (and human ‘being’) in terms of the nihilistic Gestell of techno-scientific understanding.

 Thomas Sheehan, “Nihilism: Heidegger/Jünger/Aristotle”, in Phenomenology: Japanese and American Perspectives, ed. Burt C. Hopkins, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1999, p. 281, footnote 17. 100

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5.3 The Question of Technology In what way is the modern techno-scientific age for Heidegger, the age of ‘fulfilled nihilism’, and what can humanity’s response be under such circumstances? Heidegger addressed these concerns in an ‘open letter’, he contributed to Ernst Jünger’s festschrift (1955), later published separately as Zur Seinsfrage. The letter was a response to the essay Jünger had published a few years earlier (in 1949) in Heidegger’s festschrift, titled “Über die Linie”, where he indicated the possibility of ‘overcoming’ nihilism.101 Yet for Heidegger, given his concern with the ‘essence of nihilism’, that is, with the nihilation of the (absolute) nothing, as the constitutive condition of all ‘presencing’ of beings for Dasein (including Dasein’s own self-­ presencing), talk of ‘overcoming nihilism’ is misguided, at least insofar as it does not pay heed to the distinction between its ‘essence’ in the ‘nothing’, and its derivative expression in negation, understood relative to beings. It is in the second sense, as negation of beings (non-being) that for Heidegger our technological age represents the age of ‘fulfilled nihilism’. And it is the dominance of this relative sense of negation (which I noted, is tied to a positivistic conception of ‘Being’, qua beings), which gives rise to the idea that it is both possible and desirable that nihilism should be ‘overcome’. As Sheehan writes, in his analysis of Zur Seinsfrage: The long “history of being” has culminated in the virtual domination of τέχνη over Фύσις, the triumph of the man-made world over nature, of forms imposed by artisans and technicians over forms that come to be of themselves (cf. Фύω), so much so that Фύσις seems to disappear, to count for nothing, to amount to nihil, a “negative nothingness”.102 Hence the age of complete nihilism. It is not that being tout court has disappeared: that is impossible, since as long as there are human beings there will be being, and even nihilism is a formation of being. Rather, Heideggerians hold that only a certain kind of being—but the most fundamental kind, the one that  Heidegger’s piece was also entitled “Über ‘die Linie’”, but by putting quotations around ‘die Linie’, he subtly but completely changed its meaning, from Jünger’s original title, “Across the Line”, to what could be roughly translated as, “On the [Question of ] the Line” or “Concerning the Line”. 102  Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage, p. 34/415, ET p. 89. 101

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­ nderlies all other modes of being—has withdrawn. Or better, it seems to u have been stamped out by men and women, who stamp everything with their own Gestalt, turn all entities into reproductions of human will, and thus reduce being to production. On this reading, nihilism means that the being of entities has become their unlimited intelligibility-as-this-or-that and their unlimited availability-for-production. Entities are whatever human beings would make of them.103

On Sheehan’s reading of Zur Seinsfrage, the techno–scientific world is the built or constructed world—a world stamped through and through with human intentionality and labour—which becomes the basis for its intelligibility. Such a world therefore, becomes “the theater of our mirrored selves”, in which, through the mediation of entities, ultimately “we meet only ourselves”.104 The techno-scientific world is as self-enclosed (“hermetically sealed”) as the ordered cosmos, or sacralized universe of the ancient or medieval thinkers, but with the significant difference that in technologically conditioned modernity, it loses its reference to the transcendent-divine, and emerges as immanent to itself, thus, to the realm of the human. This self-enclosed, self-referential character of modernity, based on the theoretical and technological appropriation of ‘nature’, albeit made possible through the ‘mediation’ of entities, actually entails a withdrawal of ‘nature’ (qua Being). Physis appropriated by technē, stops showing itself (even indirectly) from ‘within’, since it is wholly imposed upon from the ‘outside’.105 This immanentization of the world, from ‘within’ the standpoint of techno-scientific rationality, represents the ‘fulfillment’ of nihilism—a process that was already underway (at least from Plato onwards), with the transformations in the understanding of the ‘ontological difference’ (along with the related understanding of ‘truth’ from alētheia to ‘veritas’), in the course of the long history of western metaphysics, until its complete oblivion (forgetting the forgottenness of the difference), in contemporary modernity, marked by high positivism (‘metaphysics of presence’). Thus, Heidegger understands the history of metaphysics as a process of  Sheehan (1999, p. 274).  Ibid. 105  Cf. Ibid. pp. 274–75. 103 104

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the double ‘forgetfulness of being’ (Seinsvergessenheit), where, not only have we forgotten, but have forgotten that we have forgotten (the ontological difference). It is this ‘double forgetfulness’ that for Heidegger, culminates in contemporary techno-scientific nihilism, and therefore, it seems that his critique of the techno-scientific mode of world-disclosure is motivated by the desire to ‘overcome nihilism’, by letting physis manifest itself from itself once again. However, to understand Heidegger in this manner would be a mistake, or at least, would be too simplistic, insofar as it would not take into account the constant processive nihilation of the ‘nothing’, that we saw, is constitutive of the ‘self ’ and (its) ‘world’, and therefore, is not to be ‘overcome’. What then, is the aim of Heidegger’s critique of the techno-scientific mode of ‘revealing’? As Sheehan puts it in the context of Zur Seinsfrage, the critique is meant to transform the impulse towards ‘overcoming’ (Überwindung) nihilism (understood in the derivative, relative sense) that Jünger’s essay exemplified, to one of ‘freeing’ (Verwindung) oneself for the essence of nihilism (the nihilation of the nothing). This reading, I am claiming, is continuous with “The Question Concerning Technology”, which appeared a few years earlier in 1953, and was a revised version of a lecture titled “The Enframing”.106 The basis for the continuity lies in this: for Heidegger, under conditions of techno-scientific modernity, the ‘essence’ of nihilism comes to light in and through the ‘essence’ of technology. More precisely, in the opening up of a “free relation” to technological essence, we come face to face with what, in the essay, Heidegger terms, its ‘saving power’. Elaborating these claims requires a more systematic exposition of the structure of the argument in the essay on technology. What must be emphasized is the link between the essence of modern technology qua ‘enframing’ (Gestell) and (relative) ‘nihilism’, in the sense Sheehan underlines in his discussion of Zur Seinsfrage. In the opening lines of the essay, Heidegger asserts that his aim is to “prepare a free relationship” to  “The Enframing” was part of a series of four lectures that Heidegger had presented at the Bremen Club, in December, 1949, under the general rubric “Insight into What is’. The other three lectures in the series were: The Thing, The Danger, and The turning. Of these, Heidegger again presented “The Thing” and “The Enframing”, the latter revised as “The Question Concerning Technology”, to the Bavarian Academy of the Fine Arts in 1950 and 1953 respectively. 106

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technology, and “The relation would be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology”.107 This then leads to the delineation of the ‘essence’ of specifically modern technology (in contradistinction to ancient technology) as ‘enframing’, which then makes the link with relative nihilism (as the negation of ‘beings’) manifest. Finally, the ‘free relation’ to the essence of technology consists in the explicit, reflective thematization of this essence, in terms of originary, non-relative nihilation (‘nothing’) inherent in it (as its ‘condition of possibility’), and which therefore, constitutes its potential ‘saving power’. For, the latter, as the reflective thematization of ‘enframing’ (as the ‘essence’ of the modern technological mode of revealing), shows up ‘enframing’ in its historicality and thus, contingency—as one mode of revealing amongst ‘others’ (the most obvious alternative mode being that of the Greeks, which was once extant and is presumably, still visible to a limited extent in pre-modern, sacralized communities). In this way, it opens up at least the possibility of alternative modes of revealing/encountering both nature and ourselves. In order to establish this set of claims—one following from the other— that make up the structure of Heidegger’s argument, as we know (and discussed briefly in Chap. 2, but in connection with Bilgrami’s argument), he begins by asserting that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological”.108 In drawing this distinction between technology and its essence, Heidegger rehearses the familiar, recognizably ‘transcendental’ move that structures his thinking throughout, underpinning, for instance, the distinctions between ‘beings’ and ‘Being’, ‘negation’ and ‘nothing’ etc. It is ‘transcendental’ insofar as it is not concerned with this or that type of technology, nor the apparently value-neutral instrumental (means-ends) rationality in terms of which it is ordinarily understood, but with its very ‘conditions of possibility’. It is clear that the notion of ‘essence’, understood as ‘condition of possibility’, cannot be immediately encountered in the midst of what it conditions (even though the latter can indicate the former in a mediated manner), that is, it must, in principle, be of a different order than that of the ‘conditioned’.

107 108

 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”, 1993, p. 311.  Ibid.

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Thus, for Heidegger, the definition of technology in the standard anthropocentric and instrumental terms, as a ‘means to (human) ends’ is ‘correct’, but does not get to its essence. First, it is so broad that it applies to both ancient and modern technology (despite, as Heidegger would elaborate, their difference in ‘essence’); and second, the question of ‘essence’ is concerned with the conditions of possibility of the instrumental itself—“within what do means and ends belong?” Yet, the ‘correct’ can provide a path to the ‘truth’/essence of technology. The analysis of instrumental rationality in connection with the production of a concrete artefact—a silver chalice—in terms of Aristotle’s four-fold causality, paves the way for uncovering the ‘essence’ of technology. The modern conception of causality, hence, the mode of explanation inherent to the positive(istic) natural sciences, is almost entirely confined to considerations of the ‘material’ and ‘efficient’ causes, such that it no longer counts ‘final’ or teleological causality (and to a lesser degree, ‘formal’ causality) as a ‘cause’. Moreover, the modern conception of causality understands even the ‘material’ and ‘efficient causes in a manner quite different from the Greeks. For the latter, there is no conception of ‘dead matter’, to be arbitrarily shaped and imposed upon, nor of an ‘agent’ (the silversmith) who produces the artefact (silver chalice) of his/her own volition. Rather, the inherent possibilities permitted by the ‘matter’ are realized—it is the silver that undergoes the change (in a manner that is not contrary to its ‘nature’/intrinsic properties) ‘into’ the chalice.109 Similarly, the ‘efficient’ cause is the ‘art of metal casting’, with which the silversmith is imbued, and it is this know-how (technē), that is realized, or brought to presence through the silversmith. Thus, Heidegger says, the task of the silversmith is to ‘consider carefully’, and ‘gather together’ (legein, or logos), the other three ways (‘causes’) of being ‘(co) responsible and indebted’, for bringing the silver chalice into appearance/presence—that is, for its ‘presencing’.  One can argue that this is true of modern technology as well—it must also work with the natural properties of various materials and their possibilities. However, as Heidegger makes clear, with the rise of modern technology, based on the scientific understanding of nature, the material properties of an entity are open to much greater manipulation and control compared to ancient technology. Consequently, the latter still felt its subjection to the poiēsis of nature in a way that modern technology does not, and loses sight of. 109

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However, it is the significance attributed to the causa finalis—telic causality, in the ancient conception that is the most explicit marker of the difference between the ancient and modern conceptions of causality. For, telic causality reveals the world in a different way―as inherently meaningful and purposive. With reference to the silver chalice, which as a technological artefact, is ‘always already’ embedded in the realm of socio-­ cultural meaning (even as, in its ‘materiality’, it is depend on the inner processes of nature and the possibilities it permits), it is the telos (and eidos) that “[…] in advance confines the chalice within the realm of consecration and bestowal. Through this the chalice is circumscribed as a sacrificial vessel”.110 Put differently, a technological artefact brings to light the (historically conditioned) ‘symbolic order’ in which it is embedded. To explicate the intertwinement between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ embodied in any (technological) artefact, the relation between poiēsis and technē requires clarification. The fourfold causality (presencing) that brings into appearance/presence, is not limited to artefacts; rather it lets all things, whether ‘natural’ or man-made, appear into presencing (Anwesen)―into the network of meaning which they both signify and through which they attain significance. Although, the production of artefacts (technē) as presencing, is also a mode of poiēsis, it is not its highest, or purest form. For the ancients, physis is the highest form of poiēsis, since its presencing (‘bringing-forth’) is from itself (en heautoi)―its own internal processes. The principle of its production does not, unlike that of the silver chalice, lie in something other than itself ’ (en allōi), namely, the technē of the artisan.111 However, both physis and technē involve poiēsis, understood as a movement from concealment to unconcealment, with the poiēsis of technē being fundamentally dependent on the (auto) poiēsis of physis. Moreover, this bringing out of concealment is alētheia—a conception of ‘truth’ that is more original and broader than the derivative, residual and impoverished positivistic idea of truth as correspondence or correctness of representation.

110 111

 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”, p. 315.  Ibid. p. 317.

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Technology then, is not to be understood merely instrumentally, but as a mode of poiēsis or ‘bringing forth’ (presencing) it is a mode of revealing or unconcealment—alētheia. Thus, technology, along with its inherent instrumental mode of rationality, is a specific manner of revealing/ encountering the world and ourselves in the world. However, as Heidegger point out, one might object that such an understanding of technology might hold for ‘Greek thought’ and the pre-modern ‘technē of the artisan, but modern machine-powered technology is something entirely different, since it is essentially ‘applied physics’. Put differently, one might say that in ancient technology, ‘knowing-how’ takes precedence over ‘knowing that’, whereas in modern technology, knowing-that (physics) takes precedence over knowing-how (technē). In response to this objection, one might be tempted to point to the irreducible interdependence of modern physics and technology, insofar as the former would be impossible without the technical apparatus required for setting up experiments, not only to test its predictions, but to measure various crucial constants. Moreover, the generation of ‘anomalies’ or certain (repeatable) experimental effects can give rise to ‘new’ hypotheses or paradigm shifts (such as wave-particle duality, uncertainty principle etc. central to quantum physics). However, for Heidegger, although such interdependence indicates the basis for what in contemporary parlance has come to be known as ‘techno-science’, the latter conception, while again ‘correct’, does not get to the ‘essence’ of modern technology. It is said that modern technology is something incomparably different from all earlier technologies because it is based on modern physics as an exact science. Meanwhile, we have come to understand more clearly that the reverse holds true as well: modern physics, as experimental, is dependent upon technical apparatus and upon progress in the building of apparatus. The establishing of this mutual relationship between technology and physics is correct. But it remains merely a historiological establishing of facts and says nothing about that in which the mutual relationship is grounded. The decisive question still remains: Of what essence is modern technology that it thinks of putting the exact sciences to use?112  Ibid. pp. 319–20.

112

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The answer: the essence of modern technology also consists in a mode of revealing, but one quite unlike that of ancient technology. What then, is the mode of revealing specific to modern technology that differentiates it from pre-modern technology? It consists in a ‘challenging forth’ (Herausfordern)―a ‘setting upon’ nature as a storehouse of raw materials, energy, and ‘resources’ for our needs—a mode of encounter that reveals nature itself as ‘standing reserve’ (Bestand).113 In contrast, pre-modern technology involves a ‘keeping watch’, a ‘taking care’ and ‘maintaining’ of the processes of becoming or poisesis internal to nature―a mode of revealing which still signifies one’s dwelling in nature and being subject to its rhythms, rather than one’s ‘mastery’ of it. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In sowing grain, it places seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting in order, which sets upon nature. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry.114

However, this ‘setting upon’ or ‘challenging-forth’ in modern technology that reveals nature as ‘standing reserve’, while accomplished by humans, is not something they control. Humans do not “have control over the unconcealment itself ”,115 but are everywhere appropriated by it, such that they “belong, even more originally than nature within the standing reserve”.116 Human beings encounter themselves, for instance, as ‘human resource’ (or positivistically, as ‘patients’ for clinics—reduced to their bodily functioning), within the techno-social symbolic order. Here Heidegger hints at the intertwinement of the nihilism (in the relative sense—as negation of beings), inherent in the techno-scientific mode of revealing/encountering ‘nature’, and ourselves, qua standing-­ reserve—a mode of revealing that is beyond our control and in which we are already appropriated—and the experience of ‘alienation’. Without  Ibid. pp. 321–22.  Ibid. p. 320. 115  Ibid. p. 323. 116  Ibid. 113 114

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using the term here, he suggests that ‘alienation’, stemming from the techno-scientific, nihilistic mode of revealing nature, is in turn, tied to a certain form of “political economy” (which may or may not be capitalistic).117 The forester who measures the felled timber in the woods and who to all appearances walks the forest path in the same way as his grandfather did is today ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose […].118

And yet, Heidegger emphasizes, man is never appropriated completely, without remainder, “[…] precisely because man is challenged more originally than the energies of nature, i.e., into the processes of ordering, he never is transformed into a mere standing reserve”.119 The ‘standing reserve’ into which humans are appropriated and ordered, yet never appropriated and ordered completely, is termed ‘enframing’ (Gestell). ‘Enframing’ constitutes the essence of the modern techno-scientific mode of revealing. ‘Enframing’, as the essence of modern technology, is already at work in the advent of modern physics, which “sets nature up to exhibit itself as a calculable coherence of forces, in advance”. Modern technology therefore, is not merely ‘applied physics’, insofar its essence is already  Heidegger’s discussion here partially resonates with themes we find in various parallel philosophical traditions, broadly stemming from the ‘conditions of possibility’ approach. For instance, in the Marxist and Critical Theory traditions, modernity, of which the positive natural sciences are a constitutive element, is characterized by, on the one hand, the disenchantment of nature; and on the other, by the capitalist form of society. Both are mutually determining and reinforcing, and sources of overlapping modes of alienation—primarily, alienation from nature and from each other. It is because nature is encountered as ‘disenchanted’, and thus, human beings are alienated from nature that it becomes open to technological manipulation and exploitation on an industrial scale (in an emergent capitalist mode of production); and it is with the emergence of capitalism, which breaks from the old (naturalized) feudal order that nature is encountered as disenchanted, and human beings are alienated from each other. These resonances, of course, remain partial and limited, since Heidegger’s analysis and its motivations are quite different from Marx’s; and Heidegger rarely use the term ‘alienation’, let alone ‘capitalism’. However, the passage quoted does hint at broader, institutional transformations of society as part of the techno-scientific mode of revealing, leading to the “commodification” (again, a term Heidegger does not use) of nature. 118  Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”, 1993, p. 323. 119  Ibid. 117

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implicit in the emergence of modern physics and its mode of revealing/ encountering ‘nature’ as inherently mathematizable and thus, predictable. But after all, mathematical science arose almost two centuries before technology. How, then, could it have already been set upon by modern technology and placed in its service? The facts testify to the contrary. Surely technology got under way only when it could be supported by exact physical science. Reckoned chronologically, this is correct. Thought historically it does not hit upon the truth.120

In this (transcendental, ‘conditions of possibility’) sense, modern physics, is the “herald of enframing”. Enframing, as a mode of revealing ‘nature’ through ‘ordering’, already ‘holds sway’ in modern physics, although it “does not yet expressly come to the fore”. Consequently, the essence of technology (enframing) is more originary than not only modern technology, but also modern physics. Chronologically speaking, modern physical science begins in the seventeenth century. In contrast, machine-power technology develops only in the second half of the eighteenth century. But modern technology, which for chronological reckoning is later, is, from the point of view of the essence holding sway within it, historically earlier.121

The distinction between ‘chronological’ (or linear) time and ‘essential time’, that is, as the ‘event of appropriation’ (ereignis) into a certain (‘essential’) mode of revealing (which, is simultaneously the concealing of that revealing, precisely as a ‘historical’ mode of revealing) serves to introduce the theme of ‘historicality’ (or historicity). The latter must be understood not as empirical, descriptive history, but in terms of its ‘essence, as a “destining of a revealing”; which then makes empirical historical research or historiography possible, within that mode of revealing. Historicality, as a mode of revealing/concealing, involves a ‘destinal’ temporality. In this case, enframing as the essence of modern technology into 120 121

 Ibid. pp. 326–27.  Ibid. pp. 326–28.

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which we moderns are always already appropriated, ‘starts man upon a way’, ‘sending’ (Schicken) him on the path of the revealing, which reveals ‘nature’ and human beings as ‘standing reserve’. In “Geschichte”, therefor, Heidegger hears the ‘destining’ (Geschick) dimension of history, thought in its ‘essence’. ‘Enframing’ is a historical destining of a specific (techno-scientific) mode of revealing, just as the poiēsis of pre-modern technē belonged to another mode of a destining (of a revealing).122 And yet, for Heidegger, the ‘destining of a revealing’ within which human beings always find themselves, and which “holds complete sway” over them, does not amount to a historical determinism—“destining is never a fate that compels”.123 It is this irreducibility of human beings to the historical destining of enframing-revealing of nature and ourselves as a ‘mere’ standing reserve that prevents Heidegger’s position from being an out-and-out ‘historical determinism’ (in its techno-scientific figuration), and allows for the possibility of the emergence of the ‘saving power’, from within techno-scientific enframing. For, it should be clear from our previous discussion (in relation to the themes of death and the ‘nothing’) that the very possibility/capacity of being appropriated into a mode of revealing/concealing is itself freedom—the movement of negativity/transcendence which allows us to ‘have’ a meaningful, world, a world that concerns us. Freedom, therefore, is not reducible to human willing; rather, it emerges in and through the ‘clearing’ or revealing, which as (destinal) historical unfolding, transcends humans (since they are always already appropriated within such an unfolding), while also requiring humans (in their capacity for transcendence or negativity, rooted in the ‘nothing’) for the very emergence of clearing/revealing itself, within which beings become intelligible for us, that is, show themselves ‘as’ something. For man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and so becomes one who listens, though not one who simply obeys. […] Freedom governs the free space in the sense of the cleared, that is to say, the revealed. To the occurrence of revealing, i.e., of truth, freedom  Ibid. pp. 329–30.  Ibid. p. 330.

122 123

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stands in the closest and most intimate kinship. […] All revealing comes out of the free, goes into the free, and brings into the free. The freedom of the free consists neither in unfettered arbitrariness nor in the constraint of mere laws. Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing shimmers the veil that hides the essential occurrence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils.124

Since freedom in this sense, as the ‘free space’ of a determinate form of revealing, is also a concealing of the occurrence of this revealing, as well as of alternative modes/possibilities of revealing,125 two possibilities open up; either man remains immersed in that specific mode of revealing, “deriving all his standards on that basis”126; or he acquires sufficient reflective distance to attain insight into this movement of revealing/concealing itself, that is, to see the ‘veil’ “as what veils”—positively stated, to “[…] experience as his essence the requisite belonging to the revealing”.127 Of these, the first possibility—that of complete immersion/absorption in the specific, techno-scientific mode of revealing, where “Man stands so decisively in subservience to the challenging-forth of enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim […]”, hence, is oblivious to his essence as ‘ek-sistance’128 (his “requisite belonging to revealing”, as ‘ek-­ static standing within the clearing of Being), constitutes the ‘supreme danger’. The ‘danger’ arising from complete immersion, and appropriation in the techno-scientific mode of revealing, results in the kind of illusory narcissistic closure characteristic of modern technological nihilism. Yet when destining reigns in the mode of enframing, it is the supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a pre Ibid. p. 330 (my italics).  Ibid. pp. 332–333. 126  Ibid. p. 331. 127  Ibid. 128  Ibid. p. 332. 124 125

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cipitous fall: that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile, man precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself and postures as the lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters is only his ­construct. The illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.129

The second possibility—the opening up of a certain reflective distance with respect to enframing, which brings the revealing (of enframing) itself to light, as the very ‘happening of truth’ (presencing), that is, the movement of revealing/concealing (the ‘veil’ as ‘what veils’), and thus, also uncovers a ‘former way of revealing’, constitutes the ‘saving power’ inherent in the very essence of technology qua enframing. If technological enframing represents the ‘highest danger’, then Heidegger, in keeping with Hölderlin’s words concerning the close proximity (and dependence) of the saving power’ with respect to ‘danger’, maintains; “The essential unfolding of technology harbours in itself what we least suspect, the possible rise of the saving power”.130 This claim should no longer surprise us, since as I noted, human beings, while always already appropriated within a mode of revealing, cannot be appropriated completely. For, the possibility of (historical) appropriation/immersion in a mode of revealing is itself freedom, understood as the nihilating transcendence (stemming from the originary ‘nothing’) that allows humans to encounter a meaningful world (and themselves in the world). Such freedom, or transcendence, since it is not merely a matter of individual willing, is a ‘granting’. This granting itself is the saving power, and “lets man see and enter into the highest dignity of his essence”, which consists in “[…] keeping watch over the unconcealment―and with it, from the first, the concealment—of all essential unfolding on this earth”.131 If the freedom inherent not only in the revealing, but in the possibility of maintaining a certain reflective distance (‘keeping watch’) with respect to such revealing, is a ‘granting’ (of this ‘free’ space), then it points to a fundamental experience of finitude. For Heidegger, this experience of  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 337. 131  Ibid. 129 130

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finitude—of the ‘granting’ of a mode of revealing, thus, the ‘saving power’, may become manifest in a domain, both similar and dissimilar to the technological domain, considered in its essence, namely, that of art.132 Heidegger writes, There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name technē. Once the revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearance was also called technē. […] There was a time when the poiēsis of the fine arts was also called technē”.133

Before it was appropriated within the sphere of ‘cultural activity’, before it became a matter of ‘merely’ aesthetic enjoyment, the poiēsis of the fine arts was fundamentally related to ‘truth’ (alētheia), understood not only as ‘revealing’, but as the ‘revealing of such revealing’. As Heidegger elaborates in “The Origin of the Work of Art”, to recover and make manifest this original sense of the bringing-forth (poiēsis) inherent in the ‘technē’ of the fine arts, requires, as a first step, distinguishing the latter from the unthematized functioning of ‘equipment’. Both technology and the fine arts, as products of humans making, belong to technē and the poiēsis specific to it; and are not only subject to similar positivistic distortions of understanding, but harbour within themselves the possibility of the emergence of the ‘saving power’, that is, the space of freedom, or the requisite distance that permits the thematization of the movement of revealing and concealing constitutive of the respective ‘essences’ of the two (overlapping) domains. On Heidegger’s implicitly modernist view of the fine arts, the latter, however, are more conducive to the emergence and realization of the possibilities of reflective distance/thematization, or the ‘granting’ of the space of freedom. For, although a human creation, art is not immediately and wholly subsumable under ‘equipmental being’, that is, the ‘instrumental rationality’, and imposition of extrinsic ends/intentions upon ‘matter’, it entails. In the everyday, unthematized functional-being of equipment, ‘matter’, whether constitutive of the equipment itself, or as ‘raw material’, 132 133

 Ibid. p. 340.  Ibid. p. 339.

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is “used up” or consumed for human ends; just as the being (meaning) of equipment itself is wholly determined by the end(s) it was designed for and serves, in its unobtrusive, transparent functioning. In contrast, the ‘self-sufficiency’ of the art-work consists in its being a site where the ‘happening of truth’ occurs—where the movement of ‘truth’, as a movement between simultaneous revealing and concealing plays out, and becomes visible qua movement. Consequently, the work of art becomes the site for the explicit emergence of reflective distancing (the ‘rise of the saving power’), and ‘freedom’, insofar as it makes the ‘open region’ of unconcealment, and with it, the concealment subtending it, visible, in and through this very emergence. In the Origin, Heidegger characterizes this movement between revealing and concealing—the ‘happening of truth’—in terms of the inner tension or strife between ‘world’ and ‘earth’. The work of art simultaneously ‘sets-up’ or discloses a meaningful ‘world’, and ‘sets it(self ) back’ on the ‘earth’—the material from which it is made. In contrast to equipmental being, the artwork does not ‘use up’ its material—the stone or metal does not “disappear into usefulness”,134 but foregrounds it in its materiality, and thus, “sets it free to be nothing but itself ”. A Greek temple, for example, standing on rocky ground, “draws up out of the rock the obscurity of that rocks bulky yet spontaneous support”135; just as it makes manifest the heaviness and solidity of the stone comprising its structure. Similarly, through the artwork, “metals come to glitter and shimmer, colours to glow, tones to sing, the word to say”.136 The (self ) manifestation and acknowledgement of materiality, in and through the ‘open region’, or ‘world’ disclosed in the artwork, first gives to this world, and the historical people who dwell in it, their ‘measure’. The temple, in its unmoved solidity, first makes “the storm raging above”, and the sea raging below, “manifest in its violence”; the gleaming of its stone surfaces “first brings to light the radiance of the light of day, the breadth of the

 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, 1993, p. 171.  Ibid. p. 167. 136  Ibid. p. 171 134 135

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sky, and the darkness of the night, […]”, its “firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air”.137 “In setting up a world, the artwork sets forth the earth”, but only by “setting itself back” on the ‘earth’, as its obscure and self-concealing support or ‘shelter’, upon which historical man anchors his world and dwells. The self-manifestation of its ‘materiality’, in and through the artwork, which brings to light the brute ‘givenness’ of its inherent properties within the phenomenal realm, thereby also shows up its ‘self-refusal’ or unavailability to further conceptual analysis or explanation. As Heidegger elaborates, while the stone manifests its ‘heaviness’ within the phenomenal realm, it refuses any further ‘penetration’ into it’. If we were to. […] break open the rock, it still does not display in its fragments anything inward that has been opened up. The stone has instantly withdrawn again into the same dull pressure and bulk of its fragments. If we try to lay hold of the stone’s heaviness in another way, by placing the stone on a balance, we merely bring the heaviness into the form of a calculated weight. This perhaps very precise determination of the stone remains a number, but the weight’s burden has escaped us.138

I have already discussed this idea of ‘self-withdrawal’ that Heidegger indicates here, in the preceding chapter, in a broader and more abstract sense, via the mutual transformations of ‘explanation’ and ‘description’. I traced such a systematic set of transformations with respect of the ‘force’ of gravity in Hegel’s chapter on “Force and Understanding” in the Phenomenology. To ward off possible misunderstandings, two points must be underscored here. First, the comparison is not intended to suggest that Hegel and Heidegger’s positions are identical, but only that both are responding, in radically different ways, to the same conceptual (and ultimately modernist) problematic. Second, and more importantly, the problematic is not confined to classical mechanics, such that with the advent of quantum mechanics, and of the theory of relativity, it is overcome and thus, disappears. Although I need not develop the point here, 137 138

 Ibid. pp. 167–68.  Ibid. p. 172.

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it is clear that at the limits of theoretical physics, the strict correlation between the mathematical and physical realm (or the a priori ideal and the ‘real’), which itself must be presupposed in physics, breaks down, and theory becomes more mathematically speculative in character. This is perhaps most easily discernible in the domain of cosmology—from issues concerning the origin of the universe (where the notion of ‘before’ the big bang breaks down), multidimensional and multiple universes, to ‘gravitational singularity’, physicists are acutely aware of their mathematically ideal, hence posited (albeit stemming from mathematical necessity), and experimentally unverifiable character. Returning to Heidegger and his understanding of the work of art, it is now perhaps a bit clearer how the latter, in revealing a world, also reveals the earth (or Being itself ), in its self-concealment, that is, as the unknown and unknowable ground or shelter of the open region of the world in which humans dwell. The closely allied notions of the earth as ‘dwelling’, or ‘shelter’, along with the imperative of ‘letting be’, or conserving the earth, based on the awareness of its ultimately aporetic unavailability to conceptual articulation (to either instrumental rationality, or at a higher level, to scientific ‘explanation’, without remainder) are central to the rearticulation of our relation to ‘nature’. It is this awareness that Heidegger, in his later writings, comes to articulate in terms of the poiēsis of poetic experience—by locating it in the fine arts, for instance, rather than in conceptually oriented thinking. This attempt at getting away from the ossified, ‘static’ conceptual structures of (linguistically mediated/constituted) thought (with its attendant ‘metaphysics of presence’), is the basis for Heidegger’s increasing engagement with Hölderlin’s poetry, specifically, with his lines concerning ‘poetic dwelling’ on earth. Yet, the attempt at philosophical ‘explication’ of poetry, necessarily gives rise to an obvious paradox (‘double bind’)—of saying in pre-given, static and ossified language/concepts, what can only be shown in and through the re-enactment of emergent experience (in the sense of poiēsis) at the root of conceptual determination. Despite this prima facie paradox inherent in the attempt to say the unfamiliar (pre-­ conceptual, dynamic) in and through the familiar (conceptually determinate, static)—which Heidegger tries to circumvent by extending the

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scope of language to pre-conceptual (sense of ) ‘being’—the notion of poetic dwelling holds the potential for a transformed environmental ethics. I will take up these interconnections in the next section. Here, as I noted, Heidegger attempts to recover this fundamental preconceptual experience of the auto-poiēsis inherent in phusis, in the poiēsis of the fine arts. The poiēsis of the artwork, qua produced, consists in instigating (in the limited space of the artwork), which is simultaneously a making manifest, the ‘strife’ between world and earth, or revealing and concealing. The strife’ must not be understood in a merely oppositional sense, but in terms of its interplay and mutual dependence, that is, as a dynamic unity. The strife plays itself out in the artwork in the ‘rift’ (Riss) between world and earth, which signifies both a tear, laceration, crack, etc. as well as a ‘sketch’, outline, or plan/blueprint. The ‘rift design’ is the projection of an outline or figure (Gestalt) in the artwork, which qua ‘created’, connotes both a ‘placing’ (Stellen) and enframing (Gestell). The projection of a figure constitutes, in each case, the ‘borderline’ between the open region of intelligibility and its aporetic, self-secluding ground.139 I need not enter into a more detailed exposition of these insights, as Heidegger develops them in the specific context of the poiēsis of the fine arts. The question that must be addressed is: what import do the interrelations between ‘world’ and ‘earth’, poetic ‘dwelling’ and the sense of finitude it engenders with the experiential awareness of the aporetic, self-­secluding character of the earth, and the contingency of meaning, have for the possible rearticulation of our experience of nature? Moreover, how can such a rearticulation entail a thoroughgoing critique of modernity (at least in its standard, reified figuration) while remaining recognizably modernist? It is clear from the preceding discussion that for instance, ‘keeping watch’ over the movement of unconcealment and concealment, and the reflective distance that it opens up vis-à-vis technological enframing, or the ‘happening of truth’ in the artwork, which instigates/manifests the strife between world and earth, that reveals the latter in its self-­concealment and unavailability (to conceptual determination), is on the one hand, continuous with the

139

 Ibid. pp. 188–89.

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critical-reflective impulse of enlightenment modernity. On the other, it is also experienced as an original ‘granting’, or givenness, stemming from a source, whether termed Being or the ‘nothing’, ‘beyond’ or ‘prior’ to human willing or doing.

5.4 The Question of the Environment Does such ‘granting’, understood as a certain experience of finitude, provide sufficient resources for a reimagination of ‘nature’? In order to address this issue, I will first underscore the basic structural affinities, despite the radical transformation in terminology and approach, between Heidegger’s early and late writings. I am suggesting that throughout his writings, Heidegger attempts to articulate the fundamental (though ordinarily repressed) experience of contingency and finitude in various ways—initially, through the existential analytic of Dasein and the absolute negativity of the ‘nothing’ that emerges in and through the relative negativity/ transcendence of Dasein’s concernful ‘being-in’ the world; and in his late writings, by turning to poetic experience, and the sense of the earth as our self-concealing ‘shelter’ or dwelling, it brings to light. Yet, how can there be anything common to the existential analytic and the experience of the ‘nothing’ (in, for instance, my Being-towards-death) and poetic experience? Further, if there is an underlying unifying theme, such as ‘finitude’, then why did Heidegger feel the need to radically alter the terms of his discourse? In relation to the first issue, it is perhaps not difficult to see that the poiēsis of the arts, plays a role analogous to the experience of absolute negativity (the ‘nothing’), inherent in the relative negativity/transcendence of Dasein’s ‘being-in’ qua care, insofar as both uncover the possibility of transcending the ‘world’ of our concerns as a whole, with its limited, relative transcendence in, for instance, the means-­ ends rationality embodied in equipmental being. Moreover, through such absolute transcendence/negativity, both reveal the ‘beyond’, thought either as the (necessarily empty, posited) totality of Being, or as the self-­ secluding, self-refusing ‘earth’, which grounds the open region of the world. In relation to the second issue, it is possible to argue that in constantly reformulating the terms of discourse, and the locus of their

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unfolding (in Ereignis and historicality, in the ‘saving power’ lying dormant in the essence of technology, and in the work of art, especially poetry), Heidegger continually attempts to get away from any vestiges of traditional metaphysical thinking and the misapprehensions to which they may give rise. In Being and Time, for instance, the elaboration of authenticity in terms of anticipatory resoluteness, despite Heidegger’s qualifications, sounds too voluntaristic, and thus, opens the door to metaphysical and political distortions (as we know, to a metaphysically sanctioned regressive politics, to which Heidegger himself succumbed). However, the initial question remains. Although the rearticulation of finitude in terms of poetic experience (embodied in the fine arts), which reveals the ‘earth’ as ‘dwelling’ and ‘shelter’ only insofar as it does not yield to (conceptual) ‘presence’, seems to avoid the metaphysical distortions to which the existential articulations were possibly subject, can it provide the basis for a new environmental ethics? To delineate the main contours of this problematic, it is worth reiterating that for Heidegger, the negative moment of transcendence that engenders the experience of finitude by opening onto the ‘beyond’ of phenomenal experience, (the sense of the ‘totality’ of ‘Being’, ‘phusis’, or the self-secluding ‘earth’), always arises from our situatedness within a historical world. It shows itself in some specific, historically conditioned manner, that is, with a certain intelligibility and meaning flowing from a historical mode of interpretation in which humans are always already appropriated, but which also requires ‘humans’ (qua negativity/transcendence) to manifest itself, such that they can never be appropriated completely. It is this insight concerning our ‘situated (mostly implicit) awareness’, and the hermeneutic-phenomenological approach it shapes that remains a constant throughout Heidegger’s writings, even if it is developed in his later writings more explicitly in terms of the historicality of Dasein, and may be understood as the ‘filling out’ of Dasein’s existential-temporal structure uncovered in Being and Time. Throughout this study, I have been discussing how, on the one hand, our situatedness within a particular historical unfolding, namely, enlightenment modernity, leads to the positivistic distortion of nature, its reduction to mere ‘presence’, hence, ‘nihilistic’ appropriation. On the other, I have also indicated how it simultaneously forces a certain, perhaps

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initially implicit, awareness of these distortions. Such awareness manifests itself in the urgency with which the question concerning the environment is felt today, in talk of the anthropocene, and the environmental ‘crisis’. This ‘dialectic’ between (historical) immersion and (critical-­ reflective) distance, is I noted, reflected in Heidegger’s notion of the ‘saving power’, or in the implicit unthematized sense of crisis that permeates our contemporary, rational-scientific age, for Husserl. However, I am further suggesting that it is perhaps not altogether surprising that the current environmental concerns (while indexed to concerns of human survival, and to that extent, ‘anthropocentric’), largely stem from scientific research, and are stridently voiced by the scientific community. For, it is the objectivist orientation inherent in the natural sciences (relatively free of anthropocentric instrumental concerns) that precisely because of their initially positivistic orientation, constantly ‘discovers’ the limits of its own knowledge claims. For, ‘nature’ continually escapes the grasp of the sciences in their unifying intention. Perhaps, it is in modern physics then, that the aporia indicated in Heraclitus’ famous assertion, ‘Phusis kruptesthai philei’ (nature loves to hide),140 receives its fullest expression. What would such a conception of ‘nature’, as the inaccessible, continually elusive and self-secluding ‘beyond’, constitutive of our experience of finitude, that is, flowing from our awareness (itself a function of our negativity or capacity for self-distancing, freedom etc.) of being situated ‘within’ a particular mode of revealing, entail for the ‘environmental debate’, mired in the dualism of the anthropocentric and non-­ anthropocentric approaches? At first glance, particularly, in the early writings of Heidegger, insofar as such a conception of nature is ‘negatively generated’ (even as it must be posited as the condition for its own explicit thematization), it appears too abstract to contribute to the current environmental debate. Moreover, I noted, for Heidegger, the moment of negativity qua transcendence, self-distancing, freedom, alienation etc. with respect to ‘nature’, is constitutive of Dasein’s being-in, and  Heidegger discusses this cryptic assertion at the close of his essay on Aristotle’s notion of ‘phusis’. “On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotle’s Physics, BI”, translated by Thomas Sheehan in Pathmarks ed. William McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 228–229. 140

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the worldhood of the world. Consequently, Heidegger’s approach rules out, in principle, the possibility of any immediate relation to nature, as an alternative to its the techno-scientific mode of disclosure constitutive of modernity. One is therefore, inclined to agree with Sheehan’s assessment that talk of Heidegger’s position as an ‘overcoming’ of technological enframing, and the nihilism (and alienation) inherent in it, is illusory, and involves a fundamental misreading.141 And yet, in light of Heidegger’s later writings, which attempt to indicate the presencing and self-withdrawal of phusis indirectly through poetic experience (instead of conceptual thought) and the sense of the ‘earth’ as our self-concealing dwelling or shelter (rather than as ‘presence’, enframing etc.), certain possibilities for a transformed approach to the question of the environment open up. An approach, that is, which does not frame the problem (and responses to it), in the uncritical, dualistic terms of ‘anthropocentrism’ and ‘biocentrism’.142 Since such an approach cannot entail an unmediated relation, or unity with nature (let alone anthropocentric imposition upon nature), it can only consist in the acknowledgement of our finitude. Poetic thinking and dwelling then, consists in an acknowledgement of our finitude. In order to elucidate this claim, I turn briefly, to two of Heidegger’s writings, “Poetically Man Dwells” and “Building Dwelling

 Sheehan (1999, p. 281, footnote 17).  Anthropocentric grounds, for instance, include concerns about the future survival of the species, whereas ‘non-anthropocentric’ or biocentric approaches seeks to restore ‘intrinsic value’ to nature. While Heidegger’s thinking has influenced both camps, the attempts to appropriate his thinking by either camp tend to remain selective and one-sided. In the burgeoning literature that has emerged in the decades following Heidegger’s death in 1976, when environmental concerns were just beginning to come to the fore within academic discourse, some commentators have registered affiliations between Heideggerian philosophy and ‘deep ecology’ (See for instance, Zimmerman 1986). This ‘biocentric’ line of interpretation emphasizes finitude, Heidegger’s pronouncements concerning “letting being be”, ‘dwelling’, the aporetic character of ‘earth’ etc., while at best noting the discontinuities when it comes to its irreducible ‘anthropocentric’ dimension (the existential understanding of the ‘umwelt’ in terms of the negative movement of transcendence—‘care’ as ek-sistance, or ‘ek-static standing within’ etc.) On the other hand, some commentators, such as Sheehan, have emphasized the existential dimension, along with the fundamental negativity inherent in Dasein’s existence, which makes our alienation vis-à-vis ‘nature’, a structural element of our existence. 141 142

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Thinking”—both written sometime in 1950.143 “Poetically Man Dwells”, is a close reading of Hölderlin’s poem “In lovely blue …”. The line in the poem, from which the title of the essay is culled, is: “Full of merit, yet poetically man dwells upon the earth”. After dismissing the usual misunderstandings based on the idea of poetry as escapist, or at best, part of the ­‘literature industry’; and ‘dwelling’ as the ‘practical’ issue of housing, the ‘housing crisis’ etc.; which would imply the apparent incompatibility of “poetry” and “dwelling”, Heidegger makes three closely interrelated interpretative claims: (1) for Hölderlin, ‘dwelling’ signifies the “basic character of human existence”; (2) poetry in the sense of poiēsis, “first causes a dwelling to be dwelling”, and thus, lets us dwell; (3) therefore, “poetic creation is a kind of building”, perhaps, “even the distinctive kind of building”,144 which “first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling”.145 In relation to the first point, Heidegger underscores the oppositional sense between the initial “full of merit”, and (poetic) “dwelling”. The former signifies both man’s ‘cultivating’ and ‘caring’ of the processes of growth in nature, as in agricultural activity, and making and ‘building’, in the ‘technological’ sense, of constructing (man-made) objects that cannot come into being through natural processes. Although both are modes of building, we understand ‘building’ predominantly in the latter sense. Yet, despite all the technological advances, the instrumental rationality inherent in ‘building’, in both senses, as cultivation and construction (of the ‘built world’), can never exhaust the sense of dwelling, and indeed, comes to stand in complete opposition to the latter, particularly if “building” qua construction, becomes the exclusive sense that “dwelling” comes to acquire. Rather, it is ‘dwelling’, and the mode of (poetic) creation inherent in it that allows for ‘building’, in both senses, and the instrumental sense, common to them. Here we find a systematic reworking, in different vocabulary, of the existential analysis presented in Being and Time. “Dwelling” refers to the ‘being-in’ structure of Dasein, that allows  These writings, along with “The Thing”, constitute a series of three lectures. Heidegger delivered the lecture, “Building, Dwelling Thinking” (“Bauen, Wohnen, Denken”) to the Darmstadt Symposium on Man and Space, in August, 1951. 144  Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells …”, in Poetry, Language and Thought, 1971, p. 215. 145  Heidegger, p. 218. 143

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instrumental rationality and activity (“building”) to emerge in a secondary, derivative sense. Thus, in relation to the second point, as the constitutive ground (qua being-in) of ‘building’, ‘dwelling’, in turn, is made possible through poetic creation or poiēsis. To understand the link between the poiēsis of poetry and dwelling, requires that we first understand the link between the latter and thinking. Heidegger suggests that genuine thinking, in its original essence, is similar to poetic experience (without being identical), insofar as it involves a creative transcendence. This ‘nearness’ of poetry and thinking, allows Heidegger to “[…] follow in thought Hölderlin’s poetic statement about the poetic dwelling of man […]”, and to “[…] divine a path by which, through what is thought differently, we come nearer to thinking the same as what the poet composes in his poem”.146 In elaborating this similarity, Heidegger takes into account the broader context (lines 24–38) within which the line on ‘poetic dwelling’ is situated. While I will not follow Heidegger’s reading of each line, it is worth reproducing these lines here, in order to get a general sense of his interpretation, and bring to light its inner continuity with the earlier existential analytic. May, if life is sheer toil, a man Lift his eyes and say: so I too wish to be? Yes. As long as Kindness, The Pure, still stays with his heart, man Not unhappily measures himself Against the godhead. Is God unknown? Is he manifest like the sky? I’d sooner Believe the latter. It’s the measure of man. Full of merit, yet poetically, man Dwells on this earth. But no purer Is the shade of the starry night, If I might put it so, than Man, who’s called an image of the godhead. Is there a measure on earth? There is None.

146

 Ibid. p. 219.

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Here, the first line ‘provides a clue’ to why human dwelling can only be a ‘poetic dwelling’. While a ‘life of toil’ constitutes the human condition, in which instrumental rationality, the ‘seeking of merits’ predominates, it does not exhaust human ‘being’. For, humans have the possibility of “looking up” from their toil and so also “wish to be”, that is, explicitly realize their being qua transcendence (which has remained implicit in the life of toil). Further, in “looking up”, they look to the ‘beyond’ of the divinities, that provide a “measure” for human ‘being’, and thus a dwelling place. As Heidegger puts it, “the upward glance spans the between of earth and sky. This between is measured out for the dwelling of man.”147 This spanning (transcendence) first opens up man’s dwelling, as the dimension of (‘nearness’ and) ‘distance’, the open region of the ‘between’ (earth and sky) that in turn, admits the possibility of being ‘measured’, and thus, becoming the “measure of man”. Thus, humans both open up the dimension of ‘measure’ (the ‘between’ or open region of dwelling), and are also ‘measured’ by it, insofar as they dwell in the open region—are situated in the midst of it. According to Heidegger’s interpretation then, while “man is man only in such spanning”, “man has always measured himself with and against something heavenly…; the godhead is the measure with which man measures out his dwelling, his stay on the earth and beneath the sky”.148. This “measuring against”, the beyond (opened up in the ‘spanning’), which provides humans the measure of their dwelling—their “stay on earth”, also involves a temporal dimension, inherent in our knowledge of our mortality—the very brief duration of our lives on earth, measured against the eternity of the heavens.149 Poetic dwelling then, refers to this ‘taking measure’, which includes both the opening up of the dimension of ‘measure’ as such, and its spatial and temporal ‘measuring’ against the ‘beyond’ of ‘earth’ and ‘sky’, (the heavens, divinities etc.), that show themselves precisely in their self-­ concealment. This is how Heidegger reads the line starting with […] man measures himself […] against the godhead. Is God unknown?”. To this  Ibid. p. 220.  Ibid. pp. 220–21. 149  Ibid. p. 222. 147 148

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question, the answer at one level must be ‘no’, since if God were completely unknown, how could God provide a measure for man? And yet, God remains unknown “as he is”, (in himself ) and “it is just as this unknown one that he is the measure”.150 Thus, the same movement that Heidegger elaborates throughout his writings, is also at work here, namely, the movement of revealing and concealing between the (phenomenal) world and the self-refusing ‘beyond’, which must nonetheless ‘show’ itself in its self-refusal. As the subsequent line in the poem indicates, it is poetic dwelling that brings to light, this ‘measuring’ and the ‘measure’ in its self-refusal. In relation to the third Heideggerian thesis then, it follows that the poetizing of the poet (just as in any great work of art) is the explicit acknowledgement of this mutual dependence and movement between revealing-concealing (hence, of our finitude). The Poetic creation (the poem itself as a work of art), is “a—or perhaps, the—distinctive kind of building”. Poetic ‘creation’ operates at two levels (or in a “double sense”); at the primordial level it is our capacity for transcendence that opens up the open region of the (phenomenal, meaningful) world, and sets it back on its permanently concealed, self-refusing, ground (the ‘earth’ and sky, the divine, etc.). This ‘opening up’ and ‘setting back’, is the sense of our spatially and temporally finite dwelling, “on the earth and beneath the sky”. At the secondary level, the poem qua artistic creation, is a making explicit, and an acknowledgement of this mutual conditioning of revealing and concealing, or disclosure and closure, hence of our (spatio-­ temporal) finitude. But the poet calls all the brightness of the sights of the sky and every sound of its courses and breezes into the singing word and there makes them shine and ring. Yet the poet, if he is a poet, does not describe the mere appearance of sky and earth. The poet calls, in the sights of the sky, that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself. In the familiar appearances, the poet calls the alien as that to which the invisible imparts itself in order to remain what it is—unknown.151 150 151

 Ibid. p. 222.  Ibid. p. 225.

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In “Building, Dwelling Thinking”, this ‘acknowledgement of finitude’ (as I have termed it), in and through ‘building’ inherent in dwelling, calls for “letting beings be”, for “saving” and “conserving” being(s) in their hiddenness and self-refusal, in the midst of the open region of the visibility. However, in this essay, Heidegger, while again approaching these themes through a consideration of “what it is to dwell”, in relation to the type of “building” belonging to it, does so, not through poetic experience, but primarily through the man-made objects of the familiar (gewöhnt) ‘built world’ that we inhabit. In this difference of emphasis, and in the manner in which ‘technological’ objects such as bridges and buildings set in their “locales”, are treated, Heidegger brings to light yet another mode of acknowledgement of the invisible in the visible (the “fourfold” of earth, sky, divinities and mortals). In this manner he fleshes out his claim concerning the ‘saving power’ inherent in (the essence of ) technology. Tracing the etymology of “bauen”—“to build”, shows that far from the ordinary conception of ‘building’ as a means to ‘dwelling’, as its end, “bauen”, in its various traces preserved (and covered over) in language (in for instance, ‘Nachbar’, or neighbour as the Nachgebauer, or the near-­ dweller), originally signifies “to dwell” in the sense of staying, and inhabiting a place. Moreover, “bauen” or ‘building’ as dwelling, I noted, means to both “cherish and protect, to preserve and care for” as with “tilling the soil”,152 cultivating the land, “tending to” natural processes, such as the growth of crops etc., and to construct things. Both types of building— nurturing/cultivating and construction, belong within ‘bauen’ and thus, to dwelling.153 By tracing these etymological connections, Heidegger uncovers the various senses of dwelling or inhabiting (bauen, wohnen) that still find faint echoes in language today. These include, “remaining” (for a while), and “staying” (at a place), to be at peace (Friede), thus, to be ‘free’, which in turn means to “preserve from harm and danger” (frye), to “safeguard”, to “spare”.154 Elaborating these imbrications of meaning, Heidegger writes:  Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, 1993, p. 349.  Ibid. 154  Ibid. pp. 350–51. 152 153

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Real sparing is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own essence, when we return it specifically to its essential being, when we “free” it in the proper sense of the word into the preserve of peace. […] The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing [Schonen]. It pervades dwelling in its whole range.155

If human ‘being’ consists in “dwelling”, and the latter ultimately signifies our sense of finitude—the (implicit, original) awareness of our brief stay “on the earth”, “under the sky”, “before the divinities” (as the trace of the invisible within the visible realm), as mortals, then, for Heidegger, the explicit acknowledgement of such finitude can only take the form of a ‘sparing’ (Schonen) and ‘safeguarding’, which means, ‘freeing’ up something by returning it to its own essence. In this context, Bruce V. Foltz suggests that instead of the usual translation of ‘Schonen’ as ‘preserving’ (or ‘sparing’), the term ‘conserving’ is a better choice.156 ‘Conserving’ signifies a more active relation to the natural environment than ‘preserving’/‘sparing’, and thus, captures what Heidegger means by “Real sparing is something positive…”. As Foltz points out, ‘Schonen’, as “conserving” does not imply that something is merely ‘set aside’ (as with ‘preserving’), rather, that we use it in such a way that no harm comes to it, that we ‘look after’ and take care of it.157 In contemporary environmental discourse this would mean sustainable ways of living, and inhabiting the earth. Yet, it is important to reiterate here that for Heidegger, the basis of ‘dwelling’, as a form of “sustainable living” through active conserving, does not at all lie in the rational and technical mastery of nature. Rather, it stems from the ‘fourfold’ sense of finitude (of being on earth, under the sky, before divinities and as mortals), unified in human ‘being’ as dwelling (Dasein as ‘being-in’, in the language of Being and Time). With respect to the earth, as one of the fourfold ways of comportment constitutive of human dwelling, Heidegger writes,  Ibid. p. 351.  Bruce V.  Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and Metaphysics of Nature, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995, p. 161. 157  Ibid. 155 156

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Mortals dwell in that they save the earth […]. Saving does not only snatch something from danger. To save properly means to set something free into its own essence. […] Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is one step from boundless spoilation.

However, it may seem that dwelling qua “conserving”, in this finite sense, insofar as it means “to take under one’s care, to look after the fourfold in its essence”, applies to the natural processes of growing and cultivating, and thus, to the first modality of ‘bauen’ (inherent in ‘dwelling’), where humans do not directly intervene in nature. Or again, it is at best, applicable to pre-modern, pre-scientific forms of technology (for instance, the windmill and the footbridge, as Heidegger elaborates in his essay on technology). Yet, how does this sense of finite dwelling as ‘conserving’, apply to the ‘construction’ of the built world, which Heidegger maintains, is also a modality of ‘bauen’, and thus, dwelling? Here Heidegger focuses on architectural works, such as buildings and bridges, rather than modern technological artefacts in general. Despite this restricted focus, which leaves the question of the possibility of other modes of ‘sustainable’ technologies unaddressed, we find that the analysis presented in the essay on art, (in relation to the ancient Greek temple for instance), is generalized to the everyday, familiar built world of buildings and bridges. The consideration of a concrete, built structure, such as a bridge, serves as the basis for illustrating how it could be designed in a manner that conserves and sustains the fourfold modes of finitude that together, constitute ‘dwelling’. For Heidegger, a bridge “swings across the stream with ease and power” and thus first lets the “banks emerge as banks”158 facing each other. In this manner, the bridge first “brings the stream and land and bank into each other’s neighbourhood” and thus sets them, or “gathers the earth” into a landscape.159 The bridge’s piers bear its weight, while leaving the stream to flow on unimpeded, following its natural course. At the same time, the bridge makes the vaulted ceiling of the sky visible, as that against which it stands, and in its readiness to endure the ‘elements’.

 Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, 1993, p. 354.  Ibid.

158 159

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In taking account of the weather and ‘letting the stream run its course’, the bridge still “grants mortals their way”, while standing before the ‘divinities’160—the contingent, concealed forces of heaven and earth, (of which mortals only see a trace in the visible realm). Through this “gathering of the fourfold”, the bridge allows a ‘site’ or a ‘locale’ to emerge. The locale does not exist prior to the bridge, as ‘empty (Newtonian) space’ into which the bridge is inserted; rather, it is only with the construction of the bridge that a locale emerges, and “only things that are locales in this manner allow for spaces”.161 Heidegger traces this (phenomenological) sense of ‘space’ as the relations of ‘place’, back to the original meaning of ‘Raum’, as a “place freed for settlement and lodging”. The (phenomenal) space of dwelling, or the open region of the ‘between’ earth and sky, in which humans are situated, is thus, a bounded space— not in the sense of fixed and rigid boundary, but (analogous to Husserl’s position) as an ever-shifting and receding horizon (or what, for Heidegger, the Greek’s recognized as ‘peras’).162 As Heidegger states emphatically, “Accordingly, spaces receive their essential being from locales and not from “space” ” Ibid. The rest of his essay is concerned with showing how the latter, that is, the (Newtonian) conception of ‘absolute’ space as infinite extension in three dimensions (along with the ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ in space), emerges as a reified abstraction from relative space, or ‘places’.163 It is clear that this basic (Leibnizian) line of thinking, which understands ‘space’ as the interrelation of places (an idea, developed systematically in some of Husserl’s writings as well), is also reflected in the developments in modern physics—in the shift away from classical mechanics, based on Newtonian space, to Einsteinian relativistic space-time. In relation to the theme of this study, what must be emphasized is that the imbricated experiences of finitude that Heidegger uncovers, perhaps despite appearances to the contrary, stem from a modernist perspective,

 Ibid. pp. 354–55.  Ibid. p. 356. 162  Ibid. 163  Cf. Ibid. p. 357ff. 160 161

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when the latter is not reified in the notion of ‘objectivity’ based on unmediated ‘presence’. These manifold, imbricated senses of finitude that Heidegger articulates throughout his writings—in and through the existential analytic, the fine arts, (poetic) dwelling and the (ultimately ethical) demand it places on us to ‘conserve’ and ‘take care of ’ our natural ‘surrounding world’ (Umwelt), based on the realization of our inescapable, historically mediated situatedness in its midst, and thus, its unavailability to rational mastery in pure ‘presence’—involve a double movement of negativity constitutive of the unfolding of modernity. I have characterised this double movement in terms of a constant oscillation between relative and absolute negativity, where each presupposes, instigates and transforms into, the other. We can now see how for Heidegger, the sense of finitude involves the thematization/acknowledgement of this movement qua movement, that is, without reifying it in a ‘closed totality’. In the next chapter, we will see how this movement plays out in the domain of political economy, by turning to Marx’s writings. By reinterpreting Marx’s position in relation to its standard post Marxist critique, which sees, in Marx’s idea of universal history and its culmination in an (unalienated) classless society, the familiar (metaphysical) tendency towards ‘presence’, I will argue for the reopening of the ‘negative potential’ of universality, and with it, rearticulate the possibility of unalienated existence. This would prepare the grounds, in subsequent chapters for a more explicitly political ‘re-staging of the universal’, qua universal in becoming.

Bibliography Ayer, A. J. 1984. Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. New York: Vintage Books. Foltz, Bruce V. 1995. Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2010. The Science of Logic. Trans. and ed. George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. 1956. Zur Seinsfrage. Frankfurt am Main.:Vittorio Klostermann; Reprinted in Heidegger, M. Gesamtausgabe, 9, pp. 385–426. English Translation by Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback, 1958. The Question of Being. New Haven, Conn.: Twayne Publishers.

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Heidegger, M. 1971. …Poetically Man Dwells …. In Poetry, Language and Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Basic Writings, ed. David Farell Krell. San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers. Heidegger, Martin. 1998a. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford, UK, Cambridge, USA: Blackwell Publishers. Heidegger, Martin. 1998b. On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotle’s Physics, BI. Trans. Thomas Sheehan. In Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sheehan, Thomas. 1999. Nihilism: Heidegger/Jünger/Aristotle. In Phenomenology: Japanese and American Perspectives, ed. Burt C. Hopkins, pp. 273–316. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Zimmerman, Michael E. 1986. Implications of Heidegger’s Thought for Deep Ecology. The Modern Schoolman. Vol. 64, Issue 1: 19–43.

6 The Impasse of the Political: Rethinking the Universal

6.1 Transition to the Political Let us recall that the overall theme of our enquiry concerns the possibility of recovering and rearticulating a notion of unalienated existence from within the modernist tradition. This requires that the ‘disenchantment’ and resultant ‘objectivity’ characteristic of modernity is not conceived in a reified sense, where objectivity is reduced to either pure (necessary) ‘universality’ or (contingent) ‘particularity’. This ‘reduction’ to ‘universality or particularity (as the two, at times, mutually exclusive conceptions of reified ‘objectivity’), is the source of the series of impasses that give rise to our sense of alienation with respect to the interrelated domains of nature and (capitalist) society. For, it is the simultaneous disenchantment of both nature and human relations that leads to the emergence of the mutually complementary conceptions of objectified, techno-scientifically mediated and mastered, hence exploitable, nature on the one hand, and capitalist relations of production, ideally suited to its mass-scale exploitation, on the other. In the preceding two chapters, I outlined a critique of this reified, positivistic understanding of nature, first, by underscoring the problems/ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Patnaik, Modernity and its Futures Past, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32107-8_6

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impasses that arise with such an understanding, and then focusing on an alternative mode of disclosure based on the Heideggerian approach to the natural ‘surrounding world’. The latter showed itself to be an implicitly modernist approach (in a non-reified sense of modernity), insofar as it did not advocate ‘overcoming’ alienation via a return either to some (pre-­ modern) sacralized conception of nature, or to some (posited) ‘original’ state of unmediated unity with it. Rather, it took our “alienated” state, in the broad sense of our basic capacity for reflective distancing or transcendence vis à vis the ‘givenness’ of the world, as the very condition for ‘having’/inhabiting that (meaningful) world. I elaborated this idea by bringing to light the irreducible interrelation and mutual transformation between the ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ dimensions of negativity that structure the transcending movement of thought, by tracing it through a representative range of Heidegger’s writings, from his early existential analyses, to the later engagement with Hölderlin’s poetry. In relation to the contemporary environmental debate, from a Heideggerian perspective the opening of an alternative, “unalienated” relation to, or disclosure of, nature, entails neither a return to unmediated, ‘pure’ anthropocentricism, nor to ‘pure’ biocentrism, since both positions stem from a positivistically reduced, or ‘one-sided’ understanding. Rather, our ‘unalienated’ mode of disclosing ‘nature’, from our situatedness in its midst, as our surrounding world (“Umwelt”, “environment”) that we inhabit, irreducibly and simultaneously entails both perspectives. This means that our unalienated existence vis-à-vis nature can only take the form of an acknowledgement of our finitude. The latter again consists in a double movement—our (capacity for) transcendence (absolute negativity) that discloses an intelligible world, and its inevitable re-­ appropriation in and through determinate, historically handed down possibilities of existence (relative negativity), within the historically constituted world, in keeping with our simultaneous ‘being-in’ the world—a movement Heidegger sometimes refers to as our “ek-static standing within the clearing of Being”. However, the ‘recovery’ of unalienated life, through the recovery of a non-reified, non-objectified conception of modernity, can only be realized in the political-economic domain. This entails, in keeping with the complementarity of reified ‘nature’ and reified ‘relations of production’

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under capitalism as two aspects/figurations of reified modernity, that an alternative account of our relation to nature must provide, as its necessary complement, an alternative account of our relations to each other. In the next three chapters I develop this alternative account. Since the most systematic elaboration of the latter is to be found in Marx’s theory, and its further developments are responses to Marx, in the present chapter I turn to Marx’s critique of capitalism, with a view to preparing the ground for explicating this alternative, non-alienated account of our social existence. Yet, insofar as Marx’s position, according to its predominant interpretation, seems to in turn, result in a series of reifications, it seemingly gives rise to the impasse(s) of contemporary politics itself. I outline these impasses afflicting the political, and trace their origin to various interpretations of Marx’s position, and in a broader sense, to the structuring tendencies inherent in modernity, within which Marx’s theory is self-consciously located. The basic impasse of the political (of all contemporary political emancipatory projects) consists in the inevitable oscillation between the merely empirical and the universal—between politics as an endless game of conflicts and hegemonic formations, which constitute merely ‘provisional victories’, and politics as historical ‘progress’ towards a ‘universally’ just and egalitarian society. While both positions have some interpretative basis in Marx’s writings, in the present chapter I show how this structuring tension (between particularity and universality) may be raised to the level of principle—that is, understood dialectically. I defend a certain version of this dialectical conception, which recognizes the irreducible, mutually constitutive relation between particularity and universality, without however, leading to yet another mode of reified totality. I do so by taking up the dialectical movement—the oscillation between the particular and the universal—in its historical becoming. This requires an analysis of Marx’s ‘teleological’dialectical conception of history, while keeping the Hegelian background (particularly with reference to how the notion of “Absolute Knowing”, is to be understood), always in mind. In this context, I turn to contemporary critiques and interpretations of Marx’s conception of history. In this chapter I will focus on Claude Lefort’s critical interpretation in “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another” (1978).

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Through a discussion of this text, initially approaching the issue via Marx’s conception of historical becoming, I argue that for Marx, the reification at the root of our alienated existence under capitalist modernity, is not to be understood as a mask that hides the “real” either as objective-­ universal structures and processes, or as labour. Thus, the political-­ normative project of overcoming (capitalist) alienation, and the realization of unalienated existence, does not entail overcoming reification, in pure presence—in reflective self-coincidence or self-presence, at the “end of history”. The latter conception is the basis of the standard teleological interpretation of Marx’s notion of history, culminating in a society that fully coincides with itself. The conception of a ‘society without antagonisms’, where the ‘object’ and ‘subject’ of history become identical in reflective self-coincidence, has instigated critique directed against its conceptually totalizing, and thus, politically totalitarian tendencies. I suggest that this reading arises due to a failure to keep the notions of alienation and reification sufficiently distinct. Against this, I argue that Marx’s aim is to overcome ‘alienation’, which is specific to capitalist modernity, but not ‘reification’. Rather, Marx’s theoretical aim is precisely to explicate the necessity and inevitability of reification; and thus, his political aim is to find institutional modes of acknowledgement for the processes of reification. For Marx, the political/practical consequences of such explication, consist in the constitution of social-institutional mechanisms through which the necessity and inevitability of reification is reflectively acknowledged, and thus, the deleterious effects flowing from the reified representation, taken at face-value, are rendered “harmless”.1 Having fleshed these claims out, in the next chapter I will discuss the new political-emancipatory possibilities of unalienated existence that they open up, beyond the reduction to reified universality and particularity, by rearticulating the political as ‘universality in becoming’. In the final chapter, I first elaborate this idea in terms of Marx’s conception of what institutional form an unalienated, post-capitalist society would take, before resituating the notion of a universal in becoming, hence the possibility of unalienated existence and unreified modernity, within Adorno’s theoretical discourse concerning a ‘negative dialectics’.  In the sense in which Kant uses the term in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’.

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6.2 The Possibility of Unalienated Existence in Relation to Historical Becoming: Evolutionary Versus Repetitive History Marx’s recognition of ‘alienation’, in all its related modalities, as the central phenomenon of modern capitalist society, provides both the basis for his critique of the latter, as well as the specific form its transcendence must assume. For Marx, ‘alienation’ is symptomatic of the fundamental contradiction inherent in the capitalist mode of production, where the essentially social character of production/labour is not ‘recognized’, insofar as it is appropriated by a particular class, namely, the bourgeoisie. Consequently, at the politico–economic level, the aim of any radical social transformation must be to institutionalize the mechanisms of such ‘recognition’. Since capitalist appropriation and the alienation that results from it, are the direct consequence of private property, insofar as it participates in the creation of surplus value, that is, as private capital, the institutional mechanisms of acknowledgement, that are to overcome alienation, involve the abolition of private capital in favor of its ownership (and the re-appropriation of the surplus it generates), in common. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the retreat of socialist projects around the world, and the seemingly unlimited ascendancy of finance capital on a global scale, Marx’s central thesis—the historical possibility of ‘overcoming’ capitalistic alienation—has been called into question, and indeed, requires reassessment. The philosophical critique(s) of Marx’s understanding of the ‘universal’ dialectical-materialist movement of history, informed by these developments, have generally attribute the latter to the orientation towards absolute (self ) ‘presence’ that seems to govern the telos of a ‘classless society’. To explicate, and then respond this critique, let us first turn to Marx’s conception of history. On the standard account, presented, for instance, in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the movement of history is determined by the periodic, dialectical contradiction between the ‘relations of production’ and the ‘material forces of production’. This contradiction is dialectical, insofar as (1) the ‘relations of production’ and ‘forces of production’ are mutually determining, for any

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stage of historical formation; (2) their coming into conflict provides the impetus for their mutual transformation, hence, historical development. Historical transformation, from one form of society to another, occurs when, at a certain point, the growth of the material productive forces (attributed in part, to technological innovation) can no longer be accommodated within the existing ‘social frame’ of the relations of production, (or in “legal terms”, existing property relations)—the very relations of production that initially provided impetus to the forces of production, and fostered their growth. Thus, at a certain juncture, rather than facilitating the development of productive forces, these relations of production become obstacles to their development. As Marx writes: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.2

 Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd., 1968, pp. 181–82. 2

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To guard against possible misunderstandings, and thereby, to prepare the ground for a critique of the post-Marxist critique directed against Marx’s notion of history, several points need to be emphasized. First, the ‘base’ or the “real foundation of society” is the “totality of the relations of production’ that constitute its economic structure, upon which rests a legal and political ‘superstructure’, “to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness”. The base—superstructure distinction, therefore, does not correspond to the distinction between the “material” ‘forces of production’ and ‘relations of production’. Rather, since the latter itself is the ‘base’, the distinction is internal to the social. It is the “mode of production of material life” and not ‘material life’ in an unmediated sense that conditions higher order “social, political and intellectual life” (such that, it is the “social existence” of human beings that “determines their consciousness”). Second, and in a broader, through closely allied sense, in keeping with the dialectical conception of their relation, the “material” forces of production are constitutively mediated and determined through the “social” relations of production, just as they in turn, come to mediate/determine the latter. For, initially, it is under the ‘social framework’ constituted by the relations of production (for any given historical type of society) that the forces of production develop, before their development can no longer be accommodated within those existing relations of production. This creates the conditions for transformation in the social relations of production—the “economic foundation” or ‘base’—that eventually leads to the transformation in the “immense superstructure” of society—its “legal, political and religious […]” self-understanding, or ‘ideological forms’, through which this conflict is articulated and contested. From both these interrelated points, it follows that even if it must be posited as independent of the social, there is no unmediated access to the ‘real’ either as ‘base’ or as ‘materiality’ “outside” the social. The forces of production and the relations of production irreducibly (dialectically) determine and mediate each other. The significance of these claims will become clear, when I address the various critiques of Marx’s theory. These critiques are directed against two interconnected aspects of Marx’s position—his conception of ‘universal history’—the universal, ideal-objective

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‘law’ (possibility) of historical transformation, based on the dialectical contradiction (realized in the actual coming into conflict) of the relations of production and the forces of production; and that of unalienated (communistic) society, which is to emerge as the culmination and result of this movement, through the transformation/transcendence of capitalism as its immediately preceding social formation. As we shall see, these critiques, aimed at both the ‘process’ and ‘product’ of historical transformation, attribute some form of unmediated access to the ‘real’ qua presence (that is, they attribute a ‘metaphysics of presence’) to Marx’s theoretical system. Is such an attribution justified? To begin with, let us consider Claude Lefort’s analysis and critique of Marx’s notion of history qua ‘process’. In “Marx: From one Vision of History to Another”, Lefort, as the title indicates, attributes two different, and seemingly incompatible, conceptions of historical transformation to Marx—one essentially continuous and evolutionary, and the other, radically discontinuous, and contingent. The first conception is the one I just discussed—based on the constant coming into conflict of the relations of production and forces of production—which in its ideal possibility (or ‘form’) is governed by the dialectical logic of ‘contradiction’ (a reified ‘one-sidedness’ that then necessarily contradicts its constitutively ‘other’, and ‘opposite’ moment). Lefort points to the opening sections of the Communist Manifesto, to illustrate this dialectically structured, ‘universal’ and continuous conception of historical becoming. The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-­ master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.3

 Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, 1968, pp. 35–36. 3

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In the Manifesto, Lefort claims, the history of humanity is understood as “one in time”; there may be pauses and even regressions, but there is always a continuity (of form) underlying the movement of history. Modern bourgeois society is only the most recent manifestation of this singular thread running through all earlier historical social formations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antagonism. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.4

Explicating this continuity in ‘form’ (of class struggle, based on the contradiction between the forces and relations of production), underlying the difference in ‘content’, Marx points to the tremendous growth in the productive forces, due to imperialist expansion and the opening up of ‘new markets’ that was bound to eventually topple the old feudal relations of production. As this ‘revolutionary element’ steadily gathered force within the old feudal order, its relations of production based on the guild system, with its closely guarded skills and techniques, long apprenticeships, and restrictions of membership, could no longer meet the growing demand of new markets,5 and had to eventually give way to small-scale manufacturing.

 Ibid. p. 36.  Marx does not mention here that the character of the ‘trade with the colonies’ was essentially different between the tropical and temperate colonies, and the ‘demand created by new markets’ could be attributed more specifically to the temperate regions. As I noted in the ‘Introduction’, whereas Britain, the leading imperialist power of the time, maintained a trade surplus vis-à-vis the ‘temperate regions of white settlement’, it was able to sustain (by raising local taxes) a huge trade deficit when it came to the tropical colonies. This was due to the climatic specificity of certain natural goods, which could not be grown (or grown in limited quantities) in a temperate environment. It is only when local manufacturing (of cotton cloth, for example) was destroyed, by flooding the market with cheap manufactured cotton cloth, (through the mechanism of procuring free raw cotton, that then sustained the cotton mills of England) that demand in the ‘new markets’ of the East was artificially generated. Of course, once a tropical colony was appropriated and established, it would require a whole range of heavy manufactured goods, from railways to civil engineering works, to fully exploit and administer the territory, giving some impetus to the industrial revolution in the metropole. Yet, figures show that overall, metropolitan countries ran large trade deficits throughout the colonial period (which were sustained through direct and indirect taxation). 4 5

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The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.6

Yet, even simple manufacturing in small-scale workshops, could not meet the demands of ever-expanding capital for long, and came to be replaced by large-scale industrial production. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.7

For Marx, the growth in the forces of production, resulting in the transformation of the feudal relations of production, to modern industrial capitalism, was the result of colonial expansion, both in the tropical and temperate regions. Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.8

I noted that the mechanism of this tremendous expansion of capital during the colonial period was perforce quite distinct in the temperate  Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 1968, pp. 36–37.  Ibid. p. 37. 8  Ibid. 6 7

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and tropical colonies9—a distinction that Marx does not consider here. Further, as I shall elaborate below, the Manifesto understands colonialism, and thus capitalism, in a one-sided manner, in terms of the search for ‘new markets’, and thereby, overlooks the dimension of colonial exploitation through primitive accumulation of capital (through appropriation of natural resources, human beings, and the ‘drain of wealth’), as the root cause of the industrial revolution and the birth of capitalism in Europe. Despite these shortcomings, some of which he addresses in his later writings, Marx indicates here that colonialism, was an intrinsic dimension of the emergence and expansion of capitalism. Yet, an analysis of this relation between capitalism and colonialism, is entirely missing in Lefort’s discussion (and from the analyses of most post-Marxist, and even ‘Western Marxist’ thinkers), resulting in a rather ‘schematic’ and ‘closed’ understanding of Marx’s conception of historical transformation through the ‘conflict’ between the relations and forces of production. This schematic and closed understanding, I shall argue, leads to Lefort’s claim concerning the two incompatible ‘visions of history’ in Marx. To return to Lefort’s argument, the first, structural and continuous conception of history entails that modern capitalist society is intrinsically linked to past formations and can only be understood through them. As Marx indicates, from the growth of the productive forces (through imperialist expansion), it follows that the modern bourgeoisie, and the transformations in the relations of production through which they come into being, “is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange”.10 And yet, this latest iteration of the ‘essential conflict’, that leads to the emergence of new classes and class struggles, is different from all previous historical formations. Structural repetition here involves a specific difference (and  This was due not only to climatic conditions (resulting in much greater diversity and yield of natural goods in the tropical regions), but also due to the vastly different histories and demographics of the two regions. The sparsely populated temperate lands of North America (and parts of Australia and New Zealand) presented ‘new frontiers’ for settlement for Europeans, where local populations were expropriated from their land through extermination and later controlled through the system of reservations. This approach was impossible in highly populated and long settled regions such as the Indian subcontinent (or China), with its vast organized monarchies, and strong cultural and historical identities going back for millennia. 10  Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 1968, p. 37. 9

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not merely the notion of difference that must be logically posited for the very possibility of repetition)—in modern bourgeois society there is a “simplification of class antagonisms”, where society increasingly splits into two opposed, hostile camps, namely, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.11 With this ‘simplification’, due to the emergence and rapid development of the capitalist system, history itself acquires an accelerated rhythm. For Marx therefore, the bourgeoisie, under the capitalist mode of production, “has historically played a most revolutionary part”.12 With its need for ever expanding and new markets, and for constant innovation and “improvement in its instruments of production”, the bourgeoisie ‘tears asunder’ or ‘sweeps away’ all naturalized hierarchical feudal relations (that “bound man to his “natural superiors”), and replaces them with “naked self-interest”; “it resolves personal worth into exchangevalue, and in the place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, introduces a single, unconscionable freedom—free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation”.13 This suggests that compared to every preceding historical social formation, bourgeois society gives rise to a certain reflexivity and transparency regarding social relations. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is

 Ibid.  Ibid. 13  Ibid. p. 38. 11 12

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holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.14

The accelerated rhythm of history ushered in by the bourgeois revolution is characterised by a necessary ‘simplification’ and transparency of (antagonistic) social relations. Moreover, since these are structural features of the capitalistic mode of production, arising from its expansionary logic, they lead to increasingly greater homogenization on a world scale. While in Marx’s day, such expansion and homogenization took the form of colonialism and the direct political control it exerted, in some ways he also anticipates its current neo-liberal manifestation. In a passage that is both prescient, but also flawed in its analysis, he writes: The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

Let us first consider Marx’s views on colonialism in its relation to capitalism, in order to get a sense of the development of Marx’s theoretical understanding, and thereby, to provide a response to Lefort’s analysis. In the Manifesto, Marx still inhabits the Eurocentric (and thus, implicitly imperialistic) perspective, when he distinguishes between “barbarian” (Chinese) and “civilized” (European) nations. Even if, perhaps, there is an element of irony in the use of these terms, it is apparent that they stem from the common, reified conception of enlightenment modernity that provided the normative grounds for the justification of imperialist conquest and exploitation. However, in his later, more mature writings, both in Capital, and particularly, in a series of articles he contributed to the New York Daily 14

 Ibid.

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Tribune (spanning a decade, from 1852 to 1862), Marx revised the one-­ sided, thus incomplete, understanding of colonialism presented here. As the historian Iqbal Hussain points out, this revision was in part, due to his brief from the newspaper, which was to write on contemporary issues ‘outside America’. This forced him (much to his irritation initially, since it took time away from his theoretical studies), to read material specific to the colonized regions and countries of the world, and proved instrumental in his theoretical “incorporation of colonialism as a factor in the genesis and expansion of capitalism”.15 In studying the actual workings of British colonialism in India and China, Marx came to see that it was not the ‘cheap prices of commodities’ that ‘knocked down Chinese walls’, but the opium trade, which was foisted on the Chinese people in order to appropriate goods (tea, silk etc.) not producible in Europe. Tracing the evolution of Marx’s understanding of colonialism and its constitutive role for the development of metropolitan capitalism, historian Irfan Habib shows how Marx comes to grasp its precise mechanism through the link between colonial exploitation and appropriation in India and China, through the opium trade. In effect, Britain appropriated Chinese goods such as tea and silk, in massive quantities, completely gratis. For, the opium trade, monopolized by the East India Company, was a central means of realizing the Indian tribute to Britain.16 As Marx writes in 1853, the British government in India “depends for full one-seventh of its revenue on the sale of opium to the Chinese”.17 Marx provides figures to show the extent of the trade deficit that the imperialist powers were able to sustain vis-à-vis China, by ‘transferring’ the debt to India, and balancing it against China’s trade deficit vis-à-vis India, due to the export of opium and cotton from India to China.  Iqbal Hussain, Prefatory Note, in, Karl Marx on India, ed. Iqbal Hussain, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006, p. xiv. 16  Cf. Irfan Habib, “Introduction: Marx’s Perception of India”, in Karl Marx on India, 2006, p. xxxix. 17  Marx, New  York Daily Tribune, 14th August, 1853, On Colonialism, p.  25. Quoted in, Irfan Habib, “Introduction: Marx’s Perception of India”, in Karl Marx on India, xxxix. Marx is more vehement in denouncing the opium trade, when he points to the “flagrant self-contradiction of the Christian canting and civilization-mongering British government”: “While openly preaching free trade in poison [opium], it secretly defends the monopoly of its manufacture [in India].” Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 25th September, 1858, On Colonialism, pp. 220–21; Quoted in Irfan Habib, Ibid. 15

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Now this balance due to China by England, Australia, and the United States is transferred from China to India, as a set off against the amount due by China to India on account of opium and cotton […] imports from China to India have never yet reached the amount of £ 1,000,000 sterling, while the exports to China from India realized the sum of nearly £10,000,000.18

Britain’s trade deficit vis-à-vis China was thus, indirectly ‘balanced’ through the monopoly over the opium grown in India, which moreover, was obtained gratis, since it was paid for via revenue collected through taxation. In addition, Britain could maintain a substantial trade deficit in direct trade with India, through the same mechanism—based on trade monopoly and taxation. Marx, based on figures obtained from British parliamentary inquiries, asserts that the excess of British imports over exports in relation to India, stands at £2,250,000 in 1855. As he writes in Capital (Vol III), “England simply consumes this tribute without exporting anything in return”.19 Yet, Marx was certainly not alone in grasping the mechanism of colonial appropriation, (and its structural link with the genesis and growth of capitalism in the ‘metropolitan’ countries, and the tremendous explosion of ‘productive forces’ through the industrial revolution it produced there), nor alone in expressing his indignation. Dadabhai Nauroji understood the opium trade along the same lines as Marx, and was ‘equally indignant’; remarking, in his quaintly titled, ‘Poverty and Un-British Rule in India’, “Because India cannot fill up the remorseless drain, China must be dragged in to make it up, even though it be by being ‘poisoned’ […]. The opium trade is a sin on England’s head and a curse on India, for her share of being an instrument.”20 Habib points out that in Capital I (1867), Marx came to understand this ‘drain of wealth’ from the colonies, of which India was an important source, as part of the process of ‘primary (or primitive) accumulation’, which he takes to be a necessary prerequisite for the birth and growth of the  Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 10 October 1859; On Colonialism, pp. 243–44.  Marx, Capital Vol. III, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974, p. 583; quoted in, Irfan Habib, Marx on India, p. xl. 20  Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, p.  190. Quoted in, Habib, Marx on India, p. xl. 18 19

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industrial revolution in Britain.21 Thus, in another (dialectical) ‘reversal’ in the analysis presented in the Manifesto, Marx came to see that ‘primary accumulation’ through colonialism “preced[ed] capitalist accumulation” proper, since it was “not the result of the capitalist mode of production, but its starting point”.22 Yet, such primitive accumulation, or the ‘bleeding process’, as Marx calls it while referring to British colonialism in India, in a letter to F. Danielson in 1881,23 need not be understood in a strictly successive chronological sense, as the cause that ‘precedes’ the ‘effect’, namely, the genesis of industrial capitalism. For, Habib points out, Marx makes clear24 that the two processes went on simultaneously, with the ‘extraction of surplus’ from the (non-capitalist) colonial economies continuing to augment metropolitan industrial capitalism25 (even as those same colonial economies provided fresh markets, much to the detriment of local weavers, artisans etc., for cheap British manufactured goods). As I noted, in restricting himself to the Manifesto (1848), any discussion of Marx’s later analysis of colonialism (in the Tribune articles from 1852 to 1862 and Capital, published in 1867), and the role it plays in the genesis and development of capitalism is entirely missing in Lefort’s interpretation regarding Marx’s two, supposedly incompatible, ‘visions of history’. The point I am making is not however, merely about exegetical scope (although, the latter does raise questions concerning an interpretative approach that provides a static contrast between two works, rather than one that takes the evolution of Marx’s views into account), rather, it is theoretical. If we take into consideration these later, more mature  Marx, Capital Vol. I, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978, p. 704, Cf. Chapter XXXI, “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” pp. 702–712; Cf. Habib, Marx on India, p. xl. 22  Marx, Ibid. p. 667; Quoted in Habib, Ibid., p. xli. 23  What the English take from them [the people of India] annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless to the Hindus, pensions for military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc.,—what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India—speaking only of the value of commodities the Indians have gratuitously and annually to  send over to England—it amounts to more than the total sum of income of 60 million of agricultutral and industrial labourers of India! This is a bleeding process with a vengeance! 21

(Letter to F.  Danielson, 19th February, 1881, Selected Correspondence, pp.  340–41; quoted in Habib, Karl Marx on India, p. xlii) 24  Cf. Capital I, pp. 702–712, 716–724. 25  Habib, Marx on India, p. xli.

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writings, it becomes clear that for Marx, capitalism itself (let alone earlier historical formations) is not simply a ‘closed’ system, within which ‘contradiction’, hitherto contained in a kind of dynamic tension/equilibrium, comes to a head, until it burst it open from ‘within’. Rather, capitalism is constitutively, and continually, dependent on an ‘outside’—however this ‘outside’ may be conceived in different contexts, and at different levels of analysis (primitive accumulation under colonialism, the excess of living over dead labour, dirigiste intervention etc.)—that constantly mitigates the structural effects of the system (even as, at times it also instigates those effects). Further, I am suggesting that it is Lefort’s initial interpretation of the Manifesto, as treating each historical social formation (retrospectively revealed through the analysis of the paradigmatic capitalist one), as a ‘closed’ system that gives rise to his interpretation of Marx’s conception of history itself as a closed, even if processive, system. That is, it gives rise to the idea that in the Manifesto, ‘history’ is conceived as a continuous, and teleologically oriented process, based on the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, resulting in ‘class struggle’ under various guises throughout history (at the empirical level) that finally becomes explicit under capitalism. Once this interpretation is in place, it appears to be in sharp contrast to how Marx conceives historical becoming in the Grunderisse (which Lefort analyses), leading to the thesis of two ‘incompatible’ ‘visions of history’ in Marx—one universal in its form, continuous, and necessary, the other, discontinuous and contingent. Yet the element of contingency, hence, structural non-closure, is not entirely absent in the apparently ‘simplified’, hence transparent, relations of production under capitalism, even in the analysis presented in the Manifesto. I have already underscored the role of colonialism as the constitutive ‘outside’ in the development of capitalism, that is, for the emergence of the bourgeoisie and the tremendous growth in the productive forces outlined in the Manifesto (which Lefort completely ignores). And although, I noted, this analysis of colonialism is incomplete and one-­ sided, insofar as it restricts itself to emphasizing the ‘new markets’ of the colonial economies that are ‘on tap’ for cheap metropolitan manufactured goods (rather than primitive accumulation through colonial exploitation), it still plays a pivotal role in Marx’s understanding of the genesis

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and growth of capitalism. In addition to the ‘structural’ understanding of colonialism as part of the expansionist logic of capitalism, Marx also allows room for inherent, and constitutive, (historical) contingency in the manner in which this (structural) relation actually plays itself out. Thus, for instance, in the Manifesto, we find: The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.26

Surely, contra Lefort, ‘the discovery of America’, the ‘rounding of the Cape’, and even the need for ‘trade with the colonies’, insofar as goods (such as tea, coffee, spices, cotton silk etc.), produced in the tropical and subtropical (colonized) regions are not producible in the colder climes of (colonizing) Europe, cannot be immediately adduced to structural features of capitalism (as a ‘closed’ system). If this fundamental openness to the ‘outside’ (to contingency etc.), even of the capitalist social formation, is kept in mind, then the latter (with its seemingly greater simplicity and transparency of social relations, structural features etc.), is not fundamentally discontinuous with past historical formations (with their naturalized, opaque social relations). Thus, the two notions of historical becoming that Lefort distinguishes are not necessarily incompatible within Marx’s theoretical framework. The structurally universal, and ‘progressive’ (teleologically oriented) conception of history, as moving towards greater simplification, and ultimately, from the perspective of Marx’s political-emancipatory project, towards greater reflective (self ) distancing/‘objectification’; and the notion of history as conditioned by the ‘outside’—by contingency (and thus, at the political level, by hegemony), can, and do, co-exist and mutually condition each other.

 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 1968, p. 36.

26

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Thus, the movement towards greater simplification, homogenization, and transparency in social relations of production under capitalism articulated in the Manifesto, rings true to an extent in our contemporary, ‘globalized’ world.27 Yet, where this movement becomes ‘visible’, such visibility remains limited or partial. For instance, (if the distinction within the unified domain of ‘political economy’, is allowed to stand for the sake of analysis), it becomes partially visible on the economic front, with respect to ‘relations of production’, but not explicitly on the ideological/political one. On the latter front, not only does the hegemony of neo-liberal globalized capitalism continue to prevail, but, I noted, regressive modes of xenophobic nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and racism constantly make their presence felt, sometimes as remnants of pre-­ modernity amidst modernity, and sometimes as forms of reaction and resistance to the homogenizing force of capitalistic modernity. This leads to the fundamental paradox I am attempting to deal with in this study— the apparent simplification and greater transparency in the relations of production (arising from the desacralization/denaturalization of human social relations), does not necessarily result in transparency at the social and political level. On the contrary, as Marx himself shows, renewed forms of opacity (based on renewed modes of reification) constantly spring up,

27

 For instance, Marx and Engels write: The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-­ established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature (Manifesto, p. 39).

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which afflict not only the consciousness of the bourgeoisie, but also that of the proletariat, within capitalist relations of production. Moreover, these modes of reification, as we know, (and as Lefort spells out in another essay), were also transferred (in a kind of social analogue of psychoanalytic ‘transference resistance’) to the self-understanding of erstwhile communist societies. It is by bringing to light the resources within Marx’s theory (primarily based on the notion of commodity fetishism and false consciousness), for the explication of this (apparently) paradoxical situation that I draw a distinction between reification and alienation, and thereby, argue for the possibility of an unalienated society that yet does not succumb to a reified conception of complete and unmediated ‘presence’, in transparent closure. Yet, Lefort articulates the schematic, closed, or dialectically ‘one-sided’ interpretation of the Manifesto, when he writes, “it is one and the same necessity”, based on the simplification and homogenization of the antagonistic relations of production within bourgeois society, through which “not only do religious illusions give way, […] but political ones as well”.28 This leads to reflective transparency, and creates the necessary structural conditions for the proletariat to emerge as a ‘universal class’, that would eventually affect the ‘impending revolution’. There are, undoubtedly, passages in the Manifesto that support this overly schematic interpretation, (and this is not surprising given its status as a ‘manifesto’—a political document meant to serve as a rallying cry, and not an academic disquisition).29 However, through the discussion of colonialism, I have pointed to the dimension of the ‘outside’, of contingency that is present, albeit in an undeveloped manner, even in the Manifesto. This aspect, which Marx develops in his later writings,

 Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 1986, p. 141.  The oft-quoted passage, “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-­ diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (Manifesto, p. 46), seems to be a prime example. On this schematic conception, historical becoming is a teleologically oriented, ‘inevitable’ progression—moving from naïve, opaque (naturalized) essentialism to the reflective transparency of the social, culminating in a ‘classless’ society, where all social antagonisms disappear. Such a society, constituted in and through the ‘universal class’ of the proletariat, would entail, at last, the reflective convergence of human beings as the ‘object’ and ‘subject’ of universal history, and would therefore, be fully present to itself in transparent closure. 28 29

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prevents a ‘reduction’ of his conception of capitalism, and thus, the historical process through which it comes into being, to that of a rationally closed system. Yet, if these complications are overlooked, then it becomes easy to attribute a rationally closed, ‘vision’ of capitalism and history to Marx, and therefore, find a stark contrast, even a ‘contradiction’, with an alternative ‘vision’ (based on the emphasis on contingent factors of social transformation) elaborated elsewhere. Thus, Lefort writes, “[…] there is not a single feature of this account that is not contradicted by Marx himself ”30 and points to “a different way of perceiving history and social life”.31 To elucidate this ‘alternative’ conception, and thereby ground the ‘contradiction’, and thus, incompatibility in the strong sense, Lefort begins with Marx’s analysis of pre-capitalist modes of production in the Grundrisse. Here, it is not the continuity in form of the historical process, based on the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, but its radical discontinuity—“the mutation in humanity” that comes to the fore. What becomes visible in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, is a fundamental break, a ‘mutation in the symbolic order’. The pre-capitalist modes of production that Marx identifies, namely, the ancient, Asiatic and Germanic/feudal, can be understood only in contradistinction to the capitalist mode, such that from our situatedness within capitalist modernity, they are always conceived as “capitalism’s other”.32 In defence of this claim Lefort notes that for Marx, in the Grundrisse, two closely interconnected ‘historic pre-conditions’ must be fulfilled for the emergence of capitalism; (1) There must come into being “free labour and the exchange of this free labour for money, in order to reproduce and realize money”, and (2) “the separation of free labour from the objective conditions of its realization—from the means […] and material for labour”.33 Lefort understands the historic separation of labour from its material conditions of realization (its availability as ‘free labour’, and

 Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 1986, p. 141.  Ibid. 32  Ibid. 33  Marx, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 471. 30 31

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transformation to wage labour through its abstract representation as commodity/exchange-value, that is, as ‘labour-power’), as the moment of radical discontinuity or ‘mutation’ in the historical process, which drives a wedge between all pre-capitalist societies and capitalism. In the former, the social relations of production are such that labour is not only inseparable from its “material presuppositions, but also, by virtue of this fact, is not determinable as such”.34 That is, labour qua “labour” emerges as a historical category, along with that of the (individual) worker (who ‘owns’ and thus, sells her ‘labour-power’ as a commodity on the market), only with the advent of capitalist relations of production. Consequently, although we deploy concepts such as ‘labour’ and ‘labourer’ in relation to pre-capitalist social relations, we do so only insofar as our situatedness within capitalism allows us to ‘retrospectively’ discern and posit “some activity called labour and some human beings called laborers” in those societies.35 If, as Marx clearly states, “The positing of the individual as a worker, in this nakedness, is itself a product of history”,36 then, Lefort asks, what was the status of those who toiled in the past, “those who were labourers without being labourers—or who were not identified as such?”37 For Marx, in every pre-capitalist form of social relations of production, they were closely bound to the land, which constituted their “natural workshop”. In whatever manner this relation to the land was socially mediated—as small land holdings under the ancient and feudal forms, or as communal land ownership under the Asiatic form, the “worker” was related to the “objective conditions of his labour as to his property” that is, there was a “natural unity of labour with its material presuppositions”.38 Human beings did not have a separate identity as “labourers”, since their labour itself was not wholly separated from the natural environment— the land, which was both their dwelling place, and furnished the raw materials and means for expending their labour.39  Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 1986 p. 142.  Ibid. 36  Marx, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 473. 37  Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 1986 p. 142. 38  Marx, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 471. 39  Cf. Lefort, p. 142. 34 35

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On the one hand then, each individual understood himself/herself as the proprietor/master of the objective conditions of their labour, and therefore, understood his/her relation to others as co-proprietors. The latter relation, depending on the particular social form through which it was mediated, could have different modalities. If the communal form preceded as the legitimating condition of property, then others as coproprietors appeared “[…] as so many incarnations of common property”40 (as with the Asiatic form). If, however, the commune was more loosely constituted through individual families and their small holdings, then they appeared as relatively independent co-proprietors, and ‘communal property’ was posited as “existing alongside” (rather than incorporating) independent property owners. In the latter modality, “Individual property does not appear mediated by the commune; rather, the existence of the commune and of communal property appear as mediated by, i.e. as a relation of, the independent subjects to one another”.41 This was true of the Roman ‘ager publicus’,42 which was embodied in the state (and often existed only in the legal imaginary, as a limit to the land that could be held by wealthy citizens), and of its Germanic variant, where it existed as a “complement to individual property” (in the form of common land for hunting, grazing and timber).43 In both forms of mediation, Marx writes, “the individuals relate not as workers but as proprietors—and members of a community, who at the same time work”.44 Moreover, ‘work’ is not oriented and governed by the creation of ‘surplus value’, rather, its aim is sustenance—of the individual land owner and his family, and of the community.45 From these foregoing passages in the Grundrisse, Lefort draws the following conclusion: Marx’s analysis immediately brings to light the fact that labour is not at the origin of property. To imagine that it had this priority would be to grant a status to labour and its agent the labourer, to assign them a real identity,  Marx, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 471.  Ibid. pp. 483–84. 42  Ibid. 43  Ibid. 44  Ibid. p. 471. 45  Ibid. pp. 471–72. 40 41

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which they acquire only within capitalism itself. On the contrary, it must be understood that property is the precondition of labour.46

This assertion is somewhat ambiguous, insofar as it seems to equivocate between ‘labour’ as an activity and the ‘labourer’ as the agent of such activity, and both as distinct, explicitly socially recognized categories or ‘Identities’. The former, it is clear, must exist throughout human history, even as it is mediated through the various forms of social relations of production that are discernible in the past. Marx is explicit on this point in Capital I: “So far therefore, as labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life”.47 Thus, it is only “labour” as a socially recognized category/identity, that is, “free labour”—that, for Marx, emerges with the advent of the capitalist mode of production. Lefort, continues in a manner that does nothing to stave off this ambiguity in his use of the terms, ‘labour’ and ‘labourer’. To affirm that property is the precondition of labour implies, therefore, that human beings labour only in so far as they participate (in whatever way) in the community, in the communal property. Considering the phenomenon of the tribal community—that form which, when modified, will give rise to the Asiatic, Ancient and feudal modes of production— Marx explains: “Each individual has the status of proprietor or possessor only as a member of the community. The real appropriation through the labour process happens under these presuppositions, which are not themselves the product of labour, but appear as its natural or divine presuppositions.” And just before this, he remarked: “the clan community, the natural community, appears not as a result of, but as a presupposition for the communal appropriation (temporary) and utilization of the land”.48

 Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 1986, p. 143.  Marx, Capital Vol. I, 1978, p. 50. 48  Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 1986, p. 143 46 47

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Whereas the sentences from Marx that Lefort cites are relatively clear and unambiguous, his own interpretation of them is not. It is undoubtedly true that human ‘living’ labour is ordinarily realized within a certain social frame (but one can always imagine a Robinson Crusoe—like situation, as Marx does, where it is not),49 and thus, its meaning is socially mediated. The particular form this mediation (of living labour and its ‘meaning’) takes, depends on the various types of social relations of production that were historically extant, that is, ‘communal’ relations in the strong or weak sense, across the tribal, Asiatic, ancient and feudal forms that Marx distinguishes. However, from this it does not necessarily follow that “[…] human beings labour only in so far as they participate (in whatever way) in the community, in the communal property” (my italics). This might be de facto and generally the case, but has no de jure force (as the term ‘only’ seems to imply). For Lefort’s assertion to have de jure force, which, it seems, he intends it to have, requires that it be understood as referring to the meaning that the term ‘labour’ had in the past, and not to labour as ‘living labour’ or human activity. For Marx, it is this ‘meaning’ that is necessarily socially mediated, although it remains implicit qua meaning in pre-capitalist social relations/formations—insofar as those relations/formations are naturalized, sacralised etc.—and emerges explicitly as a category only under capitalism. Thus, it is one thing to say that ‘labour’ as a distinct and explicit concept, category etc., is absent (or has a different meaning-status) in pre-­ capitalist societies, and its ‘meaning’ is completely determined by the social form—in this case, communal property relations—within which it is realized; and quite another to say that labour(ing) itself, necessarily requires communal property relations as its pre-condition. Nor do the passages Lefort cites from Marx support the latter claim. When Marx writes that “The real appropriation through the labour process happens under these presuppositions [of membership of the community/communal property relations], which are not themselves the product of labour, but appear as its natural or divine presuppositions.”,50 he simply states that

49 50

 See for instance, Capital Vol. I, 1978, p. 81.  Marx, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 472.

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the ‘labour process’ (qua activity) in fact occurs, under the social form of ‘community’ (which is not seen as social, but imbued with a transcendent status). Since actual labouring activity, as a matter of fact, generally occurs under certain social relations of production in each historical epoch (including that of capitalism), it does not ‘produce’ those social relations. Or, more precisely, for Marx, labour qua activity, does not ‘produce’ these social relations (since it ‘presupposes’ them) in any immediate manner, but eventually it leads to their transformation through a process of the accumulation of ‘dead’ labour in the development of the productive forces. However, the existing social relations (for each historical formation), within which labouring activity occurs, appear as its transcendent (naturalized or sacralised) framework (the second quote from Marx says the same thing). This irreducibility and interrelation between labouring activity and its socially mediated expression/representation, is reflected in Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production—in the fundamental distinction between qualitatively different and varied types of concrete labour, and their quantitative, abstract expression, in the exchange-value of commodities (where the latter is, in part, determined by the exchange-value/price of the average, socially useful labour-time embodied in the commodity). Indeed, it is the transformation of the qualitative into quantitative (through abstraction from the former) that first makes these qualitatively distinct types of labouring activity and their products comparable, and thereby, makes their (proportionately) ‘equivalent exchange’ possible. This same irreducible interrelation between living labour and its social expression/meaning holds for all social formations/relations of production.51 As we know (and I will discuss shortly) from Marx’s analysis of the necessary transformation of living labour into dead/accumulated labour in the commodity, and its reification in the form of the latter (as exchangevalue), and thus, his analysis of commodity fetishism, the process of ‘naturalization’, whereby (historically generated) social relations between human beings, ‘appear’ as if they were ‘real’ or ‘natural’ properties of  See, for instance, Wage Labour and Capital, p. 74.

51

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‘things’, holds equally for the capitalist economy, insofar as it is in turn, reified as a ‘closed’ system of circulation. That is, when it is understood precisely as a system of merely ‘equivalent exchange’, where the surplus generated by living over dead labour, or the primitive accumulation of capital under colonialism (through the appropriation, completely gratis, of material resources and the surplus produced by living labour in the colonies, again disguised as ‘free trade’, or ‘equivalent exchange’), remains hidden. Further, as Žižek and others have pointed out, the capitalist frame itself (in its present neo-liberal form) comes to be naturalized, insofar as it acquires complete ideological hegemony, and is not seen as a historically generated (contingent) social formation.52 Consequently, Lefort’s claim concerning the “alternative” vision of history in Marx, where instead of steady, teleological progression, there is a radical discontinuity between (pre-modern) pre-capitalist and (modern) capitalist social formations, must account for this ‘continuity’ based on the ‘renaturalization’ of the capitalist social relations, (in what amounts to a ‘determinate negation’). I will elaborate this point in the next chapter. Lefort’s equivocation between living labour and its (socially mediated) ‘meaning’ (which emerges as a separate category only with capitalism), plays a dual, and complementary role in his argument. On the one hand, it serves to emphasize the priority of the ‘symbolic’ (community) over the ‘real’ (living labour); thereby providing the basis for the ‘alternative’ vision of history, through the claim that in the latter, there is a break/ discontinuity between two symbolic orders—that of (pre-modern) ‘community’ and (modern) ‘capitalism’ (rather than a steady, continuous progression from one to the other, through the contradiction between forces and relations of production). On the other, it serves to distil contingency itself out of the ‘symbolic’ order (social relations of production), as a series of sperate, independent factors (wars, migrations, geographical conditions etc.) for the emergence of different modes of production—the  The ethical-normative basis of capitalism is also therefore, understood naturalistically, in social contract theory, with its posited point of departure in an original ‘state of nature’. Its contemporary liberal-democratic and economic variants, such as the Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’, or ‘rational choice theory’ (going back to Adam Smith), also presuppose (the ahistorical notion of ) the ‘individual’, as ‘naturally’ and primarily inclined towards realizing his/her own self-interest. 52

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Asiatic, ancient, Germanic—within the overarching communal form (common to all these modes of production). This separation again serves to set up the contrast/incompatibility between the two ‘visions’, since in the alternative, discontinuous ‘vision’ of history, each modality of community, coming into being through various contingent factors, is not generated from an earlier form through internal contradiction. On both these counts, my counterarguments with respect to Lefort’s interpretation have emphasized, mostly in a negative manner so far, the inner, structural continuity, and compatibility, between the two conceptions of history he distinguishes in Marx. I have tried to show that (1) capitalist social relations of production, as a meaningful (symbolic) order, tend to be reified/naturalized, in a manner analogous (though not identical) to past social formations; (2) contingency is intrinsic to the genesis and development of capitalism (as exemplified through the mechanism of primitive accumulation through colonialism), just as it is for past social formations. From these two points, (3) it follows that the structural features of historical transformation, that is, ‘universal history’, and historically contingent factors, need not be necessarily incompatible.

6.3 The ‘Other’ Vision of History: The Communal Form and Its Repetition in the Asiatic, Ancient and Germanic Modes of Production If we are to flesh these claims out, we must engage more closely with Lefort’s interpretations of the Asiatic, ancient, and Germanic/feudal modes of production in the Grundrisse, which form the basis for the ‘alternative conception of history’ he finds in Marx. The argument that Lefort offers in support of this alternative, and incompatible conception, stemming from an understanding of historical change as essentially discontinuous and contingent, is that although Marx begins with the description of the tribal, or ‘clan’ community form, with the intention of tracing the emergence of more complex social formations, ‘with their own specific characteristics’ on its basis, his analysis ends up showing that

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“the ‘communal character’ is preserved in the passage from one form to the other”.53 This would imply that all pre-modern, pre-capitalist social formations are, despite variations, essentially of the same type (involving the communal form/property relations) and therefore, there is a fundamental continuity across variants. It is only with the advent of capitalism that the communal form and its property relations, disappear, and are replaced by bourgeois property relations. This is the source of discontinuity in the supposedly universal, teleologically determined historical process, based on the contradiction between relations and forces of production. Explicating the ‘intrinsic continuity’ between past (pre-capitalist) social formations (and essential discontinuity with capitalism), Lefort notes that for Marx, the Asiatic ‘despotic’ form emerges as a ‘modification’ of the small tribal community form. In the Asiatic form, the “comprehensive unity” of the community separates itself off from all the small communities and comes to ‘stand over or above them’. Yet, this higher, overarching unity is not external to the (implicit) unity of the particular organic communities, but its displaced (explicit) representation—the “projected image of unity” embodied in the despot—who appears as a ‘father’ to the particular communities. The figure of the ‘despot’ functions both as the incarnation and representation of this projected, ‘imagined’ unity, insofar s/he derives his/her (symbolic) legitimacy not from his/her own person, but from the “imagined clan being, the God”.54 Since the dialectic between the ‘real and the imaginary’ plays out in the figure of the despot—the despot both represents and incarnates the unity of the community—s/he acquires the status of being the sole proprietor of communal property, and the small communities become only ‘hereditary possessors’, while individuals become, “in fact, propertyless”. Or more precisely, “[…] property, i.e., the relation of the individual to the natural conditions of labour and of reproduction as belonging to him, as the objective, nature-given inorganic body of his subjectivity—appears mediated for him through a cession by the total unity—a unity realized

53 54

 Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 1986, p. 144.  Marx, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 473.

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in the form of the despot, the father of the many communities—to the individual, through the mediation of the particular commune”.55 In the Asiatic form there is a doubling of the unity of the community, which ‘splits’ into the immediate unity of the particular (village) community, and the overarching unity of which it is a part, represented/ embodied in the despot. In a corresponding manner, from the perspective of the individual member of the community, there is a doubling of the mediation of communal property—first through the higher community, and then the immediate community to which he/she belongs. Under these conditions, the surplus product produced by labour, belongs in part, to the higher community, in the form of tributes etc. and in part, to the immediate, small communities, which are relatively self-sufficient and independent, insofar as they “contain all the conditions of reproduction and surplus production within themselves”.56 This type of arrangement, flowing from the splitting/doubling of the unity of the communal form, admits more democratic or more despotic variations. In the former case, these particular small communities exist in relative self-sufficiency, where they “vegetate independently alongside one another, and where, inside them, the individual with his family work independently on the lot assigned to them”.57 In the latter, the labouring activity and the surplus it produces, may be wholly appropriated by the ‘higher unity’—the despot. This ‘communality of labour’ produces the massive architectural works of antiquity. Marx, with the mention of the ‘aqueducts of the orient’ suggests that it is the change in the relations of production, from the small, independent tribal clans to the Asiatic form that releases forces of production on a scale that is simply not possible within tribal social forms. I will come back to this point. Marx is quite explicit in asserting that the second form, namely, the ancient (Roman) model, despite containing “essential modifications brought about locally, historically”, and being “a product of a more active historic life”, compared to the Asiatic mode, like the latter, “[…] also

 Ibid.  Ibid. 57  Ibid. 55 56

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assumes the community as its first presupposition […]”.58 Yet, here membership to the commune, does not entail, as in the Asiatic form, that individual members are mere ‘accidents’ (or ‘natural component’ parts) of the community as the underlying and unifying ‘substance’. Further, instead of the small village communities that ‘vegetate alongside each other’ in the Asiatic mode, the locus of the community in the ancient model is the town, and the cultivated land “appears as the ‘territorium’ belonging to the town”.59 The only obstacle that the community, with its locus in the city and its territory, faces, is from other communities, which had either previously occupied the land, or aim to occupy it. Therefore, war becomes “the great comprehensive task, the primary communal labour”60 of these communities, in order to continue their occupation of the land. The whole community and its relations are organized towards this end—from the defensive ‘concentration of residences in the cities, the social differentiation (slavery etc.) that emerges with the assimilation of subjugated clans, to the differentiation of communal property into state-property (ager publicus) and private property. With respect to property relations, communal property, in the form of state-property (ager publicus) becomes distinct from the individual’s property, such that the latter is not merely an embodiment of communal property, where the individual is only the ‘possessor’ (Besitzer) of communal property. Rather, ‘private property’, while still mediated through communal property, has its own distinct status, and the mediation through the community takes the form of a “negative unity towards the outside”,61 towards, that is, external threats posed by other communities. Explicating the nature of such mediation, which allows the existence of relatively independent, self-sustaining peasants with their small land holdings, Marx writes:

 Ibid. p. 474.  Ibid. 60  Ibid. 61  Ibid. p. 475. 58 59

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Membership in the commune remains the presupposition for the appropriation of land and soil, but, as a member of the commune, the individual is a private proprietor. […].62 Property is quiritorium, of the Roman variety; the private proprietor of land is such only as a Roman, but as a Roman he is a private proprietor of land.63

With respect to the manner in which the ancient form of communally mediated private proprietorship, where the community appears as a ‘negative unity’ in the face of external threats, arises historically, Marx emphasizes contingent factors such as migration and war.64 Here Lefort points out that while the Asiatic and the ancient social forms are of the same type—based on the communal order, Marx makes no attempt to derive one from the other (via the ‘inner contradiction’ of an earlier form), or even establish any direct relation between them. Rather Marx merely remarks that the second form is the product of a ‘more active historic life’, where tribal life is transformed due to various contingent factors, such as wars for the ‘preservation or occupation’ of territories, and migrations. All these factors imply, Lefort asserts, “that geography determines, in part, the chances of historical development”.65 Further, the status of the individual as property owner, I noted, is dependent on their membership to the community, that is, their status as ‘citizens’ of a state. As Lefort puts it, the independence of the private property owner “[…] derives from an original state of dependence which he has not produced but which attests to the power of a transcendent entity. In the words of Marx himself, ‘this belonging [is] mediated by his being a member of the state, by the being of the state—hence by a presupposition regarded as divine’”.66 However, I have discussed how both these dimensions—the ‘contingent’ and the ‘transcendent’—that Lefort emphasizes in relation to Marx’s  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 476. 64  Cf. Ibid. p. 475. 65  Lefort, p. 145. 66  Lefort, p. 146. 62 63

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analysis of the ‘ancient’ model, are not entirely absent in Marx’s analysis of capitalist modernity. Rather (as I will argue in greater detail in the next section), they reappear and reconfigure themselves in various forms and levels within capitalism, even considered as a ‘closed’ system, and indeed, are constitutive of the latter. On the one hand then, the contingencies of war and migration, (such that ‘geography’ plays a role in ‘historical development’), are at least in part, shaped by the need to appropriate scarce, and unevenly distributed natural resources (more fertile land, access to water etc.). This is as true of the ancient model as it is of capitalism. Marx hints at this function that war has within the ‘ancient’ communal form, when he writes, “War is therefore the great comprehensive task, the great communal labour which is required either to occupy the objective conditions of being there alive, or to protect and perpetuate the occupation” (my italics).67 Therefore, ‘contingency’ in the context of historical change does not necessarily mean arbitrariness. On the other hand, I noted that the structural conditions of such appropriation of nature, as the ‘inorganic body’ of the labouring ‘subject’ under the communal form (relations of production) that comes to constitute its seemingly ‘transcendent’ or ‘divine’ presuppositions, reappear in modernity in a transformed sense—through the reification of capitalist relations of production, either in the commodity form, or more generally, in the renaturalization of the capitalist frame itself (including its normative underpinnings). Let us reiterate that these two points suggest that contingent and structural factors are mutually conditioning in the actual processes of historical change, and that this holds for both pre-capitalist and capitalist social formations. Thus, Lefort’s contention of two incompatible conceptions of history in Marx, can only be maintained on the basis of a highly schematic, closed interpretation of ‘universal’ history, which he finds in the Manifesto. While this schematic notion does find echoes in the latter text (which, after all, was not intended as an academic exercise, but had a practical, political aim), we saw that the element of (non-arbitrary) contingency, in the form of colonial expansion and exploitation (albeit not

67

 Marx, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 474.

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fully worked out at that stage) is central to Marx’s analysis of the genesis and growth of capitalism. Let us turn to Lefort’s critical discussion of the third form of community and communal property relations, namely, the Germanic form. I will then address his point that in the Grundrisse, Marx does not attempt to derive one social form from another based on the ‘inner contradiction’ within the previous form. This is central to Lefort’s argument concerning the alternative conception of historical change—one that is contingent and discontinuous. For Lefort, this discontinuity emerges at a singular point—the ‘radical break’ between the various pre-modern communal forms of social relations and capitalist modernity. For, all the various types that Marx distinguishes (Asiatic, Ancient and Germanic) stand on an equal footing, insofar as they fall under the communal form, (where private property is, at best, subservient to community), and one form is not thought of as a ‘higher’ form, derived from a preceding ‘lower’ one. These pre-capitalist forms then, stand in stark contrast to capitalist modernity, where private property (either as capital or labour-power), seemingly emerges as a self-standing category. For Marx, the Germanic form of community is more loosely organized than either the Asiatic or ancient forms. Among the Germanic tribes, whose individual clans historically settled in isolated pockets in the forest, separated by ‘long distances’, the sense of communal identity is “posited in their ancestry, language, common past and history, etc.”,68 and realized in the actual ‘periodic gathering together’ of its members. Thus, unlike the Asiatic form, where individuals appear merely as ‘accidents’ of the communal ‘substance’, embodied in the king, or the ancient form, where the commune exists in the institution of the state, and is realized in the city, in the Germanic form, the commune has no independent substantive representation or existence. Rather, it comes into being only in the actual, periodic gathering together of individual land owners. Among the Germanic tribes, “The commune thus appears as a coming-­together [Vereinigung], not as a being-together [Verein]; as a unification made up of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a unity”.69  Ibid. p. 484.  Marx, p. 483.

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Despite this loose, ‘bottom up’ understanding of community, realized in the periodic gathering of private proprietors, communal property (ager publicus) still exists, in the form of common ‘hunting, grazing and timber land’. Yet it does not exist, as in the ancient (Roman) form, as a modality of ‘the economic existence of the state’, such that private proprietorship is determined only in its exclusion from the use of the ager publicus.70 Rather, in the Germanic form, the latter appears merely as “a complement to individual property, a form in which a common identity is ­represented in the face of the enemy”. Thus, rather than private proprietorship being mediated through the commune, the latter appears mediated through individual private property, and each individual household, appears economically self-subsistent—“an independent center of production for itself ”.71 Once again, Lefort underscores, (1) the common thread running through the three forms, namely, that they are variants of the communal form, and (2) that there is no attempt to derive one mode of production/ property from another, as “a historical solution to the contradiction of a previous formation […]”.72 Based on these two observations, Lefort finds the two different ‘schemata’ of history in Marx—the one ‘evolutionary’ (thus continuous), governed by the growth of productive forces that eventually brings them into conflict with the existing relations of production; and the other ‘repetitive’, (thus discontinuous), governed by the primacy of (the pre-modern) communal form (as the form common to the three ‘variants’), and its rupture with the advent of capitalism.73 As I mentioned, Lefort’s central argument for the two distinct and incompatible ‘schemata’ of history in Marx, hinges on the one hand, on his insistence on the primacy of the symbolic (social relations of production), and, on the other, on the strict separation and isolation of contingent elements (based on local historical, geographical factors, such as wars, migrations, conquests etc.), from the symbolic order. This leads to his thesis of the two concepts/schemata of history—since, (1) the  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 484. 72  Lefort, p. 147. 73  Ibid. pp. 148–49. 70 71

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primacy of the symbolic order entails that the ‘big break’ (or ‘mutation in the symbolic’) occurs between pre-modern communal forms (which, despite variations, are essentially all the ‘same’), and modern capitalism; (2) The separation of contingency, entails that it is understood as mere arbitrariness, and this in turn, entails that there is no steady growth of productive forces responsible for historical change (through change in the relations of production), but only arbitrary factors such as war and migration. This strict separation, based on the reduction, on the one side, to the symbolic, and on the other, to contingency qua arbitrariness, becomes clearly visible, when, speaking of the first of the two schemata (‘evolutionary’ and ‘repetitive’)—where the growth of productive forces eventually come into conflict with, and dissolve, the existing relations of production, Lefort writes: Nevertheless, […] the autonomy granted to this factor [the growth of productive forces] —even though it is supposed to include demographic expansion— seems to contradict the key idea that production remains subordinate to socio-natural conditions, to the existence of the community which mediates the relationship to the land; […], it seems to contradict the idea that the consequences of production are conditioned by the communal form: ‘The original conditions of production (or, what is the same, the reproduction of a growing number of human beings through the natural process between the sexes …) cannot themselves originally be products— results of production.’ Now these ‘original’ conditions, such as they have been defined, do not cease to be determinant while the development of the productive forces continues. What this development modifies, let us repeat, is the particular arrangement of social relations, not the communal form. Is it this difficulty which induces Marx to put forward another factor of change? Whatever the reason may be, he gives a preponderant role at times to migration and war. The latter are events which acquire, in Marx’s interpretation, a symbolic function, in the sense that they signify the instability of human beings, a trait as primordial as their rootedness in the community and the land.74

 Ibid. p. 149.

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However, what Lefort terms a ‘contradiction’, between the “autonomy” granted to the productive forces, and the conditions of production—in this case, the communal form, is from a dialectical point of view, not really a ‘contradiction’ (in the traditional sense of the excluded middle), but their mutual dependence and determination. Or more precisely, it only appears as a ‘contradiction’ in the traditional logical sense, when the two elements are conceived, as existing separately and independently of each other (that is, in a dialectically one-sided, or reified manner). Yet, Marx, in keeping with his dialectical understanding, never grants “autonomy” to productive forces, but explicitly and consistently maintains (including in the Manifesto), that they develop within the existing relations of production, before, at some point, coming into conflict with them, and transforming them (through the emergence and establishment/consolidation of new classes, new relations of production). Further, Lefort, in keeping with his desire to maintain the primacy of form, understands the (pre-capitalist) ‘conditions of production’ in terms of the communal form that constitutively mediates all production and therefore cannot itself be ‘produced’. Yet, when he cites Marx to this effect, the passage includes as part of the “original conditions of production”, not only the communal form, but also contingent, though precisely, non-arbitrary, factors such as “the reproduction of a growing number of human beings through the natural process between the sexes […]”. Demographic expansion must surely depend on periods of sustained surplus production, relative stability, peace etc. Even though Lefort mentions “socio-natural” conditions, the emphasis remains on ‘communal form’, and therefore, the constitutive role of non-arbitrary contingent factors that Marx allows as part of ‘original conditions of production’, is side-lined. In keeping with this overemphasis on ‘form’, Lefort asserts that the development of productive forces (within the communal form), affects “the particular arrangement of social relations, not the communal form”, and asks, “is it this difficulty that induces Marx to put forward another [independent] factor of change?”, namely war and migration. Thus, he suggests that the latter are additional, independent factors of change. With this, Lefort effects the separation and isolation of ‘form’ and contingent (arbitrary) factors that he projects onto Marx’s text. What such a

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‘projection’ overlooks is, on the one hand that the change in the ‘arrangement of social relations’ brought about by the growth of productive forces, is not insignificant, even within the general communal form. The transformation from small, independent tribal communities to the overarching unity represented in the ‘despot’ in the Asiatic communal relations of production, for instance, releases productive forces on a scale (large architectural irrigational works, roads etc.) that would simply not have been possible at the level of tribal communal production. On the other, war and migration, rather than merely signifying “primordial traits” of human beings—their ‘instability’ and ‘rootedness’ in the land, also signify the (non-arbitrary) need to defend and appropriate resources (such as fertile land, water etc.) to ensure the survival and growth (both biological and material) of a particular community. Therefore, they need not be simply ‘additional’ factors, but are intrinsic to the growth of productive forces. Lefort cites Marx to show that war “seems to be no less decisive a factor of change for sedentary peoples”.75 Yet, he is so keen to maintain the separation (and primacy) of the symbolic domain/form from the historically contingent (such that war is understood as an additional, independent, and arbitrary factor of change) that he misreads (or, at least, selectively reads) the passage. The only barrier which the community can encounter in relating to the natural conditions of production—the earth—as to its own property … is another community, which already claims it as its own inorganic body. Warfare is therefore one of the earliest occupations of each of these naturally arisen communities, both for the defence of their property and for obtaining new property.76

In interpreting this passage, Lefort asserts: However, this kind of language does not resolve the difficulty. The idea that a community perceives and deals with the enemy as if it were its own inorganic body implies that, in spite of the results of conquests and of new  Ibid.  Marx, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 491.

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conflicts liable to break up an existing structure, history continues to play itself out on the same symbolic level (my italics).77

Here the misreading is obvious. Marx asserts that the ‘only barrier a community can encounter’, in relating to its ‘natural conditions of production’, that is, the earth as its own property or ‘inorganic body’, is another community which claims ‘it’ (the same piece of earth/land) as its own property/inorganic body. Thus, warfare becomes the ‘earliest occupation’ of these communities (war as communal labour), through which they seek to both defend their existing property and appropriate new property. However, Lefort understands ‘it’ as referring to the enemy (and not the land), and thus, asserts that for Marx, “The idea that a community perceives and deals with the enemy as if it were its own inorganic body implies that […] history continues to play itself out on the same symbolic level”.78 Lefort then concludes, “Marx describes this symbolic level so forcefully that the distinction he makes between the two kinds of history—evolutionary and repetitive  — ends up coinciding with the distinction between pre-capitalism and capitalism”.79 Marx however, is quite explicit in stating that “Property thus originally means no more than a human being’s relation to his natural conditions of production as belonging to him […]”, and further that “[…] property in land and soil includes its organic products”, such that, he adds parenthetically, “If human beings themselves are conquered along with the land and soil as its organic accessories, then they are equally conquered as one of the conditions of production, and in this way arises slavery and serfdom, which soon corrupts and modifies the original forms of all communities, and then itself becomes their basis.”80 Even if not every argument Lefort offers hinges on this misreading (or selective reading) of a particular passage, I have provided sufficient grounds for bringing into question his overall interpretation and critique of Marx’s position—the claim that it contains two, ultimately irreducible  Lefort, p. 150.  Ibid. 79  Ibid. 80  Marx, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 491. 77 78

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(and irreconcilable) conceptions of history. Yet, as Marx hints in the passage quoted above, early nomadic forms of community do evolve through (‘contingent’) wars over land and resources into more complex and inegalitarian (‘symbolic’) communities, characterised by slavery and serfdom. Thus, from a dialectical perspective, these two conceptions (repetitive and evolutionary) of history are not irreducible because they are mutually exclusive, rather they are irreducible precisely because they must be mutually constitutive. In attempting to maintain a strict demarcation between the symbolic and the contingent, Lefort succumbs to the very tendency he identifies in Marx’s ‘evolutionary’ (teleological) conception of history, namely, the tendency towards ‘presence’. This tendency amounts to the enactment of the dialectical movement (rather than its acknowledgment qua movement) that comes to rest (tends towards reification) in either one of its terms in a reductive sense, or in irreducible, but ‘irreconcilable’ duality (and therefore, must begin ever anew).81 If our claim concerning the dialectical, co-constitutive relation between the ‘repetitive’ and ‘evolutionary’ conceptions of history is correct, it would follow that these two conceptions do not ‘coincide with the distinction between pre-capitalism and capitalism. However, there is one point which Lefort raises that I have not sufficiently addressed—the seeming lack of any attempt by Marx in the Grundrisse to show that one communal form follows from another, based on ‘inner contradiction’. I have argued that this is a highly schematic understanding of history, which Marx complicates (with considerations of colonialism—of the ‘constitutive ‘outside’), even as he apparently puts it forward in the  We find the same tendency towards separating and prioritizing the ‘symbolic’ from the ‘real’/ contingent elsewhere in Lefort’s critique of Marx and Marxism. Thus, in arguing against the ‘Marxist interpretation’ by emphasizing “the mutation in the symbolic order” (the emergence of the ‘symbolic qua symbolic’) he again seems to forget the dialectical unity between the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘real’, thereby, enacting the very logic of reification (dialectical ‘one-sidedness’) he attacks in Marx. He writes, “The ultimate consequence of this event [mutation] is nothing less than the separation of the civil society from the state. Now to appreciate this fully one would have to reject the thesis which governs the Marxist interpretation and admit that the modern state, far from being a product of capitalism, created its conditions of development by ensuring the possibility of relatively autonomous relations of production and exchange” (Lefort, The Logic of Totalitarianism, p. 279). However, at the same time, he clearly recognizes the irreducible unity (dialectic) between the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘real’ in his own claims concerning democracy. “Democracy combines these two apparently contradictory principles: on the one hand, power emanates from the people, on the other, it is the power of nobody. And democracy thrives on this contradiction” (Ibid.). 81

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analysis of capitalism in the Manifesto. Moreover, let us note in passing that the ‘evolutionary’ schema, based on the ‘derivation’ of one mode from another, does not entail a ‘stagist’ conception, since the different pre-­modern modalities can co-exist, just as pre-modern social institutions can, and do, co-exist with modern capitalist ones. Yet the question here is, how does the evolutionary schema play out in Marx’s discussion of pre-capitalist formations? I will take up this question in relation to the Asiatic mode, since, Lefort contends, it presents a particular difficulty for Marx, which leads him to “develop, as far as possible”, the repetitive conception of history. For, the ‘Asiatic form’ goes against both the idea of continuity and of the inevitable transformation of social relations of production that pertain to the evolutionary schema of history.82

6.4 The Problem of the ‘Asiatic Mode’ and the Possibility of Evolutionary History The difficulty lies in the ‘unchangeable’ character of Asiatic societies, with respect to their communal form, even in the face of the accidental destruction of particular communities, or that of the constant dissolution and reestablishment of the ‘Asiatic state’. As Marx puts it in Capital I, echoing passages in the Grundrisse; The simplicity of the organisation of production in these self-sufficing communities which constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the same spot and with the same name—this simplicity supplies the key to the riddle of the unchangeability of Asiatic societies, which is in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states, and their never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the fundamental economic elements of society remains untouched by the storms which blow up in the cloudy regions of politics.83 82 83

 Cf. Lefort, “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another”, 1986, p. 152.  Marx, Capital Vol I, 1978, pp. 338–39.

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Here at last, in the contrast between the unchanging economic form (relations of production) and constantly changing political ‘content’, it seems, that the strict separation between ‘form’ and (contingent) ‘content’, becomes fully visible. Such a conception seems to go against the very idea of ‘political economy’, insofar as it entails the separation and reduction of both the political—to the level of empirical events, and the economic—to that of the repetitive communal property/relations of production. In terms of the conception of history, the separation indicates two levels—an ‘endogenous’ repetitive history, that constantly restores the (communal) form, and thereby ‘neutralizes’ ‘exogenous’ history— “the history that occurs at the level of fortuitous events”.84 With this separation and neutralization, it seems that neither ‘external’ contingent events, nor the ‘internal’ growth of productive forces, can bring about a transformation in the relations of production, that is, in the communal form as such. As a result, even the transformation from small, scattered tribal communes to the unity of the state in the Asiatic mode, which allows for collective labour, and thus construction, on a scale not possible earlier, and thereby, entails the growth of productive forces, still does not amount to an evolutionary schema of history. For, in reinstating the communal form, it cannot break out of the repetitive schema. If the state comes to exercise a function that the communes are incapable of fulfilling, due to their limited expanse and their scattered nature, and if it makes possible certain kinds of labour requiring a cooperation which the communes are unable to initiate, how can one explain the fact that technical and economic innovation has no effect on the basic social organization? It seems clear that the interpretation of these phenomena contradicts the schema of evolutionary history. It implies both that there is and that there is not change with the formation of the state.85

In response to this problematic, let us examine the place and evolution of Marx’s views with respect to the ‘unchanging Asiatic mode of production’. As with his views on colonialism, his views on the ‘Asiatic mode’  Lefort, “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another”, 1986, pp. 153–54.  Ibid. p. 154.

84 85

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changed considerably as he read more closely—to the point that he hardly mentions it in his later writings, as a distinct mode of production. However, it is possible to show that the rudiments of the evolutionary schema can still be found in the Grundrisse. As historian Irfan Habib shows, Marx initially simply inherited the generalizations concerning the ‘Asiatic mode’ from Hegelian discourse. With respect to pre-colonial Indian society for instance, Hegel claims that “the Hindoo’s have no history”; that the diffusion of Indian culture is merely a “dumb, deedless expansion”, since “the people of India have achieved no foreign conquests, but on every occasion have been vanquished themselves”.86 Marx essentially repeats this claim when he writes, “Indian society has no history, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of unresisting and unchanging society”.87 Similarly, Hegel, describing the ‘rigid and unchanging’ organization of the Indian village, claims that the income generated by each village is “divided into two parts, of which one belongs to the rajah and the other to the cultivators”; but in addition, the ‘service providers’ such as the judge, the Brahmin priest, the Brahmin astrologer, the smith, carpenter, potter etc. all receive a proportionate share. “This arrangement is fixed and immutable, and subject to no one’s will. All political revolutions, therefore are a matter of indifference to the common Hindoo, for his lot is unchanged”.88 Marx again repeats these claims concerning the ‘unchanging Indian village’, with ‘no (endogenous) history’, or to which history only comes from ‘outside’ (in the manner of contingent events); ‘indifferent to political revolutions (which again constitute merely exogenous contingent events), both in the 1853 Tribune article and in the passage from Capital, Lefort cites. One of the main sources for this trope of the ‘unchanging Indian village’ (“contaminated by distinctions of caste, and by slavery”, with its inherited occupations, marked by limited modes of exchange  Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree. New York: Dover Publications, 1956, pp. 163, 142. Quoted in, Habib, “Marx’s Perception of India”, in Karl Marx on India, p. xx. 87  Marx, Tribune, 8 August 1853; On Colonialism, p. 81; Quoted in Habib, Ibid. 88  Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 144. 86

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etc.,), for Marx and most likely for Hegel, is the Fifth Report of the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company (1812), submitted to the British parliament.89 Yet, despite taking his point of departure from the generally prevalent assessment of Indian society from the perspective of the colonizers, Marx would substantially revise and rework this assessment through his own research. I have already discussed the main features of his characterization of the Asiatic mode in the Grundrisse (1857–58), which in Capital I (1867), he thought was exemplified in the ‘Indian village community, namely, the ‘possession in common of the land’. By this he seems to have meant, following Mark Wilks’ Historical Sketches of South India (1810), that at least in some places the village land was cultivated in common. In Capital I, such communal cultivation is said to be characteristic of village communities of the ‘simplest form’.90 In the Grundrisse, Marx had already outlined the close relation between communal agriculture and communal property. The transition from the first, ‘naturally arisen’ mode of collective existence in pastoral, migratory communities, to settled agricultural communities, marked the explicit emergence of fixed communal property (as opposed to ‘temporary’ communal appropriation of the land by nomadic pastoral clans).91 Thus, as I mentioned in my arguments against Lefort’s overwhelming emphasis on the communal form, it is ‘living labour’, inherent in (communal) agricultural activity that results in the increase in productive forces, and leads to the modification of the original (pastoral) community, giving rise to (settled) ‘communal property’ in an explicit sense. The latter then tends to ‘appear’ (in its various modalities) as the naturalized/divine presupposition of ‘individual peasant agricultural’ (labouring) activity.92 Thus, although communal property is ‘presupposed’ as a condition of labour in pastoral communities, in the transition from the latter to settled agricultural communities, the ‘reappearance’ of communal property is not merely a ‘repetition’, since it is transformed into a fixed entity in  Marx quotes the Fifth report in his Tribune article from August 1853.  Marx, Capital Vol I, 1978, p. 337. 91  Marx, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 472. 92  Cf. Ibid. 89 90

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the process. The irreducibility of the two poles of this dialectical (mutually constitutive/dependent relation), entails that each pole (communal form/property and living labour) must reappear in a transformed sense, and thus, the repetitive and evolutionary schema of history are at bottom, one. With respect to the ‘evolutionary’ dimension of the schema discernible here, Marx saw this transition to settled agricultural community/ property as the basis for claiming that “the Asiatic or Indian property forms everywhere mark the beginning in Europe [as well]”.93 As Habib points out, Marx found ‘new proof ’ for this claim in Georg Ludwig von Maurer’s work on ‘early Germanic village communities’, and the later emergence of ‘individual property rights within it’.94 However, as Habib shows, Marx revised his understanding of the Asiatic mode, barely months after putting it forward in the Grundrisse. In the latter, Marx had followed François Bernier’s description in formulating its main features. Bernier’s central claim was that the Mughal empire, and ‘other oriental states’ (he refers to Turkey, Persia, Hindustan), were on the decline because the king was the ‘sole proprietor’ and there was ‘no private property in the soil’. Yet this description went against the existence of communal property in India; and in the Grundrisse, we saw that Marx introduced the distinction between ‘property’ and ‘possession’, to resolve this difficulty. The king or the ‘despot’, could then appear as the embodiment of the ‘the all-embracing unity’, ‘standing above’ the small communities, and the sole proprietor, while the actually existing communities were only ‘hereditary possessors’. Yet, in explicating the mechanism underlying this otherwise rather speculative reconciliation in the Grundrisse (1857–58), Marx, very shortly afterwards, brings into question the very idea of a distinct/unique Asiatic mode. In his Tribune article from 1858, reflecting on Indian land tenures, Marx agrees with the view that; […] alleged property in the government [is] nothing more than the derivation of title from the sovereign, theoretically acknowledged in all countries,  Marx and Engels, 14th March 1868, Collected Works, Vol. 42, Moscow, 1987, p. 547; Cf. Pre-­ Capitalist Social Formations, p. 139. 94  Habib, “Marx’s Perception of India”, 2006, p. xxiv (footnote 29). 93

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the codes of which are based on the feudal law and substantially acknowledged in all countries whatever in the power of the government to levy taxes on the land to the extent of the needs of the government.95

Marx suggests that the notion of ‘property’ here, as belonging to the king was simply the land tax that the government could levy, from the land owner. Moreover, this was ‘acknowledged in all countries, the codes of which were based on feudal law’. As Marx makes explicit in Capital III, (1863–67) “in Asia …, [where the state] stands above them [direct producers] as their landlord and simultaneously as sovereign, then rent and taxes coincide, or rather there exists no tax which differs from this form of ground rent”.96 Although Marx continues to make the distinction between proprietorship and possession, their relation is now understood in terms of ground-rent. As Habib observes in the context of his analysis in The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556-1707 (1999), there is no Indian source that attributes ‘ownership of the soil’ to the king, before the eighteenth century, whereas it was the commonly accepted view by ‘European observers, from the 16th century onwards’. “It was clearly the land tax, often termed by them ‘rent’, which suggested to them the existence of an all-embracing royal property in land.”97 ‘Oriental despotism’, for Marx then, amounts to nothing more than ‘rent-receiving sovereignty’, and has none of the other connotations invested in it by the Eurocentric version of colonial-liberal thought.98 Moreover, pre-colonial Indian society was marked by the zaminadri system—‘feudal’ land owners, who occupied a position intermediate between the peasants (who were mere ‘tenants at will’) and the sovereign. They had the right to collect taxes from within their dominions and in turn, were subject to assessments due to the royal government. Marx was aware of this additional layer of mediation in pre-colonial social organization. While he notes that the British viewed the zamindars as “nothing more than officers of the government appointed to look after, to collect,  Tribune, 25 May 1858; On Colonialism, p. 191.  Capital Vol III, p. 791. Quoted in Habib, Ibid. p. xxvii. 97  Habib, Ibid. (footnote 44). 98  Ibid. 95 96

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and to pay over to the prince the assessment due from the village”, he adds that “in Oudh these feudal land-holders had gone very far in curtailing alike the claims of the government and the rights of the cultivators”.99 Not only then, does the category of the ‘feudal land-holder’ make its appearance in Marx’s analysis of pre-colonial Indian property relationships, which are supposed to be the epitome of the Asiatic, despotic mode, but with it, also the differentiation of classes. The Asiatic state then, does not simply comprise a singular ‘despotic’ figure who embodies the ‘higher community’, rather it involves the “existence of a definite social class, which appropriated the surplus through the mechanism of the tax rent”.100 From this class emerged the class of ‘zamindars’—the local ‘feudal’ land-lords who consolidated their position and at times grew so powerful that they could even challenge the authority of the royal government. Yet, as Habib asks, if, as Marx recognized, “individual land ownership could be created from state landlordism, by acts of usurpation”, then what prevents “state -landlordism, [rather than being ‘presupposed’ or simply ‘given’ as a unique form of community] “from being created through acts of conquest, the supreme usurpation?”.101 These considerations show that history, in an endogenous sense, did play a role, after all, in the emergent structure and class differentiation of Indian (and Asiatic) society. Indeed, how could it not, except in the imaginations of European orientalists? In the intervening decade between the Grundrisse and Capital I, Marx also substantially revised his views on commodity production and exchange in pre-colonial India, thereby further reinforcing the point concerning class differentiation and endogenous history. In the Grundrisse, Marx thought that in all communal modes of production (Asiatic, ancient, Germanic), production was primarily geared towards use-values and not exchange-values, such that the role of exchange of commodities on the market through monetary transactions was quite limited. It was the transition from the production of ‘use’ to ‘exchange-values’ that for Marx, marks the ‘historic dissolution’ of the communal form. With  Marx, Tribune, 7 June 1858, On Colonialism, p. 192; 192–93; quoted in Habib, p. xxvii.  Habib, p. xxvii. 101  Habib, pp. xxvii-xxviii 99

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respect to the Indian village community (with its concomitance of agricultural and handicraft production), in Capital I and III, Marx argues that the ‘natural economy’ prevailed, that is, an economy without any ‘commodity’, and thus, monetary exchange; where the surplus in the mode of ground rent could be exacted in kind. Yet, as Habib points out, other passages in Capital I show that Marx’s conception of the ‘natural economy’, without commodity production or exchange, pertains only to the ‘internal conditions of production’ of the village, and stands in sharp contrast to “the division of labour brought about in Indian society, as a whole, by means of the exchange of commodities”.102 While the ‘natural economy’ prevailed within the Indian village community, commodity circulation, along with the divisions of labour, and emergence of classes (both no longer based entirely on caste) that follow from such circulation, prevailed outside it. At any rate, Marx’s contrast with “…the entire period of [European] middle-­ ages”, where “only a relatively small portion of that part of the product that represents the landlords revenue [enters] the process of circulation”,103 hints at the (undeveloped) possibility that he was “allowing a much higher level of monetization in pre-colonial India than in medieval Europe […]”.104 Further considerations show that Marx changed his views even on the ‘unchanging Indian village community’ with its communal cultivation and ‘natural economy’, insofar as he later admitted not only the rise of individual petty production but also private property within it.105 All this suggests that Marx substantially revised the conception of the ‘unchanging’ Asiatic mode that he inherited and initially took over uncritically from the European orientalist perspective. Further, it shows that certain universal structural features, such as endogenous historical change, based on class differentiation, which becomes explicit (while also being transformed in the process) through commodity production and  Capital Vol I, p. 351. Quoted in Habib, pp. xxviii–xxix.  Ibid. Capital Vol III, p. 767. Quoted in Habib, p. xxix. 104  Habib, p. xxix. 105  In his notes on Kovalevsky’s Communal Landholding (1879), Marx mentions that private property comes into existence in the Indian village communities, leading to internal contradictions. Cf. Daniel Thorner, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, II (1966) pp. 60–62; cf. Habib, p. xxxiii. 102 103

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exchange, are common to the various pre-modern communal relations of production. Apropos Lefort, this entails that ‘repetitive’ and ‘evolutionary’ history, contingent (though not necessarily arbitrary, factors, including living labour) and structural factors of historical change, can and do co-exist in an irreducible, though mutually dependent/constitutive manner, that is, in a dialectical relation. Let us at this point, turn to Marx’s analysis of capitalist relations of production and the modes of alienation resulting from it, in order to address a problematic that arises at the ‘other end’ of history, that is, the problematic, not of (possible) origins, or sources of historical becoming, but of its (possible) ‘end’. The problem, as many critics, including Lefort, have argued, lies in the reified conception of ‘presence’ to which Marx’s vision of the overcoming of capitalism (and its inherent alienation) in a ‘classless’ society that fully coincides with itself, (is transparent to itself ) in reflective ‘closure’, seems to succumb. Yet, does such a reified notion of ‘presence’ and closure necessarily follow from the idea of an unalienated, classless society?

6.5 Marx’s Analysis of the Commodity Form as a Critique of ‘Presence’106 I will address this issue by first concentrating on the emergence of the commodity-form and of the ideal/symbolic domain of ‘equivalent’ exchange it makes possible, under capitalism. As we know, in Capital I, Marx shows how the separation between use and exchange-value, engenders the commodity form in an explicit sense, that is, through the ‘expression’ of its exchange-value in terms of the ideal-universal equivalent, namely the money-commodity. The money-commodity becomes the symbolic representation (initially by being anchored to a certain ‘content’, namely, gold or silver, by weight) of universal value. On the one hand, it constitutes the ‘measure of value’ insofar as, it is the ‘universal equivalent’, that brings into relation, or allows comparison in a  The analysis in this section and the next is a revised version of a paper titled “The Question of Alienation in Marx”, in, Social Scientist, Nov–Dec 2009, Vol. 37, No. 11/12, pp. 48–71. 106

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proportionate manner, of all types of ‘concrete labour’ embodied in diverse commodities (considered as use-values) and thereby, constitutes the “socially recognized embodiment of labour.” Yet, it is only with modern capitalism—with the transition from the exchange of commodities via the ‘medium’ (measure) of money to money itself as the aim of circulation, that is, from C–M–C1 to M–C–M1, that the dimension of ‘pure’ ideality, of the ‘symbolic qua symbolic’, eventually breaks free from the restrictions of its ‘material substrate’. Consequently, on the other hand, ‘money’ emerges not only as the ‘measure’ (universal equivalent) of commodities, but also as a commodity, ‘measured’ in relation to all other commodities, including other money-commodities (currencies). However, Marx argues, it is precisely at the moment that the ideality inherent in ‘equivalent’ exchange is released in its “purity”, in its very ‘form’ qua universal equivalent, indifferent to all particular use-values that exchange no longer remains equivalent. For, the ‘difference’ introduced by (excess) ‘living labour’ intervenes in the creation of surplus value, which once again sets the cycle of production in motion. The ‘pure’ difference that ‘living labour’ introduces in the productive process is however, necessarily transformed, or expressed in terms of ‘relative’ difference. That is, the difference (surplus) introduced by living labour is measured (1) relative to its exchange-value, as ‘dead’ labour (the price of commodity it produces), and (2) relative to its own exchange-value (its price in wages) as a commodity—the ‘labour-power’ (as potentiality) sold on the market. Since both realized/dead labour and potential labour are necessarily expressed in relation to their (proportionate) exchange-values vis-à-vis all other commodities in circulation, living labour is constantly being transformed into ‘dead labour’, both immediately in relation to itself, and in a mediated sense, in relation to the dead or accumulated labour (capital) of the past. I will argue that this process, by which the ‘absolute difference’ introduced by living labour is necessarily transformed into relative difference— expressed in the exchange-value of the commodity (qua dead labour) it produces—involves a theoretical generalization of ‘fetishism’ (based on reification), as the very condition of ‘socio-historical reality’. Such generalization also casts new light on Marx’s ‘labour theory of value’. The standard interpretation of the latter (and of commodity fetishism), which

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presupposes a ‘static’ distinction between ‘appearance’ (exchange-value) and ‘underlying reality’ (labour as the ‘real’ source of value) embodied in the commodity, gives way to a dynamic, processive one, based on the manifestation as well as concealment of the ‘differential quality’ of labour. In terms of its formal structure, two closely interconnected aspects, which we have already come across in the broader context of our discussion of Marx’s schema of historical transformation, must be underscored: (1) the possibility of ‘repetition’ of the production cycle (proportionately equivalent exchange, though at a higher level) presupposes ‘difference’ (surplus introduced through living labour) as its animating principle, while the ever-vanishing moment of ‘pure’ difference is ‘posited’ only in and through ‘repetition’ and is thus, always already transformed into a ‘relative difference’ (‘profit’ expressed in exchange-value and realized through the sale of the commodity). 2) each ‘repetition’ therefore, is not the repetition of the ‘same’, but includes the ‘absolute difference’/surplus introduced by living labour in each cycle. It is in light of this structural process of the constant back and forth (undecidable oscillation) between ‘difference’ and ‘repetition’, (or between absolute and relative difference), as it emerges in Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production that his own project must be reinterpreted. We find in Capital I: Political economy has indeed analyzed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude of that value.107

In formulating the problem in this manner, Marx recognizes that mediation is inevitable. His analysis of the circulation and accumulation of capital shows how the ‘representation’ of labour as quantitative (relative) difference (surplus-value) is ‘constitutively late’ with respect to itself as a qualitative, differentiating process. Yet, this inevitability of mediation requires that the (historically mediated) emancipatory project of ‘overcoming’ alienation in the social/institutional acknowledgement of (living) “labour”, must first provide an account of the very possibility of such 107

 Marx, Capital Vol. I, pp. 84–5.

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acknowledgement. I will argue that such an account requires consistently keeping the notions of alienation and reification distinct, within Marx’s theoretical framework. It then becomes clear that politico-philosophical critiques of Marx are misdirected, insofar as they do not sufficiently distinguish between the (closely interrelated) notions of ‘alienation’ (of labour) and (its) ‘reification’. While the latter, as Marx recognizes, is inevitable (and expedient, for without it there would be no possibility of ideal-abstraction, hence ‘equivalence’ or quantitative comparison between different types of ‘concrete’ labour, and therefore no exchange whatsoever), the former, insofar as it arises from a specific set of historical social-relations, namely, those that sanction the private appropriation of surplus social labour, is not. Marx’s project is not to be understood, therefore, in the traditional metaphysical sense—as motivated by the will to rational (self) mastery, that is, as the movement towards the telos of absolute self-presence, which, aware of its mediated or temporally extended character, comes to fruition in and through the ‘medium’ of history. In such a conception, mediation remains the merely provisional deferral of ‘presence’. Instead, it must be understood as seeking to make the ‘difference’ introduced by (social) labour (surplusvalue), which is both made manifest as well as inevitably dissembled (thus, ‘disavowed’ through its private appropriation) in the closure of ‘equivalent’ exchange (its expression in the quantified, ‘relative difference’ of exchangevalue and the expansive ‘repetition’ of the production cycle), explicit— through institutional mechanisms that ensure its social appropriation. As we know, a commodity consists of two interrelated, though irreducible elements, namely, its ‘use’ and ‘exchange’ value. The former is realized in consumption, and because utility is, in part, derived from the natural/ material properties (which exist independently of human labour and the social form through which it is mediated) of the commodity, it cannot exist apart from the commodity. As ‘use-values’ commodities “[…] constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth”.108 Under the capitalist form of society they are “in addition, the material depositaries of exchange value”.109

 Ibid. p. 44.  Ibid.

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In these two assertions, we find a hint of the irreducible, mutually constitutive relation of ‘difference’ and ‘repetition’ that, I argued in critiquing Lefort’s interpretation, informs Marx’s conception of historical change.110 While it is only under capitalism, that the ‘commodity’, and therefore, exchange-value as the ideal form of the commodity, emerge in an explicit sense, commodities and their exchange, primarily oriented by their use-values, were obviously prevalent in pre-capitalist societies (such that as use-values commodities “constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever be the social form’ [i.e. relations of production] of that wealth”). Further, in capitalism, the ideal or symbolic dimension of the commodity, reified and quantified, and thus, fetishized as its seemingly inherent ‘exchange-value’ (such that in capitalism commodities “become, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value”), ‘naturalizes’ and dissembles a specific (capitalist) social form/relation of production. A specific set of social relations of production, we saw, were also latent in pre-­ capitalist societies—not however, by way of reification in (and fetishization of ) the commodity, (and its commodity form as exchange-value), but in the guise of ‘naturalized’ and ‘sacralized’ hierarchical social relations between human beings. Thus, as I will elaborate in terms of Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, with the emergence of the commodity-­ form, the fetishized social relations between people are transformed into fetishized relations between ‘things’ (commodities). In this transformation the dialectic between the ‘real’ (labouring activity, use-value etc.) and the ‘ideal’ (social relations of production, exchange-value and its symbolic money form etc.) is both preserved and reconstituted.111

 It also becomes clear how, if this relation is not kept in mind, it must lead to the ascription of the two seemingly incompatible positions to Marx, namely, history as ‘evolutionary’ and continuous, or as ‘repetitive’ and discontinuous. 111  In feudal society for instance, the dialectic played itself out in the ‘natural’ demarcation between what the peasant produced for himself and what he had to pay as rent to his lord, and the amount of time on average that he spent on each of these phases of his productive activity. With the advent of the commodity form, it occurs, as we shall see, in the transformation of human labour into a commodity, that is, with the buying and selling of labour-power, and it’s division into ‘necessary’ and ‘surplus labour’—the labour that the labourer does for maintaining himself/herself in his/her labouring capacity, and the excess labour over its own cost of reproduction, which is, in large measure (all or in part), appropriated by the capitalist in and through the production of commodities that generate surplus (exchange) value, or profits. 110

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Thus, as I discussed in the preceding section, the ‘real’ of use-value (including labour itself as use-value, that is, as living labour) whether produced by the medieval peasant or the modern wage-labourer, is always already mediated by the ideal/symbolic dimension—the form of society/ relations of production/property relations in and through which production, or the creation (through labouring activity) of use-value occurs. Consequently, if, as Marx puts it in Capital I, the task of the investigation is to trace the “genesis of this money-form”, then this cannot entail a tracing back of the ‘ideal’ dimension of exchange-value to its ‘origin’ in some “unmediated ‘real”, either of utility (based on ‘natural’, socio-historically unmediated human needs and the material properties satisfying them, or to the labouring activity needed to fulfill those needs), or of a distinct historical moment (‘history’ in the empirical sense). Rather, since the dimension of ‘ideality’ (the ‘form’ of the social) constitutively permeates the dimension of ‘reality’, the perspective is ‘genealogical’ (historical) insofar as it seeks to articulate and explicate the reconstitution of the ideal dimension—its explicitly ‘symbolic’, though reified realization in ‘exchange-value’ that comes about with the transition to capitalism—to exchange-value (as opposed to different use-values) as the very aim of production. Such an inquiry is necessarily retrospective, beginning from its own historical situatedness, and must therefore, take the money-form (exchange-value in the historically developed form confronting it), as its point of departure. As Marx puts it, the task consists in, “[…] tracing the genesis of this money-form, of developing the expression of value implied in the value relation of commodities, from its simplest almost imperceptible outline, to the dazzling money-form”.112 ‘At first sight’ then, exchange-value appears as a purely quantitative relation—the proportion in which different use-values are exchanged. Since this relation is constantly changing, exchange-value appears to be a purely relative and contingently determined quantity, “[…] and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms”.113 The various proportions in which a commodity can be  Ibid. p. 54.  Ibid. p. 44.

112 113

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exchanged with another, points to a ‘third’ that is their common measure. However, the ‘third’ that constitutes the exchange-value of a commodity, cannot be absolutely independent of the particular commodities being exchanged. The exchange-value of a commodity “[…] is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it”.114 The indifference to the ‘material’ aspect of a commodity (its particular use-value), that constitutes the ideality of its exchange-value, does not entail that the latter is wholly cut off from the ‘real’, but rather, that the notion of the ‘real’ itself must undergo a transformation—it can no longer be identified with usevalue, but must signify the “[…] one common property left, that of being products of labour”.115 However, insofar as exchange-value abstracts from the concrete, material aspect of a commodity, (constituting its use-value) it also abstracts from the concrete type of labour embodied in it. At the very moment then, that we expect to come face to face with the ‘real’ of labour, it is immediately transformed into what is common to all commodities; “[...] all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract”.116 As embodiments of abstract ‘labour-power’ (quantified according to a certain socially recognized average labour time necessary to produce each specific type of commodity, including itself as a commodity), commodities embody (exchange) ‘value’. Marx underscores the inevitability of this transformation, through which the ‘real’ of labour is necessarily encountered as ‘re-presentation’—in the idealized form of temporally quantified labour-power, while nonetheless being ‘posited’ as the ‘source’ of value, and consequently, the ‘double bind’ in which any such investigation of ‘value’ is caught. For, the investigation would reveal that “[…] exchange-value is the only form in which the value of a commodity can manifest itself or be expressed”. Nonetheless, Marx writes, it must now take up the nature of value independently of its ‘form’.117

 Ibid. p. 45.  Ibid. 116  Ibid. p. 46. 117  Ibid. 114 115

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The value of a commodity consists in the quantity of labour embodied or materialized in it. This quantity can be measured only abstractly, in terms of its duration—an idealized unit of labour-time or the average, homogenous amount of labour required, in for instance an hour, under a given socio-historically determined state of the productivity of labour, to produce a unit of a particular commodity. It follows that should the social conditions of production change, for instance, the productivity of labour increases (or decreases) due to changes in technology, natural conditions etc., then the average, socially necessary labour-time for the production of that commodity must decrease (or increase), and consequently the value of the commodity must decreases (or increases) in the same proportion. “The value of a commodity therefore varies directly as the quantity and inversely as to the productiveness of labour (labour-time) incorporated in it”.118 Thus, commodities, or definite proportions of commodities, which incorporate the same quantity of labour-time are of the same value.119 However, this quantitative determination of labour, in terms of average labour-time, and the proportionally determinate relations of exchange-value derived from it, hides within it the qualitative dimension of labour—the varied, concrete types of labour required to produce particular commodities as use-values. Without this specific type of labour involved in, for instance, carpentry, weaving etc., ‘commodities’ could never confront each other as different use-values, and therefore, set exchange in motion, that is, emerge as commodities in the first place.120 This qualitative, or differential character of labour that generates different use-values, entails that the production of commodities presupposes the division of labour as its necessary condition. The reverse however, is not true—production of commodities is not a necessary condition for the division of labour.121 Thus, as I emphasized in critiquing Lefort’s position, the ‘qualitative difference’ introduced by labour qua concrete activity, is “independent of all forms of society […] it is an eternal  Ibid. p. 48.  It is clear, as Marx argues that ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ are only short-term determinants of value. In principle, competition amongst producers must ensure that deviations in value owing to increased demand or supply are soon ‘normalized’ around their prevalent social value. 120  Marx, Capital Vol I, 1978, p. 49. 121  For example, in tribal communities there is social division of labour without the production of commodities in the full-fledged sense as exchange-values. 118 119

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nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchange between man and nature and therefore no life”.122 Living labour (“labour-power in motion”), therefore, “[…] creates value but is itself not value”—it becomes value only as a ‘commodity’— “only in its congealed (dead) state, when embodied in the form of some object”,123 as a determinate quantity of labour-time. However, in order to distinguish it as ‘value’, that is, its abstract, ideal (quantitative) character, from its concrete (qualitative) expenditure and particular, ‘useful’ embodiment, it must be expressed in a ‘material existence’ independent of the particular object in which it is embodied—in a commodity other than itself. Marx therefore, draws a distinction between the ‘relative’ and ‘equivalent’ forms of value, as they emerge in the value relation of two commodities. If x of commodity A = y of commodity B, then we may say that x of A is worth y of B. Here the value of A is relatively expressed or measured in terms of B, while B is the material value-equivalent, which functions as the measure of the value of A. The relation between measured and measure is symmetrical, but it is not seen as such. Commodity B, which occupies the position of the equivalent (measure), becomes the very embodiment of value, and its ‘useful’ character recedes to a point where it becomes “[…] a thing in which we see nothing but value […]”.124 In contradistinction to A, which, in expressing its value in relation to the equivalent B, makes the ‘social’ or relational character of value, and therefore, B’s irreducibility to its own material properties (use-value) manifest, the equivalent B, as the ‘body of value’, appears to possess value as a ‘natural’ property, just as its weight or colour.125 Since, in the value-relation between A and B, the material substance of A appears merely as use-value, while that of B appears as the realization of value, it is as if the opposition between use-value and value, internal to a commodity, is made explicit externally in the relation between the two commodities—in the asymmetry between the relative and equivalent  Marx, Capital Vol I, 1978, p. 50.  Ibid. p. 57. 124  Ibid. p. 58. 125  Cf. Ibid. pp. 59–66. 122 123

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forms they instantiate. While in every epoch human labour produced use-values, it is only in a specific historical epoch that these products of labour become ‘commodities’ in the fully developed sense—when the labour embodied in them “[…] becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article i.e. as its value”.126 Since the objective expression of labour in terms of value presupposes the equivalence of all kinds of concrete labour, the transformation that leads to the emergence of the commodity–form is not possible, “[…] until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of popular prejudice”.127 We see then, the manner in which the social relations in earlier societies, come to be reconstituted, and thereby preserved, in the ‘commodity-­ form’, which as exchange-value, appears as the ‘objective property’ of a commodity. Since this ‘mutation in the symbolic’—in the social relations of production that leads to the equivalence of different kinds of labour, can only be ‘objectively’ re-presented (or realized, after the event) in the products of labour, qua (exchange) value, it appears as if exchange-values reside in the products themselves, as one of their ‘natural’ properties. Put differently, since the ‘social character of labour’—the equivalence of the different kinds of (socially useful) concrete labour of private producers, cannot manifest itself except through the actual exchange of the products of that labour, the social relation between producers is necessarily mediated by the relations between the products exchanged. Consequently, “[…] a definite social relation between men assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things (commodities)”.128 On the one hand then, the emergence of the commodity-form (which presupposes the recognition of the ownership of one’s labour-power, and the equivalence of different kinds of labour, expressed in the exchange-value of their products) points to an interruption (mutation) in the ideal/symbolic dimension of history—the overcoming of traditional, pre-modern, ‘naturalized’ hierarchical (social) relations, and the transcendent, sacralized sources of legitimacy underlying them. Yet, on the other, the reification of the social

 Ibid. p. 67.  Ibid. p. 65. 128  Ibid. p. 77. 126 127

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in the commodity-form, or the “fetishism which attaches to commodities”,129 reconstitutes the moment of ‘transcendence’ (‘pure’ negativity), and therefore, enactively repeats it, rather than recognizing it as such. However, the ‘transcendent’ returns not ‘in-itself’, since once its social character is recognized, its status as always already lost, as perpetual non-presence, is also made manifest,130 but as its own ‘after-image’ (determinate negation), in the transformed sense of ‘reified value’. In relation to all previous social formations, the social formation that determines itself in the commodity-form is one where the difference between the ‘real’ and the social (the ‘transcendent’ and the ‘symbolic’, or use and exchange-value, concrete and abstract labour etc.) is explicitly registered, yet also disavowed. Or, more precisely, it is the differential character of the ‘real’, (in the most relevant sense here, as living labour) that is ‘registered’, insofar as it is ‘posited’ as the very ‘condition’ for the possibility of exchange, hence, for the institution of the ‘repetitive’ cycle of production, while also being inevitably covered over in and through that process—in the ‘repetition of the same’, where ‘sameness’ refers to the proportionate equivalence of ‘value’. We find here the same oscillation between absolute and relative difference that I have been tracing in various contexts throughout this study. In the present context, to see more clearly how the ‘real’ of labour qua ‘absolute difference’, both institutes the ‘relative difference’ inherent in the movement of ‘repetition’—not only at the level of history, but also at that of commodity production under capitalism, and is inevitably appropriated within the closed structure of the latter (is transformed into ‘relative difference’ or difference between repetitions), let us turn to Marx’s analysis of exchange in its fully developed form—that of the ‘universal equivalent’, or money-form. It then become clear that the generalization of the ‘equivalent form’ coincides with the generalization of the fetishistic structure of registration and disavowal. For, it is in the money-form that commodity fetishism attains its most universal expression.  Ibid.  As Marx puts it, “The religious reflex of the real world can […] only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowman and to nature.” (Ibid. p. 84). 129 130

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6.6 The Generalization of Commodity Fetishism in the Money Commodity: Circulation, Temporality, and the Proliferation of Symbols The ‘elementary form of value’ developed so far, in expressing the (exchange) value of A in relation to a single commodity ‘B’, proves insufficient to capture the quantitative (proportional) equivalence of A with all other commodities—it is, Marx writes, ‘a mere germ’. And while the ‘expanded value form’131 is based on the (social) principle of universal equivalence, the latter remains implicit so long as its expression takes the form of an interminable series of equivalences. For, this open-endedness leads to an equally interminable series of apparently independent equivalent forms of value, and therefore, the transitivity between equivalents can never ‘appear’, since the infinite chain of equivalents can never be held in view at the same time. With the emergence of a universal equivalent, the values of all the commodities in circulation are expressed “[…] in terms of a single commodity, set apart for that purpose […]”.132 Consequently, the equivalence of each commodity with every other is made explicit in a formal, quantitative sense—in terms of their value, and they are brought into relation with each other in definite proportions— are “made to appear as exchange values”133 (Ibid.). This ‘appearance’ takes the ‘bodily form’ of a particular commodity, excluded from the rest, which becomes the socially recognized universal equivalent, such as gold. Since the latter emerges as the very embodiment of value, it becomes directly exchangeable with every other commodity,  As Marx notes, the expanded form of value, or the proportional equivalence of a whole range of commodities, becomes prevalent when exchange is no longer an exceptional, but rather, a common occurrence, for example in small village communities where producers exchange their goods directly through barter. With the expanded form, the accidental character of value, determined by the proportional exchange between two arbitrary commodities (the elementary form of value) disappears, and “it becomes plain that it is not the exchange of commodities that regulates the magnitude of their value, but it is the magnitude of their value which controls their exchange proportions” (Ibid. p. 69). 132  Marx, Capital Vol I, 1978, p. 71. 133  Ibid. 131

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and over time, its ‘use-value’ comes to be identified almost entirely with its exchange-value. The universal equivalent therefore, becomes the ‘visible incarnation’ of the social character of labour. It ‘represents’ the formal equivalence of all the different kinds of labour, as human labour. Although the money-form is a special kind of commodity, directly exchangeable with all others, it is still a commodity. Its value is therefore, determined only relative to all other commodities in circulation, as representing a definite quantity of labour-time, vis-à-vis equally definite quantities embodied in every other commodity. It is only because a certain unit weight of gold also represents a definite quantity of labour-time that it is commensurable with other commodities, and can serve as a measure of their value.134 Therefore, Marx distinguishes between the function of money as the “measure of value” and as the “standard of price”. In the former capacity, money is the socially recognized embodiment of homogenous human labour; in the latter, it refers to a “fixed weight of metal”. Since the money–form does not do away with the contradictions inherent in the commodity, but merely “[…] develops a modus vivendi, a form in which they exist side by side”,135 the ‘use-value’ of the money-­commodity persists as a fixed unit weight of gold, which constitutes the ‘material’ of money. Thus, as the ‘measure of value’, it transforms all commodities into prices, or “imaginary quantities of gold”, while as the ‘standard of prices’ it measures the quantities of gold, in which the prices are realized, by a ‘unit quantity (weight) of gold’.136 However, while the relative/ideal determination of value as price is founded on the ‘real’ of labour, it is also irreducible to it, for, “labour creates value, it is itself not value”. It must be transformed into a commodity in order to express itself socially as value. Consequently, the possibility of  Ibid. pp. 97–8.  Ibid. p. 106. Marx adds the general methodological remark that this is the only way in which genuine contradictions can be reconciled. 136  Ibid. pp. 100-01. It follows that a change in the value of gold (the amount of labour-time necessary to produce a unit weight of gold) does not change: (1) its function as a standard of price, since the value of different weights of gold remain the same in relation to each other (2) its function as a measure of value, since a change in its value simultaneously affects all other commodities, and again values remain proportionally constant. Prices of commodities can increase or decrease only when either (1) the value of commodities increase or decrease relative to the money-commodity or (2) the value of the money-commodity decreases or increases relative to other commodities. 134 135

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a ‘quantitative incongruity’ between price and value is “inherent in the price form itself ”,137 and this is clearly visible when the supply exceeds demand or vice-versa. In the former case, since ‘price’ is the labour-time socially necessary for the production of a commodity, a greater amount of the collective labour-time of the community has been spent on that particular commodity, say linen, than is socially necessary. “The effect is the same as if each individual weaver had expended more labour time upon his particular product than is socially necessary.”138 Thus, the irreducibility of the ‘phenomenal form’ of value—the money-form, to the concrete labour of the individual, or equivalently, the necessary mediation of such labour through the commodity, and therefore, its social reification in the money–form, leads to further consequences. These include the emergence of social processes of production (and reconstitution of the division of labour they engender) that are subject to general laws of the market, independent of the will or activity of individual producers—to the point where the price of a commodity may cease to reflect the labour–time or value embodied in the commodity altogether.139 The separation (and connection) between the value-form and its price-form is merely the movement, at a more general level, of the separation (and connection) between the use and (exchange) value of a commodity that we have already encountered, though in a static manner. The latter division, once externalized in the money-commodity, now sets the exchange and circulation of commodities into motion. The commodity, which has no use-value to the seller, passes on to the buyer for whom it is a use-value, through the medium of the universal equivalent, the money-­ commodity. As use-value, the commodity now confronts its own ideal value-form (its price) in the money-commodity, while the latter (which is still a commodity, hence, possesses a certain ‘material’ element—its unit  Ibid. p. 104.  Ibid. p. 109. 139  For example, when a particular form of labour becomes outdated, such as weaving, due to the introduction of spinning machines, its price falls, although the same amount of labour–time as before has gone into the (same quantity of ) linen produced by the weaver. Ultimately, a particular commodity and the form of labour that produced it may become outdated to the extent that it becomes unsaleable, and then represents no social use-value, and the labour embodied in it becomes socially superfluous. 137 138

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weight), as the very embodiment of exchange-value, expresses its use-­ value only ideally, in all the other commodities in which it may be realized. The exchange of commodities takes the following form: C–M–C, where the metamorphosis, ‘C–M’, represents the sale and ‘M–C’, the purchase. Regarded from the perspective of the individual commodity owner, the process is split up into two distinct phases—sale, or the transformation of the commodity into money, and purchase, or the transformation of that money into another commodity. However, regarded from a mutual point of view, the sale, or the realization of a commodity’s ideal value (price) in the money-commodity is equally the purchase, or the realization of the ideal use-value of the money-commodity in that commodity. Further, except at the point where the money-commodity (gold, silver etc.) is directly bartered, as the immediate product of labour, for other commodities, it must represent the ‘realized price’ of some commodity. It follows that the beginning of the movement in the sale, ‘C–M’ of a commodity, that ends in the purchase ‘M–C1’ of another commodity, is simultaneously the end of the movement in the purchase ‘M–C’ that began with the sale ‘C2–M’ of some other commodity. Similarly, the end of the movement M–C1 in a purchase, can be the beginning of the movement ‘C1–M’ in a sale that ends in the purchase ‘M–C3’ etc… Consequently, the circuit of one commodity, ‘C–M–C’ through its two metamorphoses, “[…] is inextricably mixed up with the circuit of other commodities”,140 and all these circuits taken as a whole, in their mutual determination, make up the circulation of commodities. Unlike direct barter, where the circuit is at an end once the use-values change places, the money-commodity, as ideal equivalent (value), in constantly stepping into the ‘place vacated’ by the commodity as use-value, once it drops out of circulation (is consumed), ensures that the movement continues. Once the mutually constitutive (hence irreducible) ‘unity’ between the use-value and exchange-value, which exists in an ‘immediate’ fashion in the commodity, is split up or reified into its two antithetical poles—commodity and money—this ‘original unity’, can manifest itself (or the antithesis can be reconciled) only in temporally mediated 140

 Marx, Capital Vol. I, 1978, p. 113.

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fashion—­successively in time. Money and commodities successively step into each other’s ‘places’ and set up the circulation (motion) of commodities.141 The ‘currency of money’ or the course of its movement, therefore, consists of “[…] the constant and monotonous repetition of the same process”142—the metamorphosis of commodities into money and vice-­ versa, in the endless series ‘C–M–C1–M–C2–….’. Only the ideal form of the money-commodity (and therefore all commodities) can be repeated. For, repetition requires as a condition of its possibility, the ‘differential’ aspect introduced by the ‘real’, in the ‘socially mediated form’ of the use-­ value, either of the commodity or the money–commodity that marks its ‘place’—the material substance of money in the hands of the seller, that replaces her commodity.143 Consequently, the currency of the money-­ commodity consists of its “continued removal further and further, from its starting point”.144 In the series C–M–C1–M–C2…, once the seller becomes a buyer, and reconverts the money into a commodity (C1) qua use-value (once it is consumed and not resold), the money cannot return to her hands ‘in-itself ’, that is, as the realized price of the first transaction, namely, the sale of the ‘original’ commodity (C), but passes on to the next seller (who has just sold to the original seller as buyer) and so on. For the process to renew itself at each stage, so that money once again comes into the hands of the person who as buyer consumes the commodity, requires the impetus of new labour on their part and the introduction of fresh commodities for sale on the market. Therefore, just as in direct barter, it  “The antithesis, use-value and value; the contradictions that private labour is bound to manifest itself as direct social labour, … the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things; all these antitheses and contradictions, which are immanent to commodities, assert themselves and develop their modes of motion in the antithetical phases (sale and purchase) of the metamorphosis of the commodity” (Marx 115). 142  Marx, Ibid., p. 116. 143  Thus, as Marx elaborates, the total material quantity of the money-commodity of a particular denomination, required for the circulation of commodities, in a given economy and over a given interval of time, is determined by its velocity, i.e. “the sum of the prices of the commodities (in circulation) divided by the number of moves made by coins of the same denomination” (121). It is clear therefore that if the value of the money-commodity falls or rises, prices would rise or fall (provided the value of the same mass of other commodities remains constant or does not fall or rise in the same proportion), and more or less of the money-commodity would be required, again provided that its velocity remains constant or does not increase or diminish in the same proportion. 144  Marx, Capital Vol. I, 1978, p. 116. 141

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is ‘the replacing of one commodity by another’ qua use-value, (or the ‘real’ difference between two commodities as use-values) that keeps the movement/circulation of commodities going. However, it is the money-­ commodity that appears to move. Therefore, what is an ‘optical effect’ of the movement of commodities, appears, as the ‘medium of circulation’, to be its cause—one that sets the commodities, apparently ‘motionless in themselves’, into motion.145 The ‘static’ conception of commodity fetishism, articulated in terms of reification of value in the money-commodity, therefore attains its ‘dynamic’ expression in the money-form, which now ‘appears’ as the ‘medium of circulation’. Thus, on the one hand the movement of the money-commodity, and the ‘velocity’146 of this movement, is an index of the “rapidity with which commodities change their forms […], the hurried social interchange of matter […]”.147 On the other, the irreducible ‘phenomenal form’ this movement takes, namely, the money-form, leads to an ever-increasing separation and apparent independence, of the ‘form’ from the ‘content’, name from referent, ‘nominal weight from real weight’.148 This “[…] natural tendency of circulation to convert coins into a mere semblance of what they profess to be, into a symbol of the weight of metal they are officially supposed to contain […]”,149 entails that it is always possible to substitute other ‘tokens’ of a different material, paper-money for instance, that function as symbols of these coins. Since the latter was itself a ‘symbol’, with the introduction of paper-­ money, the manner in which circulation leads to a multiplication of symbols, becomes clear. As a ‘pure symbol’, or a symbol of a symbol, its materiality is of no consequence, and therefore need not have any, even symbolic, weight. At this stage the symbolic is, however, still tied to the ‘real’ of the gold standard. What prevents the proliferation of ‘mere’ symbols is the  Ibid. p. 117.  Ibid. p. 116 and Footnote 12 above. 147  Ibid. p. 121. 148  This may come about when, for example, a more precious metal such as gold replaces silver, such that the value of ‘one pound’, the money name for a pound weight of silver now represents only one fourth of a pound of gold. 149  Marx, Capital Vol. I, 1978, p. 126. 145 146

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possibility, in principle, of realizing their ‘content’ in gold bullion reserves, that is, “[…] the amount of gold (or silver) which would actually circulate if not replaced by symbols”.150 Nevertheless, corresponding to the increasing (and irreducible) distance between the symbolic and the ‘real’, opened up through the process of circulation, there now appears a temporal separation between sale and purchase—between the metamorphoses, ‘C–M’ and ‘M–C’. Since the production of commodities requires time, while the producer’s wants are immediate and diverse, s/he must be able to ‘buy without selling’. To do so, s/he must previously have ‘sold without buying’, that is, must have saved, or accumulated reserves of exchange-value in the form of the money-commodity. This temporal lag is in part responsible for the transformation through which the money-­ commodity, instead of serving as a means of circulation qua ideal equivalent, becomes the “very end and aim” of transaction. The ‘hoarding’ of the money–commodity (gold, in earlier times, paper-money and savings in banks etc.), is therefore, the result of its function as an ideal, universal equivalent—its irreducibility to, hence exchangeability with, any particular use-value, and of the temporal lag inherent in the production of use-values. The ‘temporal lag’ between buying and selling, or the conversion of money into commodity and vice –versa, where the buyer may buy without paying immediately and the seller may sell without realizing the price of her commodity, entails that the buyer becomes a debtor or “[…] the representative of […] future money”,151 and the seller, a creditor. Over time, with the institutionalization (through money lenders, banks etc.) of this non-simultaneity opened up in the process of circulation, the ideal value-form of money comes to acquire a quasi-independent, and dynamic existence relative to its ‘substance’ or the money-commodity. There is always more ‘money’ in movement/circulation, qua ‘ideal possibility’, or the ‘promise’ of its future realization, than the gold reserves (or even its first order representatives—coins, paper-money etc.) of which it is a symbol. This ‘excess’ of the symbolic over the ‘real’, reproduces itself ever  Ibid. p. 128. For instance, an increase (or decrease) in the paper-money in circulation, relative to what can be replaced by the existing gold reserves would lead to depreciation (or appreciation) in it value and therefore give rise to inflation (or deflation). 151  Ibid. p. 135. 150

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anew and leads to a never-ending proliferation of symbols, within the sphere of generalized circulation. The irreducibility of the symbolic and its tendency towards self-­ multiplication means that increasingly, wealth comes to be held not in particular use-values, but in the money-commodity itself qua ‘means of payment’, or ‘savings’, both for the purposes of ‘buying without selling’ and for settling debts. The exchange sequence C–M–C, is, in a sense, ‘reversed’, and becomes M–C–M.  The money-commodity is no longer exclusively the ‘medium’ that facilitates exchange, but as ‘means of payment’, becomes it aim, by stepping in as the universal commodity. The buyer buys without selling, and therefore, enacts the second metamorphosis, ‘M–C’, first, (followed by the first—the sale, ‘C–M’), while the seller sells without immediately realizing the price, and therefore, the first metamorphosis, ‘C–M’ comes second, (subsequent to the purchase ‘M–C’). The transition from the form of circulation C–M–C to M–C–M, is, for Marx, the origin of capital—“[…] money that circulates in the latter manner becomes capital”. Since a commodity is bought only to be sold, the net result of the latter process is M–M.  Yet this process would be meaningless in-itself (as mere form, it is tautological), if it results in the return of the same amount of money to the seller as she put into circulation as buyer. Since the ‘difference’ that leads to exchange here cannot be qualitative (the exchange of one use-value for another) it must be quantitative. Circulation results in more (or less) money returning to the seller than she originally put into circulation. The latter is then the capital advanced and the difference (Δ M), is the surplus-value created, through the circulation of that initial capital. The formulation becomes M–C–M′, where M′ = M + Δ M.152 Thus, unlike the circuit C–M–C, where the money, once spent, does not come back to the original seller (the commodity purchased falls out of circulation), and the process is not renewed without the influx of fresh products (expenditure of fresh labour) on the part of the latter, in the circuit M–C–M′, the reflux of surplus money is both the condition and the aim of this process. With the latter therefore, the purely differential character of the ‘real’—the ‘real’ as ‘absolute difference’, which was merely 152

 Cf. Ibid. p. 149.

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implicit in the renewal, each time, of the process of simple circulation, becomes explicit. For, the process is no longer motivated by the ‘real’ differences in use-values, but by the quantitative difference in ideal exchange-­ values themselves that ‘appear’ in the course of its movement. Put differently, the ‘reversal’ entails the shift from a static to a dynamic notion of the ‘real’, (from, as we shall see below, ‘dead labour’ as product or capital, to its conception as a living, active process) that was only partially realized in simple circulation. Since the latter therefore, can manifest itself only through quantitative difference—the difference between repetitions of ideal value within the process of circulation itself—it follows that this process becomes interminable. For, while simple circulation is concerned with a purpose extrinsic to circulation itself (even if it originally instigates circulation), namely the ‘satisfaction of wants’, the circulation of capital, (its quantitative increase, surplus-value, and with it, the accumulation of capital), is an ‘end in itself ’, such that with each cycle, the quantitative increase in capital, precipitates the process ever anew— in principle, to increase itself ad-infinitum. As Marx writes, “The circulation of capital has therefore no limits. As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist”.153 However, this ‘mere change in form’ also remains ‘invisible’ to an extent, even for the capitalist, insofar as it does not break with sphere of simple circulation. It remains inscribed within the structure of the endless metamorphosis of commodities into the money-­ commodity and vice-versa (…–C–M–C–M–…). Consequently, it is within the sphere of simple circulation that surplus-value emerges. However, since the latter cannot result from circulation itself—either from the exchange of equivalents, or from the merely nominal or contingent deviation from their value154—it must stem from something that  Ibid. pp. 150–151.  That is, as Marx shows, it cannot result from nominal increases (or decreases) in price on the part of sellers or buyers, for if this increase is generalized, (if everyone charges more than the value of the commodity), then this increase in revenue for the seller would cancel itself out for her qua buyer, and the same would hold in the reverse instance i.e. where the buyer buys cheaper than the value of the commodity and sells it at its value. (cf. 158–159) Nor can it arise from individuals overcharging or undercharging because in such a situation, where one person gains at the expense of the other, i.e. where the other loses, the total amount of value in circulation remains the same, (it becomes distributed differently). 153 154

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“[…] takes place in the background, which is not apparent in the circulation itself ”.155 Thus, surplus value is created only by the addition of fresh labour to the commodity, such that the (modified) commodity now represents a greater quantity of labour-time ossified in it. However, it is impossible for this additional value to express itself ‘outside the sphere of circulation’, apart from its relation to all other commodities. Or as Marx puts it, “It is therefore impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation”.156 I have been tracing the effects of this dialectical ‘double bind’,157 throughout. For Marx, these effects emerge in explicit fashion—in its dynamic/differential character—with the creation of surplus value—with the transition from C–M–C′ to M–C–M′ mode of circulation. We are now in position to situate these effects in the broader social context that both conditions and is conditioned by such circulation. This would allow us to see more clearly how the transition entails a generalization of the basic fetishistic structure of ‘registration’ and ‘disavowal’ of the differential activity of labour, in and through the circulation and accumulation of capital (the continual, interminable process of ‘differentiation’ or creation of surplus value, and its reappropriation within the sphere of “equivalent” exchange). Further, it would show how this continual instigation of, and reappropriation (disavowal) within, the sphere of circulation,158 of the differential dimension of labouring activity, precipitates the capitalistic crisis. It is in relation to such an understanding of the movement of

 Marx, Capital Vol. I, 1978, p. 162.  Ibid. p. 163. 157  Here and throughout, I make no distinction between the Derridian notion of ‘differance’ or pure difference and the ‘closed dialectical structure’ that Derrida opposes it to. In contradistinction to Derrida’s reading of Hegelian dialectics, which sees in it a merely relative (hence ‘closed’) articulation of difference, I locate its ‘open’ character precisely in the moment of independence or irreducibility of its relata (cf. Derrida,  From a Restricted to a General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve). 158  “Momentarily, indeed, the value initially advanced, the £100, is distinguishable from the surplus value £10 that is annexed to it during circulation; but the distinction vanishes immediately. At the end of the process, we do not receive with one hand the original hundred and with the other, the surplus value of £10. We simply get a value of £110, which is in exactly the same condition and fitness for commencing the expanding process, as the original hundred was” (Marx 150). 155 156

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capital, along with its phenomenal effects, that Marx’s central problematic, namely, the social recognition of labour, must be rearticulated. The ‘interminable’ dialectical movement inherent in circulation, and the purely differential character of labour that is consequently, both revealed and concealed in it, again entails that such ‘recognition’ (in the ‘labour theory of value’) cannot involve a return to the ‘real’ of labour in a naïve, unmediated sense.

6.7 How Marx ‘Invented the Symptom’: Alienation and Therapeutic Response There is, within the sphere of circulation, one commodity whose consumption is not a matter indifferent to value, and thus, circulation. Rather, its very consumption creates value. The appearance on the market of the commodity in question, namely, labour-power, requires on the one hand, a transformation in social relations, through which the historical category of the ‘individual’—the “untrammeled owner of his capacity to labour, i.e., of his person”,159 emerges. On the other, the category of the ‘individual’ and the socio-historical conditions underlying it, are themselves conditioned by the emergence of capital—of surplus-value that transforms mere exchange (simple circulation) into the accumulation of capital. It is only under the latter circumstances that the capitalist, as the owner of the means of production, or accumulated capital, can find labour-power as a commodity for sale on the market. The owner of labour-power, lacking the means of production, is forced to sell his/her labour-power itself as a commodity, which thus, “exists only in his living self ”, instead of indirectly through a commodity in which it is embodied.160

 Ibid. p. 165.  The emergence of the ‘free wage labourer’, i.e., one who has nothing to sell save his labourpower, is ofcourse a gradual process, and requires the (primitive) accumulation and concentration of capital, and along with it the productivity of large scale labour mobilized by it, to have reached a level where individual and small scale producers can no longer compete, and therefore slowly swell the ranks of wage-labour (cf. Manifesto 44). 159 160

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The ‘individual’, recognized as the ‘owner’ of the commodity ‘labour-­ power’ under capitalist relations of production is thereby, transformed into the wage-worker. The latter, unlike the slave or the serf, represents ‘free labour’, insofar as s/he is not herself a commodity bought and ‘owned’ by the capitalist (only her labour-power is bought by the capitalist, for a certain period of time), and can therefore, ‘leave the capitalist as often as s/he chooses’, (just as the capitalist can discharge the worker once her services are not required). ‘Wages’, then, as the special name for the price of the commodity, labour-power, constitute the ‘objective’, quantified recognition of the mutually free, ‘uncoerced’ character of the exchange between the buyer and seller of labour-power. However, as Marx emphasizes, while the individual worker is ‘free’ to leave the individual capitalist, s/he is not free to leave the ‘whole class of buyers’, the capitalists, as such, on pain of extinction. Thus, here, the ‘determinate negation’ of ‘freedom’, in relation to pre-capitalist societies entails that while “the worker does not belong to this or that capitalist”, s/he belongs to “to the capitalist class as such ”.161 The value of the commodity, ‘labour-power’ (its price as wages) like every other commodity, is determined by its cost of production—the labour-time necessary to produce it. This cost of production, or labour-­ time embodied in it, will vary depending on the type of labour—skilled or unskilled, it represents. In the special case of labour-power, in the form of its lowest common denominator, namely, simply the capacity to work (unskilled labour), which resides in each living individual, its minimum cost of production (represented in its ‘minimum wage’), comprises the labour-time, represented in the set of essential commodities required for the maintenance and reproduction of the life-force necessary to sustain labour-power (per unit duration, such as an average day).162 Here again, the ‘minimum wage’ for the reproduction of labour-power holds for the class of workers, and not for the individual worker. The capitalist system requires that ‘the race of workers does not die out’; yet, competition  Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 1968, p. 9.  If, for example, these essential commodities incorporate an average of 6 hours of social labour, then this constitutes the absolute minimum value of a days labour, and if those six hours are represented by say, five dollars, then the latter is the minimum price, or expression of value. 161 162

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amongst workers due to over-supply, or unemployment (the ‘reserve army of labour’, intrinsic to the system) entails that the minimum wage can go below that required to sustain individual workers in their labouring capacity. Thus, the ‘minimum wage’ stipulated by law (just as the maximum hours of work), is an intervention from ‘outside’ the system, to mitigate some of its more immediate deleterious effects. Labour-power belongs to the class of commodities (including the money-commodity), whose immediate existence is entirely ideal, until it is utilized or expended in some concrete activity. Consequently, on the one hand, its price, like that of every other commodity, is fixed in advance, “[…] since a definite quantity of social labour has been spent on it”.163 On the other, its use-value (labouring activity) is realized only at a time subsequent to its alienation or sale.164 Here again, the ‘temporal lag’ between the always already socially determined exchange-value of labour, and its use-value, introduced in the course of circulation, proves decisive in the creation of surplus-value—in the formation and accumulation of capital. ‘Outside’ the sphere of circulation, of “equivalent exchange”,165 the realization of the use-value of the commodity bought by the capitalist, namely, labouring activity, creates value that exceeds its own, previously determined exchange-value. Its realization therefore, introduces an absolute difference that can manifest itself only in relative (quantitative) difference, after its expenditure.166

 Marx, Capital Vol. I, 1978, p. 170.  Further, for this reason, in most cases the price of labour is realized in actual wages, only after it has been exercised. The labourer therefore, “everywhere gives credit to the capitalist” (174). Without insisting on the latter point, Marx nevertheless hints at its practical importance in the formation of capital. For it is only after labour-power is used up in the production of a commodity that the capitalist can sell it and thus obtain money to pay wages and other costs of production etc. Thus, the (large scale) capitalist operates on borrowed money, and it makes no difference whether this ‘initial capital’ is borrowed from banks or directly from the worker, for the former is merely the repository of accumulated social labour–time, (capital in its explicitly social character). 165  The sphere which is “the very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” (Marx 172). 166  Ibid. pp. 188–89. 163 164

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Put differently, the finished product is the accumulation of (always already) past labour.167 Its exchange-value therefore, is constituted in part, by the socially necessary labour-time represented in the raw materials, the instruments/means of production (machinery etc.), and its wear and tear—(quantity of the means of production consumed in its production), and in part by the labour-time expended in its production—the transformation of those raw materials into the finished product. The latter represents the value of labour-power per unit time, determined relative to the labour-time (value) embodied in essential commodities required to sustain it in its labouring capacity. If therefore, the value of the finished product exceeds the value of its component parts, then, since the value of raw materials and instruments are preserved in the product, this excess can arise only in the excess of living labour (its use-value), hence labour-­time incorporated in the product, over that required to maintain it qua labour-power—over its own (exchange) value.168 If this result is extended to each stage of the production process, then the formal structure, M–C–M′–C–M″–…, articulated above, becomes visible in this process, in its specifically temporal character. For, at each stage—for instance, the picking of the raw cotton required for the production of cotton fabric, the labouring activity, since it is necessarily past, can be given only indirectly (as ‘dead labour’) in its product, that is, as the quantitative difference in the accumulated labour-time, hence exchangevalue of the cotton, introduced by it as ‘living labour’, over itself as dead-­ labour—its own earlier past, accumulated labour-time, represented in say, the cotton crop and preserved in the cotton, and so on. Thus, the fact that production must unfold in time, sets up the differential repetition/ circulation of capital. It entails the continuous metamorphosis of living into ‘dead labour’ or accumulated labour-time, (of the ever vanishing  “While the labourer is at work, his labour constantly undergoes a transformation: from being motion it becomes an object without motion, from being the labourer working it becomes the thing produced” (p. 184). 168  Marx terms the value transferred without change to the product, ‘constant capital’ and the value created through labour, ‘variable capital’ (p. 193 ff). For example, if 6 hours of labour is required in order to realize its own value i.e. produce a value equivalent to, hence exchangeable with, the commodities necessary for the maintenance of the labouring capacity of the worker, then this does not prevent her from labouring a full day (say, 12 hours), thus creating more value (an excess value of 6 hours labour-time) than it consumes. 167

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‘present’ into the past). Equally, since the latter is the very ‘form’ that living labour must be transformed into, (the past as what was once the future ‘coming towards’ the ‘present’), its continuous reanimation by living labour, retains/preserves, in (the form of ) cumulative relative/quantitative difference (surplus-value), its own past repetitions. Once the formation and accumulation of capital, within the seemingly “closed” sphere of circulation, is understood in terms of its temporal-­ discursive structure—from the fact that circulation unfolds in time, and therefore, necessarily results in the reification qua surplus-value (quantitative difference) of living into dead labour, it becomes clear that the aim of Marx’s critique of capitalism, through the ‘labour theory of value’, is not to uncover living-labour as the unreified ‘real’ ‘underlying’ reified value. Rather, since reification is inevitable, owing to the temporal discursivity of the production process, it is (1) to make this process of reification, inherent in the capitalist mode of production explicit, by tracing the consequences of its unmitigated development. The development of these dynamic processes of reification leads to the explicit emergence of the ‘contradiction’ between what is essentially a product of ‘collective’ or social labour, and its private appropriation qua surplus-value. This contradiction ‘comes to the surface’ in the crisis of ‘overproduction’, or underconsumption.169 And (2) to reconcile this contradiction, (or reified,  To maximize surplus-value generated in each cycle, M–C–M′, the capitalist must maximize (all other costs of production being preserved in the value of the commodity produced), the quantity of labour-time that creates value (surplus-labour), over that required merely to replace the value of labour-power (necessary-labour). That is, what must be maximized in each production cycle is the rate of surplus-value. The capitalist can achieve this either in an ‘absolute’ or ‘relative’ manner— either by increasing the number hours of work in a day (footnote 168), or by increasing the productivity of labour. Since however, there are human limits in the case of the former (which, though not without much political struggle, came to be reflected in legal limits), the capitalist must eventually take recourse to the latter method. The productivity of labour can increase only if a greater quantity of the commodity is produced per unit time than before, or equivalently, if less time is required per unit commodity. An absolute increase in the number of working hours would result in an absolute increase in the value produced, and therefore, an increase in the rate of surplus. In contrast, an increase in the productivity of labour, the length of the working day now remaining constant, would result, not in an increase in value in absolute terms, but a change in the division between necessary and surplus labour-time during the working day. The time required to realize the value of labour-power (necessary-labour), thus, the value of labour-power, would diminish, and correspondingly, the time freed up for the creation of surplus-value (surplus–labour) for the capitalist would increase, hence the rate of surplus would again increase. 169

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dialectical one-sidedness) in a society (relations of production) that The total value produced over a determinate length of time remains constant, however the productiveness of labour may vary. For example, if, as a result of an increase in the productivity of labour, production of a particular commodity is doubled, the unit price of that commodity will fall, since less labour-time is now incorporated in it. The same value as before is produced, but it is now spread over twice as many commodities. The competitive advantage derived from an increase in productivity means that the ‘social price’ is higher than its actual value (for the individual capitalist). The capitalist may sell it at the social price and make a profit, but since she is obliged to sell twice the number of commodities as previously, the market must be twice as extensive, or the demand twice as much as before. Since these conditions don’t obtain in the short run, she sells them below their social but above their individual price. Thus, as long as there is a net increase (despite the relative decrease) in the revenue from the sale of a commodity over its costs of production, as long as there is profit for the capitalist, she is motivated to constantly find ways of reducing the price of her commodity by increasing the productivity of labour. It is this process of differentiation introduced by surplus labour, and its appropriation by the capitalist in the ‘form’ of surplus-value, that eventually leads to the crisis of capital, a crisis that ironically enough, is brought about by overproduction/underconsumption. The crisis, as the manifestation of this central contradiction of capitalism, may be understood in terms of the contradiction between relations and forces of production. As Marx and Engels write so forcefully in the Manifesto: It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of overproduction. […] and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, […]. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented (Manifesto, pp. 40–41). The ‘closed’ (reified) logic of circulation, resulting in the appropriation of surplus, hence the maximization of the rate of surplus, by the capitalist, leads on the one side, to an ever-increasing mass of commodities, and on the other, to an ever-diminishing value (wage) of labour-power for the vast majority, and growing unemployment. Thus, overproduction and lack of purchasing power due to income deflation, are mutually conditioning. The crisis (economic recession), develops out of the process of reification taken to its extreme, where the dependence of ‘bourgeois property’ (capital, surplus-value etc.) on the social forces of production it calls into play is not recognized, thus leading to their absolute opposition and confrontation. Yet, since this opposition constitutes the very condition of ‘bourgeois society’, its relations of production that result in the formation of bourgeois property through the private appropriation of the product of social forces of production, it cannot be overcome (reconciled) within this mode of production. On the contrary, the bourgeoisie can react to the crisis only by destroying productive forces, while simultaneously expanding the market for its products at an ever more frenetic pace. It thus exacerbates the contradiction (makes the opposition more extreme) with each such cycle.

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acknowledges both the inevitability of reification (of living into dead labour, surplus value into exchange-value, absolute into relative difference etc.), owing to temporal discursivity, and thereby, renders the (phenomenal effects of ) reification ‘harmless’, by redistributing the surplus exchange-value (created through the ‘difference’ introduced by living labour), in common.170 These two points taken together, that is, first tracing, and then rendering harmless, the phenomenal effects of reification (rather than the impossible attempt to grasp the ‘real’ of labour in its ‘immediacy’), amount to a ‘symptomatic’ understanding of capitalism, which then elicits an appropriate ‘therapeutic’ response. Indeed, as Lacan famously asserts, “Marx invented the symptom”. Žižek, explicating this idea, writes that the structural analogy between Marx’s analysis of the commodity-­ form and Freud’s analysis of the dream-work lies in avoiding “[…] the properly fetishistic fascination with the ‘content’ supposedly hidden behind the form […]”.171 For, the ‘secret’ to be revealed through the analysis of the ‘form’ of the dream or the commodity, is “the secret of the form itself”.172 The problem is not that of uncovering and isolating the ‘real cause’/content of a dream, or the concrete, living labour accumulated in the commodity; rather, it is to explain why latent dream thoughts take such a form; or why socially mediated labour takes the abstract form of a commodity qua exchange-value. As Marx puts it in his short but crucial discussion in “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof ”; A commodity is therefore, a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why products of labour become c­ ommodities,  As Marx asserts, “Capital is a collective product and […] in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society can it be set in motion”. Consequently, what is at stake in the revolutionary transformation of bourgeois society, “[…] is not the abolition of property generally [qua reified social labour] but the abolition of bourgeois property [i.e. private appropriation of reified social labour]” (Ibid. p. 47). 171  Žižek, “How Marx Invented the Symptom”, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 3–4. 172  Ibid. 170

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social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. […] it is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of relations between things.173

On the symptomatic understanding (which demands a ‘therapeutic’ response), for Marx, overcoming capitalist alienation stemming from reification, cannot entail a return to the “unmediated real” (in whatever modality it may be posited). Yet, if reification is inevitable, how is reflective acknowledgement, hence any ‘therapy’ (resulting in ‘unalienated existence’ in the fully developed, self-aware sense), possible in the first place—are we not forever trapped in a reified, fetishistic world (or ‘false consciousness’)? I will take up a discussion of the various responses to this problematic, which has to do with the more explicitly political aspect of ‘political economy’, in the next chapter. However, Marx provides a hint in the passage quoted above, when he describes commodities as “[…] social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses”. It is this peculiar, simultaneous visibility and opacity that the very structure of the ‘symptom’ (or, more generally, any symbolic/representative relation) brings to light, that opens the possibility of ‘acknowledgement’, without epistemic (and practical) ‘mastery’ in the ‘immediacy’ of (self ) presence.

Bibliography Derrida, Jacques. 1978. From a Restricted to a General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve. In Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Habib, Irfan. 2006. Introduction: Marx’s Perception of India. In Karl Marx on India, ed. Iqbal Hussain. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Hegel, G.  W. F. 1956. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J.  Sibree. New  York: Dover Publications. Hussain, Iqbal. 2006. Prefatory Note. In Karl Marx on India, ed. Iqbal Hussain. New Delhi: Tulika Books. 173

 Marx, Capital Vol. I, 1978, p. 77.

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Kovalevsky, M. M. 1879. Community Landownership: The Causes, the Course and Consequences of its Disintegration. Moscow: F. B. Miller. Lefort, Claude. 1986a. Marx: From One Vision of History to Another. In The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Lefort, Claude. 1986b. The Logic of Totalitarianism. In The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Marx, Karl. 1964. Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations. Trans. J.  Cohen, ed. E. J. Hobsbawm. New York: International Publishers. Marx, Karl. 1968. Wage Labour and Capital. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. 1968. Communist Manifesto. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. 1987. Collected Works, Vol. 42. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Naoroji, Dadabhai. 1962. Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Thorner, Daniel. 1966. Marx on India and the Asiatic Mode of Production. In Contributions to Indian Sociology. Vol. 9: 33–66. Žižek, Salvoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso Books.

7 Dialectics and the Universal in Process

The question posed at the end of the preceding chapter with respect to Marx’s theory was that given the inevitability of reification (owing to the temporality of production), how is any reflective acknowledgement, and therefore, the realization of ‘unalienated life’ in its specifically modernist sense, possible at all? The latter, I have been contending, is to be understood as the inner potentiality or promise of modernity—a ‘promise’ that was betrayed by the (metaphysical, socio-political, and economic) figuration that enlightenment rationality (the critical-negative movement of reason) ended up assuming. Yet, if, owing to the very temporal-discursive structure of ‘reason’, understood in its broadest sense (including its historical ‘materialist’ dimension that Marx elaborates), we are ‘trapped’ in inevitable processes of reification, then what becomes of that potentiality or promise of modernity, and the political-emancipatory project that stems from it? Are we compelled to agree, after all, with Lefort’s assessment, when he writes, […] from this vision of history as well as from the vision of the irresistible movement of productive forces set loose by capitalism, there arises the image of this strange being, the proletariat: at once purely social, purely historical, and, as it were, outside society and history—a class which ceases © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Patnaik, Modernity and its Futures Past, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32107-8_7

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to be one, since the dissolution of all classes takes place within it, and the only class which can act in a way which is free from the poetry of the past; a strange being who fulfils the destiny of humanity, but abolishes all tradition—an heir without a heritage. Should we say that it is the destroyer of the social imaginary or the last product of Marx’s imagination?1

Indeed, as commentators even on the left have pointed out, it might be too naïve today to assume that the emergence of ‘universal’ proletarian class consciousness, through the contradictions immanent in capitalism, would lead to its eventual collapse and overcoming. Its inherent processes of reification, along with the interventions from ‘outside’ the system, provide a certain resilience and adaptability to capitalism that Marx had perhaps not fully anticipated. Further, as the initial, guiding question for these inquiries indicates, in times of capitalist crises, even in its ‘globalized’, financialized neo-liberal form, narrow and exclusionary modes of (reified) ‘identity’—xenophobic nationalism, racism, including anti-­ immigrant sentiments etc.—often exert a much stronger pull than any universalist humanist (let alone proletarian) perspective. The rising tide of right-wing populism around the world bears testimony to this phenomenon. However, today, in the ‘age of the Anthropocene’, the intrinsic unsustainability of the capitalist system, and therefore, the need to transcend it, is being forced upon human consciousness from another (though closely interconnected) source—the contradiction between the infinite exploitation of finite nature, (of which humans are a part), and the resulting ecological crisis looming before us. Thus, Marxist ecologists such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett develop Marx’s idea that the ‘metabolic exchange’ between humans and nature becomes unsustainable under capitalism in the Anthropocene (or what has been critically redesignated as the ‘capitalocene’), and leads to an anthropogenically induced ‘metabolic rift’ on a planetary scale. The rift, or ‘alienation’ from nature

 Claude Lefort, “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another”, in The Political Forms of Modern Society, 1986, p. 180. 1

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(including human ‘nature’) has now reached a crisis-point, where the very survival of the human species, along with all the other species on the planet, is at stake. It is in this conception of an anthropogenic ‘metabolic rift’, introduced by capitalist accumulation and expansion, through which it ‘fouls its own planetary nest’, that Marx’s critique of the political economy of capitalism, and his ecological concerns come together. I take up this imbrication between Marx’s critique of capitalist political economy and his nascent ecology, along with the alternative visions of a more sustainable (unalienated) metabolic exchange with nature (and humans who dwell in it), in the next and final chapter. In this chapter, I address the ‘political’ dimension of Marx’s critique, in relation to the problematic of reification (through regression to narrow identity politics), false consciousness etc., by further developing the ‘symptomatic’ reading, and the simultaneous “perceptibility and imperceptibility”, it engenders. I will first approach these issues via a discussion Lukács’ analysis in History and Class consciousness, which represents the classical Marxist perspective, before turning to more recent debates—of which those between Butler, Laclau and Žižek in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, seem representative. Though these discussions I hope to shed some light on the possibility, extent, and particular figuration, of the universal dimension of the political emancipatory impetus, not only for Marxist discourse,2 but more broadly, for that of modernity, of which Marx’s theory is an expression.

 The problematic has a long history within Marxist discourse, with commentators adopting either an overly one-sided ‘objectivist’ or ‘subjectivist’ interpretation of capitalism, and therefore, of its transcendence in a ‘new’ society (and the specific institutional forms that would shape this post-­ capitalist society). A detailed analysis of the debates between the objectivist and subjectivist approaches, along with the specific differences within each camp, is beyond the scope of the present study. However, it will become clear that similar ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ considerations (reflected in the notions of ‘structural necessity’, ‘universality’ on the one hand and ‘contingent hegemony’, ‘antagonism’ on the other), are at work in Lukács’ writings, and in the debate between Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, that I discuss in this chapter. For an overview of the ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ arguments in recent Marxist discourse, see Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (2012); in particular, the section in the introduction titled: “Objectivist and Subjectivist Approaches to Marx’s Philosophical Contribution” (pp. 9–36). 2

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7.1 On the Possibility of Proletarian ‘Universal’ Class Consciousness Lukács takes up the problematic of whether and how proletarian class consciousness, in a universal sense, is at all possible. That is, a class consciousness, which in relation to all previous forms of consciousness (embodied in property relations/relations of production), and in particular, to the bourgeois form of consciousness (which, despite giving rise to partial perspicuity, reestablishes opacity, stemming from its modes of reification, including its own narrow class interests), breaks through to a consciousness of the ‘whole’. That is, to the entire dialectical drama of history, of which it is a product, and therefore, to a universal (‘objective’) perspective, that then instigates the vision of a ‘classless’ society. The problematic determines the themes that Lukács delimits through the series of  questions he poses at the beginning of his essay,  “Class Consciousness”, concerning the nature and practical function of class consciousness, its qualitatively different modalities vis-à-vis different classes, and its gradations within the proletariat.3 I mentioned that the challenge to this understanding of the emergent unity of the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of history, even as a teleological possibility, consists in the contemporary reaffirmation of regressive tendencies from within a set of circumstances that conform to the conditions of capitalist crisis, and thus, ought to, according to the standard interpretation of Marx’s conception of history, lead to the formation of a revolutionary proletarian (self )-consciousness. Thus, at the very moment when capitalism, in its current neo-liberal formation, is facing a world-wide economic slow-down, stagnation in employment, etc. (a situation that moreover, appears interminable, since unlike the age of imperialism, there are no new frontiers for capitalist expansion), we find, far from ‘universal proletarian consciousness’, the reestablishment of atavistic, exclusionary ‘particularisms’. Even if, in keeping with recent historical experience (for instance, in Germany and Italy, in the aftermath the First World War, and ‘great depression’), we concede that the very  Georg Lukács. “Class Consciousness”, in History and Class Consciousness, 1971, p. 46.

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circumstances that are supposed to give rise to proletarian universal consciousness also tend towards fascism, we may ask, can the teleological model of dialectical reason, with its emphasis on the progressive movement of historical consciousness through a process of internal contradiction, withstand this moment of radical contingency/indeterminacy? In the preceding chapter, I discussed how contingency is integral to Marx’s conception of historical becoming in relation to past historical formations. Yet, at the present historical juncture, the moment of contingency/indeterminacy, in contrast to the ‘universal’ structural conception of historical becoming, seems to be asserting itself in particularly strident fashion. Indeed, with the reemergence of various types of ‘identity-­ politics’ and the fragmentation of political resistance—its limitation to particular issues, rather than a critique of the whole—the Schmittian articulation of the political in terms of the ‘friend-foe’ distinction, seems to be vindicated. For Carl Schmitt, the distinction between friend/foe is constitutive of the specifically political domain, insofar as it is irreducible to any other set of economic, ethical, or aesthetical antitheses. The irreducibility of the, ‘friend/foe’ antithesis articulates politics as a relatively independent domain—not wholly cut off, but representing an intensification—“to the point of the most extreme and intense antagonism”, which may or may not invoke other antitheses. The ‘enemy’ need not be ‘evil’, (although s/ he usually bears the emotional charge of being evil); yet, “he is nonetheless, the other, the stranger, and […] in a especially intense way, existentially something different and alien […]”.4 This characterization of politics raises a fundamental question: instead of any ‘universal’ political consciousness and praxis, must we accept that politics is simply fuelled by resentment or antagonism, which plays out in an endless series of conflicts between different groups? This empiricization of political consciousness would imply, in keeping with Schmitt’s position (and his critique of liberalism, as diluting the antagonism constitutive of the political), that the specifically political moment is always concrete, contingent, and therefore, ‘outside’ the closure of reason; which would include ‘historical reason’ in the Marxist sense.  Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Trans. George Schwab, 1996, p. 27.

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The present historical moment, characterized by the reemergence of overlapping racial, religious, and xenophobic antagonisms across the world, seems to lend credence to such a conception of the political. The empiricist understanding is not confined to conservative theorists like Schmitt, but also reappears in a more nuanced manner in the writings of post-Marxist thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau. I will argue against a strictly empiricist understanding, initially by turning to Lukács’ writings; while, at the same time, avoiding the schematic/formulaic interpretation of dialectically-­historically generated political consciousness that pervades much of the thinking in the Marxist tradition. As with Lefort’s approach, we shall see that Laclau reads Marx in a schematic manner, and thereby enacts a dialectical one-sidedness of his own, that is, enacts the very movement he critiques in Marx. Thus, while Laclau (and Lefort) recognizes points of ambiguity in Marx’s writings that hint at a more complex picture than the usual schematic one, governed by a deterministic dialectic, he seems to reduce these ambiguities to an either-or choice—either ‘universal history’, class struggle, teleology etc., or ‘pure contingency’, hegemony and antagonism—and therefore, offers his interpretation as an alternative incapable of being accommodated within a dialectical logic. However, as I have argued in relation to Lefort’s critique (which also strictly separates universality and contingency), Marx’s notion of universal history can accommodate contingency, the ‘outside’ etc. in a constitutive sense, that is, not by appropriating/reducing it within a ‘dialectical closure of reason’, but precisely by recognizing and maintaining it in its irreducibility, as one of the poles (which displays both independence and dependence) constitutive of any dialectical relation. Thus, the mere appearance of contingency/the outside etc. cannot strip history (hence, the emergence of the ‘universal’ dimension of political consciousness) of ‘ultimate rational coherence’. After all, even in traditional logic we draw distinctions between (extra-logical) ‘truth’ and ‘validity’, possibility and actuality, necessary and sufficient conditions etc., without it immediately bringing the ‘formal-rational’ character of logic into question. Thus, it is only under the presupposition of this strict separation between reason and contingency that the conception of ultimate/absolute rational closure/foundation arises. As I argued, neither the former presupposition, nor therefore, the latter conception, can be unproblematically imputed to Marx.

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The sharp contrast that Laclau draws between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, between an absolutely rationalist-universal history and the moment of ‘pure’ antagonism, contingency etc., is meant to introduce (following Antonio Gramsci) the notion of (contingent) hegemony, as the central category/process of political analysis. Yet, in introducing ‘hegemony’ on the basis of this strict separation, Laclau reads Marx in a reductive fashion, and his ‘critique’ actually turns out to be applicable to his own approach/position. In contrast, as I argued in the preceding chapter, and will develop further by underscoring certain aspects of Lukács’ analysis, Marx recognizes the inevitability of reification—of the transformation of every mode of ‘difference’ (of labour, class antagonism etc.) into its reified representation. In relation to Laclau, this entails that the ‘outside’, or a differential limit of contingency, antagonism etc. does not ‘undermine rationality’, but sustains it when understood dialectically. In the preceding chapter, I elaborated this point in relation to Capital I, by locating ‘contingency’, the ‘constitutive outside’ etc. in the “material” conditions of production (which include ‘qualitative’ concrete labouring activity, its biological and social reproduction, primitive accumulation, and nature itself ), that are not recognized as such, insofar as they are necessarily transformed through the very process of ‘representation’ into quantitative relations (commodities as exchange-values) under capitalism. At the same time, the qualitative dimension of the ‘constitutive outside’, is not quantified ‘without remainder’, and manifests itself indirectly, for example, through the creation of surplus value, as the ‘difference’ introduced by living over dead labour, colonialism, the limit imposed by ‘nature’/earth itself on its conception as unlimited resource/ use-value etc.) The former process, involving abstraction and quantification, is that of reification in the commodity form, whereas the latter, insofar as it necessarily remains unacknowledged within the ‘system’, manifests itself in class struggle, and capitalist crisis. I will take up the point concerning Marx’s recognition of the inevitability of reification that I have already discussed, by focusing on Lukács’ analysis of the commodity form, in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”, but now with a view to addressing the problematic of a reified class consciousness. As Lukács shows, the latter is characteristic of bourgeois consciousness, which manifests itself in the crisis of

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capitalism (where bourgeois consciousness comes up against its own limits). Yet, as I noted, although it takes a different form, it is also characteristic of proletarian class consciousness, leading to the problematic (in principle) of the very possibility of an unreified (universal) consciousness emerging in the proletariat. This puts into question the possibility of universal emancipatory politics from a position internal to Marx’s discourse. Once I have explicated, following Lukács, the sense in which proletarian ‘universal’ consciousness is possible from within the basic coordinates of Marx’s theory, I will take up and respond to the further critique of such ‘universality’ in the political domain, in terms of the constitutive outside or contingency and hegemonic formations that Laclau offers, by developing the point concerning the indirect manifestation of the constitutive character of contingency from within the apparent “closure” of the universal dialectical-historical reason.

7.2 The Generalization of the Commodity Form and the Reification Inherent in It: Lukács and the Possibility of Proletarian Class Consciousness5 Lukács emphasizes that the phenomenon of commodity fetishism, flowing from the commodity form, is specific to the age of modern capitalism. This is not to say that the commodity form and exchange did not exist prior to the emergence of capitalism; yet “What is at issue here, […] is the question: how far is commodity exchange together with its structural consequences able to influence the total outer and inner life of society?”6 The manner in which the commodity form pervades every ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspect of modern capitalistic society, indicates a qualitative (and not merely quantitative) distinction vis-à-vis earlier  This section is a revised version of my paper entitled, “The Emergence of Class Consciousness: Lukács on ‘Objective Possibility’”, in Social Scientist, Vol. 45, No. 11/12 (November–December 2017), pp. 41–62. 6  Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”, in History and Class Consciousness, 1971, p. 84. Hereafter, ‘Reification’. 5

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modes of production. For Lukács, following Marx, the emergence of the commodity form in its fully developed form as exchange-value (embodied in the money commodity) under capitalism, institutes a qualitative difference in relation to previous social formations, insofar as it penetrates all aspects of the social and ‘remolds it’ “in its own image”. To recall, the transition from the C–M–C′ to the M–C–M′ circuit entails that the money form becomes not merely the measure but also the aim of exchange, hence emerges as a commodity in its own right. It is with this transition that the qualitative/symbolic distinction between capitalism and previous social formations becomes partially ‘visible’, while also giving rise to new forms of reification, fetishism, and thus, opacity. I noted that the emergence of the money-commodity implies that ‘equivalence’, in its ‘pure’ abstract ideality, breaks free from its material embodiment (in all kinds of concrete labour, and its products qua use-­ values).7 It is this mode of abstract ideal ‘existence’, as ‘pure’ exchangevalue, in the money-commodity that institutes a certain visibility with respect to its own immanent social origin (‘exchange-value’ understood as social relations of production between humans), and simultaneously renders this origin opaque. For, in the commodity form, and the moneycommodity in particular, ‘universal equivalence’ is represented in terms of its proportionate exchangeability with all other commodities, thus, quantitatively expressed (reified) in terms of exchange-values. Such reification of ‘universal equivalence’, and the fetishism that follows from it, or as Lukács puts it, “the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression […]”,8 amounts to a determinate negation, which once again sets in motion the processes (tendency towards dialectical one-sidedness) that reproduce modes of alienation and inequality (albeit in a transformed sense). In a related context, while differentiating the fetishism attached to religious consciousness (the worship of idols and images that are fetishized as holy, since as symbolic representations of God they came to be ‘equivalents’ of God), from that attached to the commodity form/exchange-value, Adorno and  Thus, the material embodiment in gold, silver etc. gives way to paper money, and now online transactions, where the ‘materiality’ of money becomes increasingly irrelevant. 8  Lukács, Reification, p. 86. 7

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Horkheimer point to the same movement when they write, “Earlier fetishes had been subject to the law of equivalence, now Equivalence itself becomes a fetish”.9 Lukács argues that it is this peculiar, dialectically governed perceptibility and imperceptibility, inherent in the commodity form that opens up the non-arbitrary historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of unreified proletarian self-consciousness—which, in becoming aware of its own mediated giveness to itself as an ‘object’, for instance, in its own identity as a commodity (‘seller of labour-power’) transcends the reified ‘immediacy’ of bourgeois ‘reality’. Yet, this process of reification, where a definite social relation between humans appears ‘as if ’ it is the objective ‘property’ of commodities, initially results in reified modes of consciousness (leading to alienation), both for the worker and the bourgeoisie. For, although they occupy different positions/perspectives in it, both are part of the same capitalist ‘reality’, where the ‘as if ’ element is disavowed. For Lukács, there is an ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ side to the phenomenon of alienation. Objectively, the market, and the movement of commodities in the market, function according to determinate laws, which may, analogous to natural laws, be known and predictively used to further the interests of individuals, but which cannot be changed by their individual activity. Subjectively, this implies that the laws of the market lead to the estrangement of an individual’s activity, its transformation into a commodity—such that, Marx writes “[…] in the eyes of the labourer himself labour-power assumes the form of a commodity belonging to him”.10 These processes of reification and the alienation attendant upon them, are not confined to the individual’s identity as a worker or capitalist, such that, as Laclau suggests, outside those economic identities, her/his other identities, and social relations remain untouched. Rather, Lukács shows how the phenomenon of reification in the commodity form, based on the abstraction of ‘free’ labour—which is increasingly formalized through its comparability, measurability etc. according to the ‘inner logic’ of the  Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 12. I will return to this assertion in Chap. 8, in the context of a discussion of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s interpretation of the dialectical movement of enlightenment rationality. 10  Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, 1978, p. 167, footnote 1, quoted in, Lukács, Reification, p. 87. 9

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movement towards the division of labour under capitalism—permeates every sphere of human activity and consciousness, including the realms of law, ethics, bureaucracy, and philosophy. This limited, reified, and unthematized, mode of consciousness discloses the world and the ‘subject’ in the world, in a specific manner—as essentially quantifiable and measurable. I will not deal with Lukács’ analyses of these larger themes in any detail, except for some brief remarks on his discussion of Kant’s critical philosophy, as a response to the problems of empiricism and rationalism in bourgeois philosophy that flow from the reified (self ) encounter with the world. Yet before doing so, let us turn to some of the salient features of the division of labour, and the reified modes of consciousness, it engenders. This will further clarify the sense in which reification becomes the “universal form of existence” in capitalist modernity. When production is geared towards commodities, its historical development (from petty production to the modern factory) displays the inner tendency towards greater functional rationalization, through the reduction of all qualitative labour based on individual skill, to simple, repetitive, quantitatively measurable labour. The labouring activity of the individual worker is no longer directed towards the end product as a whole, but is confined to a set of specialized, repeatable actions. The latter lends itself to comparison and measurement, as the average time necessary for completing a certain set of well-defined tasks, which in turn, comes to confront the worker as a “fixed and established reality”.11 In short, the increasing fragmentation and specialization of the labour process, both in its ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspects, is determined by a principle of rationalization based on quantification and calculability. Secondly, Lukács points out, the fragmentation of the object of production (its ‘analysis’ into specialized sub-systems/assemblies) goes hand in hand with the fragmentation of the subject. The specialization and standardization of the work process entails that the worker’s qualitative, ‘human’ attributes, “[…] appear as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions”.12 Both in relation to the total process, and in relation to his/ 11 12

 Lukács, Reification, p. 88.  Ibid. p. 89.

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her own actions, the worker is no longer in control; rather, s/he becomes a cog in a pre-existing, self-sufficient mechanical system. In conforming to a ‘closed’ mechanical system with its own set of rationalized, fixed laws, which now appears independent of the human will and beyond the pale of human intervention, “man’s immediate attitudes to the world” must also undergo a fundamental and decisive transformation. Lukács, following Marx, understands the essence of this transformation in terms of the manner in which the quantified world, to the exclusion of anything qualitative, becomes the dominant ‘reality’. The latter involves the reduction of both time and space to a “common denominator”; that of a unit of measure, and therefore the degradation of time to space.13 The quantification of the time of labour, necessarily calls for its determinate representation, for instance, in the socially necessary average labour-time needed to produce a particular commodity, or more precisely, a sub-part of the commodity (which appears as part of its value). “Thus, time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space.”14 Several points must be emphasized here with respect to the ‘spatialization’ of time, that is, its movement towards representation in phenomenal (ideal) space, essential to the process of reification through quantification. First, as Kant shows in relation to concepts, this tendency is always already underway, since consciousness, insofar as it is temporally discursive, is given, even to itself, not in its immediate synthesizing activity but in the synthesized products of its activity (concepts). Thus, although in the “transcendental synthesis of the manifold of representations in general”, that is, in the original synthetic unity of apperception, “I am conscious to myself not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am”,15 such consciousness does not amount to (determinate) self-cognition. To know myself requires (self ) intuition;  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 90. 15  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1929, B157. All references are to this edition. 13 14

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consequently, Kant writes, “[…] although my existence is not indeed an appearance (still less an illusion), the determination of my existence can take place only in conformity with the form of inner sense […]”,16 that is, time. This conformity makes the representation of synthetic unity of the “I” itself possible.17 What Kant underscores in the ‘epistemic’ realm, in terms of the distinction between the ‘original’ synthetic unity of apperception, and its determinate (conceptual) representation in an ‘analytic unity of apperception’,18 or again, in the notion of ‘figurative synthesis’ (synthesis Speciosa)19 and the ‘schematism’ of the understanding, finds its analogue in the ‘material’ realm of human sociality and production, in the quantified representation of (abstract) labour qua exchange-value. In the social domain this occurs through the constant interrelation, and mutual transformation, of living and dead labour (capital), in the creation of surplus value. This constant transformation of living into dead labour, and its constant reanimation in each cycle of production and exchange that sustains economic expansion, is not seen as such. Rather, as Lukács points out, the necessary transformation of living into dead labour, of the qualitative into the quantitative, leads to a process of ever deepening reification. “Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher and higher levels, the structure of reification  Ibid. B158.  The temporal structure of the (self-representation) “I think” is brought out in the footnote to B158. 16 17

The “I think” expresses the act of determining my existence. Existence is already given thereby, but the mode in which I am to determine this existence, that is, the manifold belonging to it, is not thereby given. In order that it be given, self-intuition is required; and such intuition is conditioned by a given a priori form, namely time, which is sensible and belongs to the receptivity of the determinable in me. Now since I do not have another self-­ intuition which gives the determining in me (I am conscious only of the spontaneity of it) prior to the act of determination […] I cannot determine my existence as that of a self-active being; all that I can do is to represent to myself the spontaneity of my thought, […], and my existence is still only determinable sensibly, that is as the existence of an appearance (B158, footnote α). 18 19

 Ibid. B133  Cf. Ibid. B151.

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progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully, and more definitively into the consciousness of man.”20 In the process of the reproduction and accumulation of capital, it now appears as if surplus arises as the immediate effect of the exchange of commodities, which in the money-commodity, in the form of ‘interest bearing capital’, seems to short-circuit the labour process altogether. This seeming capacity of the money-commodity to generate surplus value, independent of the processes of production, represents the “[…] perversion and objectification of production relations in their highest degree […]”21—the ultimate fetishized form of capital, where “[…] the source of profit is no longer discernible, and in which the result of the  capitalist process of production—divorced from the process—acquires an independent existence”.22 Secondly, Lukács suggests that the reification stemming from the fragmentation of the subject and object in the labour process and its quantitative representation, results in the emergence of both the empiricist and rationalist world-views, as two, seemingly opposed formations, but which are two sides of the same dialectical coin. On the one hand, the fragmentation of labour “[…] destroys those bonds that had bound individuals to a community in the days when production was still ‘organic’”.23 The historical emergence of the worker as an ‘isolated abstract atom’ in and through the process of mechanization—the separation of the producer not only from the means of production and the object produced, but also from his/her fellow human beings, discloses the world itself as a fragmented set of mechanical processes standing ‘over against’ the isolated subject. The emergence of the isolated subject and the mechanized, quantified representation of nature go hand in hand. Yet, this isolation and fragmentation is an illusion (even if a ‘necessary illusion’), since it is merely the inverse reflex of the pervasive ordering of society by the laws of capitalist production. “[…] for the first time in history—the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process, and the fate of every member is determined by  Lukács, Reification, p. 93.  Ibid. p. 94. 22  Marx, Capital Vol. III, 1974, pp. 392–93, Cf. Lukács, Reification pp. 93–94. 23  Lukács, Reification, p. 90. 20 21

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unified laws.”24 The latter then, take on the appearance of timeless ‘natural laws’, governing the movement of ‘commodities’, which in turn, take on the character of ‘natural’ elements. Thus, the “[…] individual object which man confronts directly, either as producer or consumer, is distorted in its objectivity by its commodity character”25; for instance, to the land owner ‘land’ simply means ‘ground rent’.26 Yet, the fragmentation, which is only the ‘concrete’ analogue of positivism that affects the isolated ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in the process of labour, extends to the laws themselves. The latter appear to form a ‘unified system of general laws’, but this turns out to be an illusion as well. For, since these laws are mere rationalizations /formalizations of fragmented life, they in turn are infected with the same fragmentation, or more precisely, they form an aggregate of (often conflicting) laws, rather than a systematic whole. It is this aggregate character, and therefore, the contingent interrelations between the laws, which finds expression in capitalist crisis. […] the structure of the crisis is […] no more than a heightening of the degree and intensity of the daily life of bourgeois society. In its unthinking, mundane reality that life seems firmly held together by ‘natural laws’, yet it can experience a sudden dislocation because the bonds uniting its various elements and partial systems are a chance affair […]. So that the pretense that society is regulated by eternal, iron laws […] is finally revealed for what it is: a pretense.27

The crisis arising from overproduction/under-consumption, is a ‘dislocation’ of this sort, where the contingency of the relation, hence conflict between the two sides, becomes suddenly visible. If the process of reification is nothing but the manner in which all mediation (social, historical, etc.) becomes obscured and transformed into immediacy, then this process is both reflected in, and conditioned by, the realm of thought—in theoretical and practical philosophy. Lukács  Ibid. p. 92.  Ibid. p. 93. 26  Ibid. 27  Ibid. p. 101. 24 25

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underscores how Kant is both acutely aware of the reifications inherent in the empiricist and rationalist traditions, and yet, insofar as he remains an ahistorical thinker, this awareness (thus, the ‘dialectical’ movement of thought it uncovers), extends only to its abstract expression in a series of ‘antinomies’. The latter, for Lukács, is the highest ‘critical’ expression that bourgeois thought can achieve within the constraints of an ahistorical, and ultimately non-mediated understanding of phenomena. Thirdly, it must be emphasized that while the source of these reified modes of consciousness and their pervasive, constitutive character is located in capitalist relations of production, it does not imply an economic reductionism. Rather, the dialectical character of these relations, and their historically mediated emergence, necessarily prevents such a reductionist conception. For Lukács, the abstract, quantified labour associated with the capitalist division of labour “[…] exists both as the presupposition and the product of capitalist production […]”,28 and the decisive, epoch-making transformation consists in the manner in which it comes to dominate consciousness and social reality with the advent of capitalism. As I mentioned, in relation to all previous social formations, the appearance on the market of labour-power as a commodity offered for sale, requires on the one hand, the transformation in social relations through which the historical category of the ‘free individual’—the “untrammeled owner of his capacity to labour i.e., of his person”29 emerges. On the other hand, the category of the ‘free individual’, and the socio-historical conditions underlying it, are themselves conditioned by the emergence of capital—of surplus-value that transforms mere exchange (simple circulation) into the accumulation of capital. It is only under the latter circumstances that the capitalist, as the owner of the means of production or accumulated capital, can find, as a buyer, the commodity labour-power, for sale on the market. Our discussion has now set the stage for explicating the question of the possibility and emergence of proletarian class consciousness. For, it is against the background of the pervasive character of capitalistic reification of consciousness in the commodity form, and more broadly, the  Cf. Ibid. p. 87.  Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 1978, p. 165.

28 29

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structure of inevitable temporal/historical mediation this reveals, even for the ‘self-consciousness’ of the proletariat, that the question of a class consciousness that transcends its own historical situatedness and breaks through to the view of the ‘whole’, attains its highest problematic expression. On the classical account, the self-consciousness of the proletariat represents the co-incidence of the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of history, since such self-consciousness is at the same time the “objective understanding” of society as a whole. Consequently, in furthering its own class interests, the proletariat simultaneously and consciously furthers the objective interests of society as a whole, and therefore emerges as the “universal class” that aims to realize objective historical possibilities. Yet, how is this possible? For, as Lukács points out: […] the proletariat makes its appearance as the product of the capitalist order. The forms in which it exists are […] the repositories of reification in the acutest and direst form and they issue in the most extreme dehumanization. Thus, the proletariat shares with the bourgeoisie the reification of every aspect of its life.30

Thus, on the one hand, the labour process under the capitalistic ‘rationalization’ of production through the division of labour leads to the fragmentation and reification of both the subject and object, to such an extent that no realm of experience and meaning, no phenomena remain untouched. Yet, on the other, although the ‘objective reality’ of phenomena, in their immediate (reified) character is the same for both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the manner in which this immediacy is ‘lived’, hence, the perspectives on this ‘immediacy’, are quite different, owing to the different social positions that the two classes occupy. As Marx writes: The property-owning class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self- alienation. But the former feels confirmed by it; it recognizes alienation as its own instrument and in it possesses the semblance of

30

 Lukács, Reification, p. 149.

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a human existence. The latter feels itself destroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.31

For Lukács, in keeping with this point, it is the ‘specific categories of mediation’, by means of which existing social ‘reality’ is ‘raised to the level of consciousness’, that is, the manner in which it is encountered, understood, and evaluated, such that it emerges as ‘objective reality’ that differ for the two classes.32 However, it is not a matter of different ‘subjective’, perspectival evaluations of objective ‘facts’; for that would be to remain within the reified, positivistic binaries of fact and value, object and subject, content and form etc. The conception of mediation, which is ultimately historical mediation (‘historicity’), is not to be understood in contra-distinction to the ‘immediacy’ of historical facts/events, such that the former provides an interpretation, meaning, or intelligible form to the latter qua concrete ‘objective’ content. As Lukács emphasizes, this reified form-content binary (which we have come across in Lefort’s approach), sets up the seemingly absolute, irreconcilable opposition between history considered empirically, as an aggregate of individual historical events and epochs (determined by the actions of individual historical personages), or as the “transcendent heuristic principle opposed to the events of history”.33 The latter then gives rise to a ‘naturalistic and/or teleological’ conception of history, equally applicable to capitalist and post-capitalist/communist societies. For history, as pure ‘form’, is nothing but eternal, ahistorical laws that come to be enshrined in bourgeois institutions, such that the latter appear immutable, and signal the ‘end of history’.34 We know that this reified conception reappears, and comes to determine a certain understanding of the dialectical movement of history within the Marxist tradition as well.  Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, Herausgegben von Franz Mehring, (4 Vols.), Vol. II, Stuttgart 1902, p.  132 (The Holy Family, chapter 4); quoted in Reification, p. 149. 32  Reification, p. 150. 33  Ibid. p. 152. 34  Lukács, “Class Consciousness”, in History and Class Consciousness, Trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971, pp. 47–48. Hereafter, ‘Class Consciousness’. 31

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If we are to avoid falling back into these modes of reification (of empiricist or formalist history), then the basic insight gained from the discussion in the preceding section, must be kept in mind. It is clear from Lukács’ analysis that historical mediation is constitutive of historical ‘facts’, of social institutions and formations, such that, on the one hand, once the illusory nature of reified consciousness is exposed, these institutions cease to appear as ahistorical objectivities, and are recognized in their historically ‘constituted’ character (as ‘relations immanent to the social) that make up particular social formations. On the other, the elimination of the positivistic conception of the ‘thing-in-itself ’ (either in its particularity or universality), its exposure as an illusion, does not eliminate the ‘objectivity’ and laws of history, unfolding ‘behind the back’ of human willing. Rather, it reconfigures their objectivity on a different basis. In the first instance, with reference to bourgeois institutions and their evolution, it reveals the ‘objective’ movement of history as “[…] the self-objectification of human society at a particular stage, in its development; its laws hold good only within the framework of the historical context that produced them and which is in turn determined by them”.35 Yet, by itself the mere assertion of historical mediation does not explain how proletarian consciousness can become a mode of self-consciousness that ‘breaks through’ to the ‘totality’ of the social of which it is a part, and thus, to the unity of the dialectical process of history as such. On the contrary, at first glance, the inescapability of historical mediation seems to exacerbate the situation, since instead of resulting in the self-­ consciousness of the ‘totality’ of the dialectical process, it leads to ‘false consciousness’—which despite the difference in the form it takes for bourgeois and the proletariat consciousness (owing to their different positions in society), is still a mode of ‘immediacy’. As Lukács writes in the context of a critique of bourgeois thought and philosophy, which uncovers mediations but ultimately transforms those mediations into the immediacy of ‘eternal laws’: “Every mediation must necessarily yield a standpoint from which the objectivity it creates assumes the form of immediacy”.36 However, it is not clear why this dialectically necessary 35 36

 Ibid. p. 49.  Lukács, Reification, p. 156.

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movement of reification, where mediation is acknowledged at a lower concrete level, only to be transformed into immediacy at a higher, abstract level, should be confined to the bourgeoisie; for, the proletariat, insofar as it “is a product of the capitalist order” is subject to the same dialectical one-sidedness, thus, to similar modes of false consciousness (immediacy). Here Lukács provides an analysis of the dialectically interrelated ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspects of false consciousness that opens up the category of ‘objective possibility’; a category that yields in effect, a ‘transcendental’, as opposed to transcendent, conception of historical movement (although Lukács would not subscribe to this terminology). False consciousness, in its content, appears ‘subjectively justified’ or correct, from a particular concrete socio-historical position, yet ‘objectively’ fails to comprehend the historically mediated emergence of the social formation within which it is situated. Or equivalently, the same (false) consciousness may be understood as ‘subjectively’ failing to “reach its self-appointed goals”, which must ultimately lie in the self-consciousness of the ‘totality’, while ‘objectively’, though unconsciously, furthering the processes of society (presumably, through the ‘cunning of reason’, in the Hegelian sense). This dialectical conception of false consciousness shows how the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ movement of historical/conscious formations are irreducible to the psychological/empirical domain of what individuals or classes, ‘in fact’ think, feel etc. Yet, they are also irreducible to some ‘immutable’, ‘eternal’, ‘objective’ laws of history, independent of human consciousness. For, it is precisely the relation of consciousness to the ‘whole’ of society (which from the perspective of ‘self-consciousness’ or ‘observing consciousness’ in the Hegelian sense, may remain implicit, mired in immediacy, or may emerge explicitly as the self-consciousness of the whole), hence to the dialectical movement of history in which the conception of this ‘whole’ emerges, that sets up the category of ‘objective possibility’ (at the ‘transcendental’ level). That is, the possibility of inferring “[…] the thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation, if they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society. That

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is to say, it would be possible to infer thoughts and feelings appropriate to their objective situation”.37 It is clear how ‘objective’ in this sense must refer to the transcendental “conditions of possibility” for the emergence of class consciousness, including the mode of class self-consciousness that would comprehend its relation to the whole. Class consciousness is therefore, the rational thoughts, reactions etc. imputable to a certain ‘typical’ position in the production process. Yet, it is also clear that class consciousness, seen from this transcendental ‘objective’ standpoint, can be false, immediate and limited. For the bourgeoisie, since its own ‘objective conditions’ are not self-consciously grasped in this transcendental sense, but simply ‘lived’, its consciousness remains at the level of immediacy, which necessarily manifests itself in the periodic crises that shake the capitalistic structure. Thus, reified bourgeois consciousness, with its abstract quantified conception of the world, sets up a rigid binary/opposition (and order of priority) between the ‘object’ and ‘subject’. Whatever cannot be quantified becomes merely subjective, irrational etc., such that the dialectical interrelation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ remains unconscious (or is understood in an ‘immediate’ or ‘one-sided’ manner). For bourgeois consciousness, this ‘unconscious dialectic’, “[…] breaks forth in their confession of naïve surprise, when what they have just thought to have defined with great difficulty as a thing, suddenly appears as a social relation, and then reappears to tease them again as a thing, before they have barely managed to define it as a social relation”.38 However, I noted that the objective conditions of possibility for proletarian consciousness are determined by the capitalist order of which it is a product. The latter implies that proletarian consciousness encounters itself ‘immediately’ as a commodity. Thus, the question remains, how does the difference in the position that proletarian consciousness occupies within the production relation, enable it to go beyond such immediacy to (potentially) a self-conscious grasping of the mediated conditions of possibility themselves? The answer lies, I mentioned, in the difference  Lukács, Class Consciousness, p. 51.  Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Trans. N. I. Stone, New York, London, p. 31; quoted in Lukács, Reification, p. 165. 37 38

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in the manner in which this ‘immediacy’ is encountered owing to the different social positions of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. For bourgeois consciousness the limit imposed by its class position (its objective possibilities) remains primarily an ‘external’ limit, which it cannot transcend. In contrast, the social position of the proletariat implies (qua ‘objective possibility’) that the “[…] barrier imposed by immediacy becomes an internal barrier”.39 What this means, as Lukács elaborates in an analysis reminiscent of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, is that the worker experiences this barrier as a split within his/her self-consciousness. On the one hand, s/he becomes aware of himself/herself as the ‘pure object’ (commodity) of the processes of capital, devoid of autonomy, and on the other, precisely through such awareness, simultaneously asserts her/his subjectivity, irreducibility, autonomy etc. In earlier ‘organic’ social formations based on slavery or servitude, since the slave or the vassal was immersed in the immediacy of their social roles/positions, the ‘self ’ remains ‘undivided’ in this distinct (transcendental) sense (although, this undivided-self still permits ‘empirical’ modes of self-consciousness). In contrast, under capitalism, “Because of the split between subjectivity and objectivity induced in man by the compulsion to objectify himself as a commodity, the situation becomes one that can be made conscious”.40 Since the capitalist is part of the same social formation as the worker, he/she also experiences the same ‘splitting of personality’—the doubling, whereby s/he is both immersed in the movement of commodities, or capital, and an ‘observer of this movement’. The difference here is that for the capitalist, this movement has the illusory appearance of being an effect of his/her own volition. Thus, the manner in which the doubling is experienced ensures that bourgeois consciousness remains immersed in immediacy; just as, in Hegel’s account, the autonomy/independence of the master turns out to be false or illusory, insofar as it is dependent on, thus mediated through, the transformative labour of the slave. I noted that this “split-personality” of the worker is due to the peculiar perspicuity imposed by the ‘objectivity’ of the commodity form itself (as  Lukács, Reification, p. 164.  Ibid. p. 168.

39 40

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a mode of self-encounter), such that self-awareness here, as Lukács puts it, is the “self-consciousness of the commodity”.41 The latter is distinct in principle from ‘empirical’ or psychological modes of consciousness, including self-consciousness. In empirical consciousness, that is, the ordinary consciousness of an object, neither the relation between consciousness and its object, nor the cognition that it generates, is modified in any way when the object in question happens to be the self. In this empirical mode of consciousness, the criterion of truth remains the same for cognition of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ objects, such that ‘self-­consciousness’ is simply another instance of empirical consciousness of objects. Thus, if a slave became conscious of himself as a slave, “[…] he can only attain to knowledge of an object that happens ‘accidentally’ to be himself. Between a ‘thinking’ slave and an ‘unconscious’ slave there is no real distinction to be drawn in an objective social sense”.42 In contrast, the (‘transcendental’) ‘self-consciousness’ of the proletariat, as the “self-consciousness of the commodity” is ‘practical’, for, it objectively (and not merely arbitrarily) transforms the structure of the object of cognition.43 Through this mode of self-consciousness the commodity-­form no longer appears in its illusory reified, fetishized, and quantified immediacy—as a mode of false consciousness. Rather, in the commodity-form, the objective character of labour, as use-value (in creating surplus value) comes to be represented and ‘becomes social reality’.44 It is not as if the commodity-form, or even the necessarily quantified representation of labour in it, disappears; for, these are ‘necessary (transcendental) illusions’ in the Kantian sense, which do not vanish upon discovery. Yet, the ‘intentional modality’, in the Husserlian sense (and Kantian sense, even if it is not Kantian terminology) of the relation between consciousness and the commodity-form changes; or equivalently, the commodity-form emerges as a mode of self-encounter (akin, in the ‘epistemic sphere’ to the schematized categories in Kant’s first Critique,

 Ibid.  Ibid. p. 169. 43  Ibid. 44  Ibid. 41 42

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or methodological ‘reduction’, starting with that of the naturalistic attitude, in Husserl’s Ideas). What implications does Lukács’ analysis have for the ‘question of the political’ and the interrelated concerns to which it gives rise? With respect to the possibility of political praxis, it is now clear that it is the irreducible contingency inherent in the dialectical-structural movement of history, which is in part, responsible for the emergence of the possibility of a proletarian universal class (self ) consciousness (even as possibility) that opens on to the totality of its movement, and therefore, allows for a non-­ empirical form of political praxis. For, Lukács (in a manner analogous to the Kantian mode of vigilance) consistently resists the urge to derive ‘actuality’ from (objective, historical) ‘possibility’. Addressing the problem of determinism in the old ‘mechanistic’ historical materialism, he writes: History is at its least automatic when it is the consciousness of the proletariat that is at issue. The truth that the old intuitive, mechanistic materialism could not grasp turns out to be doubly true for the proletariat, namely that it can be transformed and liberated by its own actions […]. The objective economic evolution could do no more than create the position of the proletariat in the production process. It was this position that determined its point of view. But the objective evolution could only give the proletariat the opportunity and the necessity to change society. Any transformation can only come about as the product of the free action of the proletariat itself.45

If contingency is admitted in a manner that is not merely provisional, but intrinsic to the ‘objective’ dialectical movement/possibilities of history, then it should come as no surprise that there is no ‘stagist’ progression of history to fall back upon—that the dialectical movement is subject to reversals, retrogressions, without on that account, making history itself merely an empirical matter, a concatenation of events. Thus, at any decisive juncture (such as post First-World-War-Europe, or the contemporary crisis of global capitalism), we find contending progressive and regressive forces, with no certainty over which of these forces would predominate, at least in the near future.  Ibid. p. 209.

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Further, the insight that contingency underpins the dialectical movement of history and consciousness, entails that there is an alternative way of thinking through the ‘teleological’ possibility of a classless society— one that does not succumb to a ‘metaphysics of presence’. Lukács’ analysis of the ‘objective possibility’ of a non-empirical mode of self-consciousness, owing to the social position of the proletariat, highlights this strain of Marx’s thinking. It suggests, I mentioned, that the latter does not aim at overcoming reification once and for all (in ‘immediacy’, ‘presence’ etc.), since such an attempt would simply reenact the logic of reification; which is another way of saying that reification in its form is inevitable. Rather, its aim is to overcome alienation, as a set of interrelated processes and phenomena specific to capitalist modernity, that, while resulting from the reification intrinsic to the latter, is not identical with such reification. Thus, the conception of a classless society, in its positive content, is not the transcendence, but the conscious thematization of the (inevitable) processes of reification, in order to render their alienating effect ‘harmless’. This change in “intentional modality” towards reification, institutionalized in socio-economic and political mechanisms (such as the appropriation of surplus ‘in common’), can then result in a society/relation of production that overcomes capitalist alienation.46 It is clear from the preceding analysis that alienation under capitalism stems from reification, but only because within capitalism, the processes of reification are not recognized as such. Since the tendency towards reification is a structural tendency, where the self-conscious thematization of its form does not make the form itself disappear, political ‘praxis’ consists in a constant and always incomplete movement towards conscious  As I mentioned in the preceding chapter, Žižek alludes to the same insight in his analysis of Lacan’s claim that Marx ‘invented the symptom’. The analogy between the commodity form (Marx) and the dream-work (Freud), lies in being wary of the “[…] fetishistic fascination with the ‘content’ supposedly hidden behind the form […]” (2008, pp. 3–4). For Marx, the ‘secret’ of the commodity form (or for Freud, the dream-work) lies in ‘the form itself’. That is, the central phenomenon that Marx is attempting to explicate is, how and why abstract labour takes the (reified) form of the commodity qua exchange-value, or how and why the social character of labour qua ‘relations between men’, manifests itself in the “fantastic form of relations between things”. I am claiming that if the guiding aim of Marx’s theory is understood in this manner, then it can be generalised to the conception of a ‘classless’, therefore self-conscious society, such that the latter is not a necessarily a mode of transparent self-presence (see Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2008). 46

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thematization from within our historical situatedness; along with a constant reimagining of established institutional forms. Only in this way can one guard against the ever-present danger of the transformation of these institutions, once again, into modes of false consciousness, unthematized reification etc., leading to the reinstatement of the processes of exploitation. Žižek has pointed out that within contemporary liberal political theory, the concept of “totalitarianism” as applied to Marxist theory (as ‘metaphysics of presence’), has acquired a ‘hegemonic’ legitimacy that implies an “unwritten Denkverbot”, which systematically undercuts any attempt to engage in political projects making universal emancipatory claims that challenge the ‘totality’ of the modern neo-liberal socio-­political and economic world order.47 Instead, the specter of ‘totalitarianism’, restricts political theory and praxis to the empirical level—theoretically to that of contingent hegemonic formations, and in terms of praxis, to specific issues and causes, to ‘identity politics’ insofar as it does not challenge the whole. By explicating some of Lukács’ arguments, which provide a richer, more nuanced understanding of Marx’s thought, I am attempting to defy this “Denkverbot” and reopen the ‘universal’ dimension of political theory/praxis, with rational and ethical content, for our times. Yet, more needs to said concerning the theoretical and ‘practical’ dimensions of universality in the political domain, in particular, concerning the manner in which a revised ‘universality’ can accommodate contingency, without immediately reducing it. In the next section, I address this problematic by turning to the debate between Butler, Laclau and Žižek. The debate revolves around precisely the question of how to reconceive and rearticulate ‘universality’, within the political arena, in relation to the post-­ Enlightenment, post-modern awareness of irreducible ‘contingency’, which therefore, seems to bestow a merely provisional, ‘hegemonic’ character to all ‘universal’ emancipatory claims.

 Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, London, New York: Verso, 2002, pp. 2–3.

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7.3 Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, and the Political If it is correct to say that enlightenment modernity, with its naïve, substantive conception of universality, has, theoretically at least, run its course, then the question is: are we simply left with contingent political articulations that claim universality for themselves only by acquiring ‘hegemony’—where one social group or identity manages to project its particular emancipatory claim/interest as representing the ‘universal’ interests of society? Or, is there any possibility of retaining some notion of universal emancipatory politics, yet one that does not collapse into a claim defending a naïve, unmediated conception of universality? Each of the three thinkers under discussion, attempts to navigate between these extremes of naïve, ‘unmediated’ (reified) universality and a Machiavellian ‘false’ universality (which renders the domain of the ‘political’ fundamentally contingent—nothing but the endless play of conflict and provisional victories). The debate turns on how to understand the ‘negativity’ inherent in universality—variously described as its necessary (and not merely provisional) non-closure, incompleteness, non-­ transparency, non-presence, difference, ‘irreducible mediation through particularity’ etc. More precisely, as I have been discussing in various context throughout this study, it turns on, first, whether this negativity constitutive of universality, is understood in a predominantly relative or absolute sense—as an endless series of differential (‘antagonistic’) relations constitutive of ‘identity’ (determinate universality) and of the political field, or as an ‘absolute’ difference that ‘founds’ the political as the contested ground of universality. And second, it turns on how one might conceive and articulate the relation between the two senses of negativity or difference. Through this analysis of the different ways in which these thinkers negotiate the ‘extremes’ of relative and ‘absolute’ difference; the ways in which they attempt to rearticulate the irreducible interrelation between universality and particularity, necessity and contingency etc., their ‘common trajectory’ that instigates the dialogue in the first place, emerges more clearly. However, piecing together this trajectory is a challenging

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task, since, not only do the exchanges cover a wide range of theoretical issues, but in the process, also bring to light deep and irreducible differences between the thinkers. The differences emerge not just in their theses but in the very performance of their arguments—in the repetitive manner in which their arguments and counterarguments enact a certain ‘logical’ movement, where each accuses the other of ‘Kantian essentialism’, formalism, ahistoricism etc., while denying those same charges of their own positions. As Laclau himself remarks apropos Žižek’s charge against him that the very model of ‘contingent hegemony’ paradoxically appears to be ahistorical (and essentialist) in character, since it seems to provide “the formal coordinates of every ideological process”, rather than simply explicating the contemporary, ‘postmodern’ self-understanding, which arises within the historical context of the retreat of the left, and its ‘structural’ understanding: As we see, Žižek’s argument is a variation on Butler’s about transcendental limits and historicism, although ironically, while Butler’s charge was addressed to Žižek’s and my own work, Žižek is formulating the same objection against Butler and myself. I will refrain from joining the club and making the same criticism—this time against Butler and Žižek.48

Keeping this curious symmetry of argumentation in view, I am contending that what is at work here, in the articulation of negativity inherent in (impossible but necessary) ‘universality’, is a ‘negative dialectics’ in the Adornoian sense, as it articulates the realm of politics and political theory. I will return to this claim once we have the main strands of the debate clearly in view. Let us turn then, to Laclau’s conception of ‘Hegemony’, in its relation to contingency and universality, in order to distinguish it from the enlightenment conception of universality qua ‘pure’ immediacy or presence, exemplified for Laclau, by Marx’s theory. Once this distinction is in place, we can bring, by considering Žižek’s and Butler’s critiques, the

 Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Verso 2000, p. 200, cf. p. 281, Hereafter, ‘Contingency’. 48

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problematic of relative and structural ‘difference’, and their possible interconnection, into sharper focus. In his response to Judith Butler’s question concerning whether ‘hegemony’ is still a useful analytical/interpretative category for understanding contemporary political processes,49 Laclau makes a strong claim: not only is hegemony still ‘useful’, “[…] it defines the very terrain in which a political relation is actually constituted”.50 This claim becomes comprehensible only by clarifying the ‘conceptual displacements’ the category of hegemony introduces in relation to classical Marxist political theory. The concept of hegemony is not absent from Marx’s writings, though it has a secondary, provisional role. To show this, Laclau contrasts two passages from Marx: The Proletariat is coming into being in Germany only as the result of the rising industrial development. For it is not the naturally arising poor but the artificially impoverished, not the human masses mechanically oppressed by the gravity of society but the masses resulting from the drastic dissolution of society […] that form the proletariat […]. By proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto world order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat simply raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has made the principle of the proletariat, what without its own cooperation is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society […].51

The second passage reads: On what is a partial, merely political, revolution based? On the fact that part of the civil society emancipates itself and attains general domination; on the fact that a definite class, proceeding from its particular situation, undertakes the general emancipation of society […]. For the revolution of a nation and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to ­coincide, for one  Ibid. p. 6.  Ibid. p. 44. 51  Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3 London: Lawrence and Wishart 1975, pp. 186–87, quoted in Laclau, Contingency, 2000, pp. 44–45. 49 50

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estate to be acknowledges as the state of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class, a particular estate must be looked upon as the notorious crime of the whole of society so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation.52

Echoing Lefort’s approach, Laclau notes that the contrast between the two passages, is ‘striking’. The first passage represents the classical position—of the proletariat emerging as the ‘universal class’, through the “drastic dissolution of society”. Here to reiterate, the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of history coincide in the proletariat, which in and through the dialectical movement of history becomes ‘for-itself ’. The proletariat, unlike all previous social classes, is no longer merely the ‘object’ of history—it does not passively ‘suffer’ the ‘objective’ processes of history (the dissolution of earlier relations of production owing to growing productive forces etc.) by which it comes into being, rather it sees through to the conditions of its own emergence, hence to the ‘totality’ of the dialectical movement and the emergent whole. As we know, this sets up the teleological conception of the dialectical movement of history, culminating in a ‘classless’ society. Proletarian consciousness, in becoming (self ) aware of the objective conditions of its own emergence, sheds its particular class character, with its specific interests arising from its social position, and comes to directly embody the universality of the social whole. The telos of a ‘classless society’, therefore, represents the reflective coincidence of society with itself, where the social becomes fully transparent to itself. Thus, all social differentiation, particularity etc., including the proletariat itself as a class, must disappear, since they represent the unreflected inertia of the past. The second passage presents a very different picture. While in the first, it is through the dissolution of its particularity that the proletariat comes to occupy a universal standpoint, in the second, “[…] a definite class, proceeding from its particular situation, undertakes the general emancipation of society”. That is, mediation through particularity is the condition for the staging of universal claims. It is this staging/representation of the universal in and through particularity that allows a section of civil  Ibid. pp. 184–85, quoted in Ibid. p. 45.

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society to “emancipate itself and achieve general domination”. Unlike the unmediated (‘pure’) universality of the proletariat in the first passage, in the second, universality is mediated through the particular, such that “[…] something which does not cease to be particular has to demonstrate its rights to identify its own particular aims with universal emancipatory aims of the community”.53 Moreover, whereas in the first case the dissolution of the particular in the universal implies that there is no differentiation or conflict between classes, (since they cease to exist) and “power becomes superfluous”, in the second, the mediation of universality through particularity means that the staging of ‘universal claims’ is achieved precisely through the “antagonistic exclusion” of a particular class, in which “all the defects of society” come to be concentrated. Here, mediation and power become constitutive for any staging of a universal emancipatory discourse.54 For Marx of course, the second case represents only “a partial, merely political, revolution”, which stages a mediated universality that not only admits class differentiation within society, but depends on the antagonism between classes for staking its claim to universality. It is only the achievement of ‘pure’ unmediated universality of the social whole, without any social-political differentiation, antagonism etc. that constitutes ‘authentic’ emancipation. At this point, the series of ‘conceptual displacements’ that Laclau introduces in relation to Marx’s position become apparent. The mediated conception of universality described in the second passage, where “[…] the very possibility of domination is made dependent on the ability of a limited historical actor to present its own ‘partial’ emancipation as equivalent to the emancipation of society as a whole”,55 is the characteristic feature of political hegemony. Yet, whereas for Marx this state of affairs is secondary, provisional, and inauthentic, based on a merely “partial ­ political  Butler, Laclau, Žižek, Contingency, p. 46.  The latter, Laclau points out, operates through (at least) ‘two mediations’, first, through the particular group and its interests that comes to be identified with, and thus ‘represent’, the social whole and its general emancipatory project, and second, through the oppressive ‘other’ whose ‘antagonistic exclusion’ ‘is the very condition’ for the identification of the particular group with those universalized emancipatory claims. 55  Ibid. p. 47. 53 54

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revolution”, for Laclau (following Gramsci), it is constitutive of the very possibility of any universalizing emancipatory project. For Laclau, unlike Marx, there is no “purely” objective, universal (dialectical) law that determines the inexorable movement of history towards human emancipation, and which underlies contingent political struggles, and provisional victories. Rather, contingent hegemonic formations are constitutive of the ‘very terrain of the political’, understood as the ‘condition of possibility’ of ‘politics’ in the ordinary sense—the entire institutional apparatus of political formations (Parties) around specific ideologies, conflict and contestation between these parties within (and outside) that institutional apparatus, etc. This ‘terrain’ of politics, is nothing but the ‘staging’ of the universal constitutively mediated through the particular. Such constitutive mediation implies therefore, a necessarily “partial or pragmatic universality”.56 If domination involves political subordination, the latter in turn can be achieved only through a process of universalization, which makes all domination unstable. With this we have all the dimensions of the political and theoretical situation which make possible the ‘hegemonic’ turn in emancipatory politics.57

The notion of ‘hegemony’ is, of course, introduced by Gramsci, and captures the mediated, ‘contingent universality’ implied in the second passage from Marx that Laclau quotes. For Laclau, “It is the deepening of this second view of emancipation, and its generalization to the whole of politics in the modern age that constitutes Gramsci’s achievement”.58 This deepening and expansion of the ‘second view’—of the category of ‘hegemony’ as not merely provisional but constitutive—was conditioned by the historical context in which Gramsci was writing. Gramsci saw that capitalism was not moving in the direction of greater homogenization of society, but towards greater differentiation and complexity in the social, political, and economic domains. Thus, it became increasingly apparent that a ‘universal class’ would not emerge ‘automatically’, in accordance with the immanent logic of capitalism, but would require active political intervention and constitution. For Laclau, the tendency towards greater  Ibid.  Ibid. 58  Ibid. p. 51. 56 57

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complexity and differentiation that Gramsci recognized has only become accentuated in the contemporary globalized capitalist order. Consequently, “a political dimension becomes constitutive of all social identity”59 and with it, the category of hegemony becomes constitutive of the social as such. Two closely interconnected points need to be emphasized with respect to Laclau’s (and Gramsci’s) ‘hegemonic turn’ vis-à-vis Marx. First, Laclau is rather quick to dismiss the possibility of ‘authentic’ revolution and emancipation, based on a critique of Marx’s understanding of the ‘mechanism’ by which it would be attained. Second, even if we concede that Marx’s vision of ‘authentic’ emancipation, as the “unmediated” realization of the universal in the proletariat, seems untenable given historical experience, and moreover, vulnerable to reification (leading to ‘totalitarianism’, grounded in a ‘metaphysics of presence’), does it follow from Laclau’s theory that all emancipatory politics making universalizing claims must be given up—scaled down to merely contingently universal or hegemonic claims? Or is this ‘critique’ in turn reductionist, such that as Laclau’s himself claims, his theoretical position allows him to both maintain a contingent, hegemonic conception of universality, and still make room for more ‘global’ emancipatory projects? I will have more to say concerning Laclau’s conception of capitalism once I discuss Žižek’s critique of Laclau. Laclau’s understanding of contemporary capitalism—his contention that the working class has disappeared in advanced capitalist countries, hence, the old ‘essentialist’ framework of classical Marxism, which accords primacy to class struggle, the distinction between base and superstructure etc., is no longer valid, and must be rethought in terms of a ‘plurality of struggles’, of which class is just one element and class struggle just one of the processes—is central to his theory of hegemony. Thus, it is only a rearticulation of contemporary capitalism in terms that are continuous with Marx’s basic theoretical framework that can stave off the reductionist, empiricist position, which maintains that the political is exclusively the domain of contingent struggles and hegemonic universality—a position which Laclau also wants to avoid. 59

 Ibid. p. 53.

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However, contemporary capitalism, in its deterritorialized, neo-liberal avatar, appears to lend itself to the ‘logic of hegemony’. Laclau writes, “The globalization of the economy, the reduction of the functions and powers of the nation-states, the proliferation of international quasi state organizations—everything points in the direction of complex processes of decision making, which could be approached in terms of hegemonic logics [...]”.60 Yet, these developments could also be seen as the very conditions for greater capitalist homogenization (perhaps in a manner more complex than Marx could have envisaged). However, contemporary capitalist homogenization in the sense spelled out by Laclau, or in Hardt’s and Negri’s notion of ‘Empire’ for example, seems perfectly compatible with hegemony in the constitutive sense. Thus, contemporary capitalism may be understood, contra Marx, in purely hegemonic terms, that is, as exemplified in the ‘universal’ supranational hegemony of finance capital and its institutions, whose interests trump any democratic emancipatory demands coming from ‘below’. Moreover, increasing homogenization, deterritorialization etc. at the level of political economy through globalized finance, has brought with it its ‘antagonistic other’—what is excluded, vilified, but also paradoxically, not always antithetical to the interests of finance, namely, a more vehement, sometimes violent, assertion of ‘identity’, based on narrow religious, ethnic, or nationalist/cultural solidarities. These phenomena, arising in the context of global capitalism, seem therefore, to provide strong ‘evidence’ for Laclau’s claim concerning the constitutive dimension of hegemony and the differential, asymmetric power relations inherent to it. My concern with Laclau’s argument therefore, is not directed at contesting the ‘description’ of social ‘reality’ under contemporary capitalism, since any such ‘description’, even one that emphasizes the homogenizing force of contemporary capitalism rather than its ‘increasing complexity’, would be compatible with a ‘hegemonic’ interpretation. The concern rather, is with Laclau’s conclusion, based on his claim that capitalism is not resolving itself into a simple opposition between two classes. He writes, “It is sufficient that the logic of capital does not move in that direction for the realm of particularism to be prolonged sine die (a  Ibid.

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particularism […] which is not incompatible with a plurality of universalizing effects)”.61 Yet is it really sufficient? Could one concede that differentiation, antagonism etc. would not disappear from the fabric of the social, and yet salvage something of Marx’s notion of ‘universality’, albeit in a modified sense? I have already made a case for such a reading vis á vis Lefort’s position. Here I will reinforce this interpretation in the context of contemporary globalized capitalism, by analyzing the latter from a perspective continuous with Marx’s approach, but which now takes the specificities of its contemporary ‘global’ dimension into account. What is required then, is the elaboration of a perspective that is not primarily restricted to the ‘closed’ framework of factory production in the ‘metropolitan’ West, but can be enlarged to the global movement of finance capital, and its diverse modes of (primitive) accumulation and extraction of surplus. If, as I argued, ‘territorial’ imperialism, as a constitutive dimension of capitalism, was essential to the possibility and continued growth of the industrial revolution, then contemporary, ‘deterritorialized’ capitalism ushers in a new phase—a neo-imperialism that marks both a discontinuity—characterized by deterritorialization, and a continuity—characterized by the mechanism of exploitation, extraction of surplus value etc. that signals the “return of the repressed”, namely, land. Thus, unlike the notion of ‘Empire’, as a hegemonic formation, ‘neo-imperialism’ is a function of the ‘structural’ processes of capitalism. In this sense, it is again a movement of determinate negation—the return of what was negated/ excluded, in a transformed sense. Here again, it is a matter of articulating this movement in its negative dimension, which continually comes up against its own ‘absolute’ differential basis. With respect to the point concerning the restriction of emancipatory politics to “a plurality of universalizing effects”, Laclau writes, If hegemony means the representation, by a particular social sector, of an impossible totality with which it is incommensurable, then it is enough that we make the space of tropological substitutions fully visible, to enable

61

 Ibid. p. 46.

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the hegemonic logic to operate freely. If the fullness of society is ­unachievable, the attempts at reaching it will necessarily fail, although they will be able, in the search for that impossible object, to solve a variety of partial problems.62

The necessary ‘contamination’ of universality by particularity that prevents the social from fully (reflectively) coinciding with itself to form a ‘totality’, and therefore, makes hegemony a constitutive and permanent (and not provisional) condition, that is, makes the ‘impossible’ totality of the social necessarily a matter of hegemonic representation, appears to lead only to a “plurality of universalizing effects” that can “solve a variety of partial problems”. Yet, is there a way out of these seemingly mutually exclusive choices between ‘pure universality’, total/authentic emancipation etc. on the one hand, and ‘contingent universality’, the endless play of hegemonic domination etc., on the other, that Laclau’s reading seems to offer? To address this question, I will first consider Žižek’s (and Butler’s) critique of Laclau’s position, before turning to Laclau’s response. Žižek’s critique, in particular, pushes Laclau’s approach to its ‘limit’, both in portraying it (initially it seems, in a rather ‘flat’ manner), as nothing but the contingent, differential play of identity, power and ‘projected’ (staged) universality, and in positing, by contrast, a structural, founding difference that articulates and organizes the field of the political. It thus proves helpful in assessing Laclau’s response in meeting these objections. In contrast, Butler’s critique of Laclau is more attuned to the ‘non-reductive’ conception of Hegemony, which in its attempts to think particularity and universality together as irreducible moments, draws attention to the exclusions constitutive of the ‘universal’ (the political ‘Subject’, in the context in which Butler raises the issue). For Butler, these exclusions are “politically salient and not structurally static”.63 Consequently, on her (non-reductive) interpretation of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s conception of Hegemony (in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1985), what is excluded can return to ‘haunt’ the polities constituted in and through their  Laclau, The Politics of Rhetoric, 2000.  Cf. Butler, Laclau, Žižek, Contingency, p. 5.

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exclusion. This ‘haunting’ always exerts a certain critical pressure, which can lead to an expansion of the ‘universalist’ social imaginary of modern societies, that is, to an expansion of the ‘basic premises of democracy itself ’.64 However, I will argue that while Butler’s attempt to think ‘particularity’ and universality in their irreducibility underscores important dimensions of their interrelation (for example, following Hegel, what is politically at stake in thinking universality abstractly—its totalizing tendencies in the French revolution and the resulting ‘terror’), her critique of the structural/founding difference, (the Lacanian ‘real’ or the ‘barred subject’) as ahistorical, static etc. seems to be based on a certain misinterpretation of the type of negativity in question. Thus, it seems to lose out on an important aspect of the critique of Hegemony in terms of its capitalist ‘frame’ that Žižek forefronts. I will then turn to Butler’s response to these issues brought up by both Laclau and Žižek. Žižek, in his response to Laclau, advocates a “refusal of choice” between these “false alternatives” presented by contemporary Critical Theory, that of a structuralist ‘essentialism’ of the Marxist variety (class struggle, base and superstructure, grand narrative etc.) and ‘postmodernism’ (multiple identities, plurality of struggles, contingent hegemony). Yet, in what sense are these ‘false alternatives’, and what does mapping this ‘falsity’, leave us with? Žižek’s strategy here, in classical Hegelian fashion, is to undercut, which means, to historicize, the presuppositions that give rise to the seemingly incompatible character of this ‘opposition’. That is to say, the opposition dissolves, rather than being forcibly ‘reduced’ to one or the other of its poles, when the presuppositions that generate the opposition are shown up as ‘presuppositions’, tied to a certain historical context. For Žižek, the fundamental presupposition, which appears as the ‘neutral’ frame of reference, and is therefore, never explicitly thematized or problematized within postmodernist discourse (of which he takes Laclau’s position to be representative), is capitalism itself. Articulating this critique of the postmodernist critique of Marx would allow me to address my second concern—what does showing up the ‘falsity’ of this opposition leave us with? Here, in response to this 64

 Ibid. p. 11.

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problematic, expressed in “[…] Lenin’s old question, ‘what is to be done?’”, Žižek suggests a ‘third way’, namely, acting politically in a manner that transforms the “fundamental structural principle of society”.65 This third way, which undercuts the capitalistic frame as an unquestioned ‘natural frame’, leads neither to the ‘unmediated fullness of society’, nor restricts itself to solving a “variety of partial problems” within the existing (capitalist) framework. Rather, it opens up the possibility of political intervention, within a dialectical conception of history without positing a determinate telos. […] here at least, there is a third way […] What about changing the very fundamental structural principle of society, as happened with the emergence of the ‘democratic invention’? The passage from feudal monarchy to capitalist democracy, while it failed to reach the ‘impossible fullness of society’, certainly did more than just ‘solve a variety of partial problems’.66

However, for post-modern, post-Marxists such as Lefort and Laclau, the ‘counterargument’ to such an understanding (which Žižek mentions), is that the ‘third way’ is already extant in the symbolic form of the ‘democratic invention’. For, the latter transforms the very ‘impossibility’ of representing the ‘fullness’ of the social, into the ‘condition of possibility’ for its symbolic legitimacy. Whereas in pre-modern social formations, this impossibility was covered over, and the ‘place of power’ was substantively represented in the monarch, who therefore, embodied  its (ultimately transcendent)  source of legitimacy, in modernity the ‘place of power’ remains symbolically ‘empty’. It is this very emptiness of the place of power (its non-identification with the elected representative who provisionally occupies it) that constitutes the symbolic legitimacy of the exercise of power in modern democracies. This ‘mutation in the symbolic order’ inherent in modern democratic societies, consists in the fact that “[…] the contingency of power, the gap between power qua place and its place-holder, is no longer only ‘in-itself ’ but becomes ‘for-itself ’”.67 The latter implies a thorough immanentization or reflexivization of the social,  Ibid. p. 93.  Ibid. 67  Cf. Ibid. p. 94. 65 66

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where contingency is no longer disavowed, by locating the source of power in a divine/transcendent order (which the figure of the monarch embodies), ‘outside’ the realm of human affairs; rather, it is explicitly acknowledged and represented in its contingent character. Thus, far from representing an unreflective renaturalization of the capitalist frame (its depoliticization, dehistoricization etc.), along the lines of a series of determinate negations (‘concrete universals’)—a re-­naturalization giving rise to a specifically ‘capitalist democracy’ according to Žižek, for both Lefort and Laclau, modern democracy is thoroughly reflexive in its functioning. For example, against Žižek’s claim that “the political itself (political democracy) […] can be operative only insofar as it represses its radically contingent nature, insofar as it undergoes a minimum of ‘naturalization’, such that “the essentialist lure is irreducible”, Laclau writes: For, in the endless play of substitutions that Žižek is describing one possibility is omitted: that, instead of the impossibility leading to a series of substitutions which attempt to supersede it, it leads to the symbolization of impossibility as such, as a positive value. [….] although positivization is unavoidable, nothing prevents this symbolizing from presenting impossibility as such, rather than concealing it through the illusion of taking us beyond it. No doubt this operation still retains an element of naturalization, because the very fact of giving a name to something which […] is nameless is creating an entity out of something which is clearly no entity at all; […] The possibility of this weakened type of naturalization is important for democratic politics, which involves the institutionalization of its own openness and, in that sense, the injunction to identify with its ultimate impossibility.68

Against this picture of (post)modernity, characterized by the structural ‘break’ inherent in political democracy, which invokes a minimal, thoroughly reflexive, nominalized ‘renaturalization’, Žižek points out that the history of modernity consists of a ‘series of breaks’, each of which alters the very notion of democracy. I have already discussed, in relation to Bilgrami’s essay, the distinction between liberal and socialist conceptions  We saw that Žižek does not, in fact, omit discussion of the symbolization of the impossibility of social fullness itself, as constitutive of modern democracy. Cf. Ibid. p. 199. 68

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of democracy, as expressions, or more precisely, particular attempts to resolve the inherent tension between ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’. These figurations of democracy within the history of modernity are to be understood not as subspecies of the universal ‘genus’ ‘democracy’, but as forming a series of ‘concrete universals’ in the Hegelian sense. At least two ‘structural transformations’ or ‘symbolic mutations’ in the emergence of the ‘democratic invention’ can be readily distinguished. The ‘modernity’ ushered in by the Enlightenment (‘first modernity’), with its unproblematic sense of universality—the assertion of universal human rights, dignity, sovereignty, equality etc. based on a ‘substantive’ conception of value, going back to the ‘natural rights’ tradition—and the ‘second modernity’ (post-modernity), constituted by the pervasive reflexivization of the social, its move towards immanence in the transformation of its own inherent negativity or ‘impossibility’ into a positive, constitutive condition. Perhaps intermediate between the ‘first’ and the ‘second’ modernity, lies Kant’s procedural conception of the universal. For, Kant’s functionalization of the universal through the procedural method of universalizability constitutive of the (form of the) ‘moral law’, and therefore, the non-substantive conception of the universal it entails, still has its basis, as Butler points out, in the human capacity for rationality and autonomy, and the sense of dignity attached to it. Kant’s procedural conception then, represents a beginning towards thinking the universal in a non-static manner, qua ‘universal in becoming’ (the very negative movement of thought/reason I have been emphasizing), which transforms (but also retains) the substantive conception of human worth qua ‘capacity’ (for autonomy). The two conceptions of modernity are clearly contemporaneous in an empirical, but also in a theoretical sense, since they co-exist in a certain inherent tension, where each can easily transform into the other. Further, it could be argued that Kant’s procedural conception, as occupying an intermediate position, reflects this tension between the substantive and non-substantive conception of the universal.69  For, while invoking a certain rational capacity, inherent in the procedural conception of the universalizability of my normative claims, such that I become a member of a community, a ‘kingdom of ends’, this ‘capacity’ is also in a sense non-substantial, it is the negative moment as such, the moment of autonomy that points to a noumenal or ‘supersensible beyond’. 69

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The tension and possibility of ‘slippage’ between the two conceptions consists in this: the democratic figuration of enlightenment modernity, with its extension of universality to all human beings (with the possibility of its further extrapolation to all sentient creatures), has its basis in an implicit negativity (even if it is in the service of a positive-­substantive conception of universality) inherent in the critical-reflective stance of reason. The latter instigates reason to go beyond its own ‘limited satisfactions’, or narrow parochialisms (of race, gender, caste, nation, and even species). Yet, the transformation of the negative-critical moment into its ‘positive’ symbolic figuration (the ‘second modernity’), constitutes a ‘determinate negation’ that goes farther than a minimal, nominalized re-­ naturalization (owing to the very structure of representational mediation imposed by an ‘entity’, namely, universality, fullness etc., as both ‘necessary and impossible’) that is still thoroughly reflexive. For, this transformation tends to reenact the deleterious effects of the first ‘substantive’ conception of universality that emerged with the Enlightenment, which necessarily set up the ‘excluded other’ (recognizable as part of the logic of imperialism). Internally, I noted, such a refiguration of the negative reconstitutes the social ‘whole’, even if in a ‘spectral’, disincorporated sense and thus, provides the legitimating grounds for the exercise of power. Admittedly such universality/legitimacy, restricted to the field immanent to the social, is more fragile than its pre-modern ‘substantive’ counterpart. For instance, the spectrality of the ‘Nation’, its character as an ‘imagined community’, becomes visible in the domain of everyday political contestations, say between the progressive left/liberal and the regressive ‘right’ over what constitutes ‘nationalism’—the recognition of minorities, oppressed and disenfranchised sections of society as full citizens, or their exclusion from the democratic process, and the manner in which their modes of exclusion shape the discourse on ‘nationalism’. Ordinarily, such contestations can be accommodated within a democratic polity, owing to the symbolic ‘emptiness’ of the place of power, constitutive of the legitimate exercise of power by those who occupy it provisionally in a ‘representative’ capacity. However, as Lefort points out, if this immanent symbolic legitimacy is lost, if, that is, the elected representative/party is perceived as serving its own interest and not that of the social whole constituted in the symbolic

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‘emptiness’ of the place of power, then the latter becomes not symbolically but ‘really’ empty. This loss of representative legitimacy implies a fall from the ‘symbolic’ to the ‘real’, from the (empty) ‘universal’ to the ‘particular’, where each party is seen as ‘corrupt’, or acting for the sake of their own immediate gain etc. This opens up the possibility of the dissolution of the socio-political field, and of the ‘return of the repressed’ in symptomatic form—the nostalgia for the ‘lost’ substantive fullness of the social that leads to its ‘substantive’ articulation in terms of xenophobic nationalism, religious majoritarianism etc. Yet, this loss of symbolic/representative legitimacy, or fall into particularity, and the concomitant possibility of the substantive ‘reincarnation’ of the social, occurs precisely through the obliteration of the fragile space of negativity opened up in modern democracies. Thus, the possibility of this loss, reincarnation etc. does not entail a direct critique of Laclau’s (and Lefort’s) contention that the symbolic representation of negativity/impossibility in modern democracies does not necessarily imply an uncritical, pre-thematic renaturalization. In order to argue for the latter position, Žižek has to show that the symbolic reconstitution of the social ‘whole’ in modern democracies, in the very representation of negativity, conflict, difference etc., tends to perpetrate certain modes of political exclusion. Žižek does this by showing how all democratic polities are concrete/ determinate universalities, brought about through a series of displacements or determinate negations that are constitutively exclusionary. More precisely, the determinate form of modern democracy is constituted through its capitalist frame, which remains unthematized as reincarnating the social, as renaturalizing, or dehistoricizing it. It is in this connection that Žižek calls for a ‘third way’, involving the structural transformation of the determinate capitalist frame. The argument for the constitutively exclusionary character of the ‘universality’ represented in modern ‘radical’ democracy takes the following form: thought in static fashion, any such ‘realization’ of modern democracy, as a concrete universality, involves the coincidence of the specific difference of the ‘species’ with “the difference constitutive of the genus itself ”,70 such that the ‘genus’ or ‘universal’ again becomes a determinate/  Butler, Laclau, Žižek, Contingency, p. 99.

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differentiated particular. Žižek sees Laclau’s notion of hegemony as akin to Hegel’s ‘concrete universality’ in this sense, but where “the antagonistic gap” or ‘difference constitutive of society qua genus’, that is, the difference between “society and its external limit, non-society” is understood as an internal structural feature of society—as an “intra-social structural difference”.71 Thought dynamically, the gap/impossibility that irreducibly separates the empty universal from the particular, and sets up the mechanism of representative mediation, hence ‘hegemony’, instigates the series of historical displacements, and the determinate shapes of modern democracy to which they give rise. Yet, for Žižek, unlike Laclau, the “infamous Hegelian ‘reconciliation’ between Universal and Particular” does not amount to a strict coincidence—where the ‘irreducible gap’ between them is finally ‘reduced’ in self-sufficient transparency. For, the ‘moment of coincidence’ never arrives, or more precisely, at the very moment when it is supposed to arrive, the universal notion turns into something else. If we take a closer look at Hegel, we see that— in so far as every particular species of a genus does not ‘fit’ its universal genus—when we finally arrive at a particular species that fully fits its notion, the very universal notion is transformed into another notion. No existing historical shape of state fully fits the notion of State—the necessity of dialectical passage from State (‘objective spirit’, history), into Religion (‘Absolute Spirit’) involves the fact that the only existing state that effectively fits its notion is a religious community—which precisely is no longer a state. Here we encounter the properly dialectical paradox of concrete universality qua historicity: in the relationship between genus and its subspecies, one of the subspecies would always be the element that negates the very universal feature of the genus.72

In the case of ‘radical democracy’, if it were truly ‘radical’, it would politicize the economy (in the Marxist sense of ‘political economy’), but then it would no longer remain a (merely) ‘political democracy’.73 In other words, a truly ‘radical democracy’, one that fits its ‘genus’, would  Ibid.  Ibid. 73  Cf. Ibid. p. 100. 71 72

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thematize its capitalist frame, which limits it, that is, thematize the political economy of capitalism that prevents it from being a ‘true’ democracy (insofar as, I noted, the capitalist frame concentrates wealth, resources in a particular class, and subverts the democratic process in myriad ways); yet in doing so it would transcend the merely political understanding of democracy offered by Laclau and Lefort (symbolic representation of negativity, of the ‘empty place of power’, hegemony etc.). Yet, isn’t this ‘politicization of the economy’ precisely what ‘post-­ modern politics’ insists upon? Doesn’t this repoliticization of the economy constitute precisely the cornerstone of its critique of the ‘economic essentialism’ or ‘economism’ that it attributes to classical Marxism as its defining feature? Here everything depends on how this ‘politicization’ is conceived—whether the political moment of the ‘democratic invention’ is understood as the privileged historical moment (the ‘symbolic mutation’ in the realm of the political) that is then ‘extended’ or ‘applied’ to other spheres, such as race, gender, religion, the economy etc.(in demanding rights for various groups, for example), which were formerly thought to lie ‘outside’ the realm of politics; or whether it is understood in the Marxist sense of political economy, class struggle etc., that is, as the political-economic-social frame/structure that conditions in advance, the very terrain of ‘political’ discourse. According to Žižek, Laclau and Mouffe (and Lefort) accept the former position—the primacy of the ‘political’ (democratic invention) and then argue for its extension to other, ‘independent’ spheres,74 which thus sets up the logic of hegemony. That is, it gives rise to a plurality of struggles, where one of these struggles can come to represent the ‘empty universality’ or ‘impossible fullness’ of the social, and thus acquire hegemony. Further, Žižek argues that it is precisely the occlusion of the conditioning political-economic frame of capitalism that allows for the privileging of the ‘purely’ political moment, hence, for the idea that it must be ‘extended’ to the ‘economy’, as one amongst a plurality of domains such as ‘gender’, ‘race’ etc., “left ‘undeconstructed’ by Marx”. As Žižek puts it:

 Ibid. p. 98.

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Postmodern politics definitely has the great merit that it ‘repoliticizes’ a series of domains previously considered ‘apolitical’ or ‘private’, the fact remains, however, that it does not in fact repoliticize capitalism, because the very notion and form of the ‘political’ within which it operates is grounded in the depoliticization of the economy. If we were to play the postmodern game of plurality of political subjectivizations, it is formally necessary that we do not ask certain questions (about how to subvert capitalism as such, about the constitutive limits of political democracy and/or the democratic state as such …).75

Žižek’s ‘third way’ then, first of all, entails repoliticizing the capitalist frame of modern (liberal) democracy by denaturalizing/rehistoricizing it—by bringing the frame itself into the ambit of political discourse, rather than letting it remain undisturbed and unthematized as its constitutive condition. Yet, in order to accomplish the ‘perspectival shift’ required for the reemergence of the ‘third way’, that is, even to see this distinction between the ‘purely political’ and its framing condition, it is necessary to return to the first question concerning the falsity of the alternatives presented by the post-modernist critique of Marxist ‘essentialism’. For Žižek, I noted, while this critique, which moves from the ‘essentialism’ inherent in Marxism, with its simplification of identities into two opposed economic classes and the emergence of the proletariat ‘for-itself ’ as the “unique subject of history”, to the contingent plurality of identities and hegemonic struggles, might describe “an actual historical process”, it involves a dehistoricization (renaturalization, depoliticization) of capitalism. As a consequence, it betrays a certain resignation in the face of the capitalist-liberal order, and therefore, eschews from the outset, any attempt to overcome it.76 Yet the ‘erasure’ of the capitalist frame is of a peculiar kind—one that affects a series of displacements that for Žižek, constitute the political/ ideological gesture par excellence. As we saw, Lukàcs explicates precisely how ‘property’, ‘class’, ‘commodity’, ‘exchange-value’ etc., as structural features of capitalism, are not merely confined to the ‘specific domain of economy’, but come to constitute social ‘reality’—the very (alienated) 75 76

 Ibid. pp. 98–99.  Cf. Ibid. p. 95.

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modes in which we encounter the world, others, and ourselves in the world. For Žižek, “This global dimension of capitalism is suspended in today’s multiculturalist progressive politics: its ‘anti-capitalism’ is reduced to the level of how today’s capitalism breeds sexist/racist oppression and so on”.77 Once the constitutive frame of capitalism, its structural contradiction (class antagonism, alienation etc.) is disavowed, it is displaced onto “other markers of social difference”, “which come to bear an inordinate weight”.78 To understand the ‘ideological’ nature of this displacement, one must understand the manner in which a constitutive condition simultaneously reappears in the series of the ‘conditioned’, such that “it encounters itself in its oppositional determination”.79 For example, the money–commodity, as the symbolic representation of exchange-value, is the ‘measure’ of the exchange-values of all other commodities, and yet, it is also a commodity bought and sold on the market, whose exchange-value is ‘measured’ by all other commodities, including other money-commodities/ currencies. When postmodern politics insists, against ‘Marxist essentialism’, on the ‘repoliticization’ of the ‘economy’, it affects a displacement where the constitutive condition reappears as one within the series of the conditioned, resulting in the appearance of the whole domain as constitutively contingent, multiple, etc. It is this restaging of political economy within the political domain, which Žižek compares to the farcical restaging of the production process (involving ‘real’ exploitation of immigrant workers etc.) in ‘food courts’ (where for example, fruit juices are freshly squeezed in front of the consumer) that constitutes the political/ideological gesture par excellence. In its insistence on denaturalizing/re-­politicizing the economy as one within the series, it in fact depoliticizes the economy in its constitutive sense. Insofar as postmodern politics promotes in effect, a kind of ‘politicization of the economy’, is not this politicization similar to the way our supermarkets—which fundamentally exclude from their field of visibility the actual  Ibid. p. 96.  Ibid. p. 97. 79  Ibid. p. 96. 77 78

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production processes […]—stage it within the field of displayed goods, as a kind of ersatz, the spectacle of pseudo-production (meals prepared in full view in ‘food courts’, fruit juices freshly squeezed before the customers eyes etc.)? An authentic leftist would therefore ask the postmodern politicians a new version of the old Freudian question to the perplexed Jew: ‘Why are you saying that one should politicize the economy when one should in fact politicize the economy?’”80

Thus, for Žižek, postmodernism/post-Marxism of the Laclauian variety, in occluding the capitalist frame of its analysis, enacts an essentializing move of its own, since it presents its model of radical contingency, constitutive hegemony etc. as the ahistorical, formal condition of all politics, rather than as an interpretation of a specific historical moment arising from the retreat of the structuralist discourse of the left. In other words, the movement from essentialist Marxism to postmodern politics is itself conditioned by a historical, specifically, capitalist context. The question therefore, as Žižek puts it, is “how to historicize historicism itself ”.81 This ‘constitutive’ status of the economy, class struggle etc. should not, however, be understood as a return to a purported Marxist “essentialism”, that yet again, invokes the ‘base’-‘superstructure’ distinction. Rather, it is to be understood as the ‘limit’ of the socio-political field, viewed from ‘inside’ the field—from our situatedness within the field. I will return to this point, and elaborate it in relation to the very possibility of a ‘structural transformation’ from ‘within’, and what an alternative society following this structural transformation of the capitalist frame, might look like. The possibility of such a structural transformation, from a perspective located within the socio-historical field of becoming, as opposed to a ‘universal perspective’ conceived ‘outside’ the field (which succumbs to the ‘metaphysics of presence’) depends on a conception of dialectics that foregrounds its moment of negativity, and maintains itself in it. In the present context however, this idea of the limit of the social viewed from inside’ implies that not only, as Laclau’s notion of radical 80 81

 Ibid. pp. 96–97.  Ibid. p. 106.

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antagonism emphasizes, is it impossible to represent the fullness of society, but equally, it is impossible to adequately represent the very negativity/antagonism that in principle, prevents society from achieving transparent closure, or fullness. This latter impossibility is re-presented in a distorted fashion, reified and thus, externalized and excised, from the domain of the social, for example in the ‘ideological fantasy’ of the ‘Jewish plot’ or the ‘foreign hand’. This distorted positivization/externalization of the negativity of the social field, in turn sets up the reified representation of the latter as a unified totality—xenophobic nationalism being just one example. If therefore, in the operation of ideology, the ‘essentialist lure’ (the reductive tendency towards ‘presence’), works both ways,82 then the only ‘way out’—one that allows us to reconceive the possibility of any political project aimed at transforming the structural principles of society (as opposed to ‘solving partial problems’ within the existing status quo), as I noted, lies in a ‘negative’ conception of dialectics. A conception of negativity that comes close to ‘negative dialectics’ is, however, not entirely absent from Laclau’s discourse. Although Žižek’s emphasis on the ‘third way’ does highlight the unquestioned structural presupposition, namely, capitalism, that undergirds a ‘garden variety’ post-modernism resulting in the empiricization of the political (as the domain of unending contingent struggle and provisional hegemonic formations), is such a conception fully attributable to Laclau? For instance, apropos Žižek’s critique, Laclau makes clear that he does not disagree with Žižek’s analysis of the operation of ‘ideological fantasy’—the ‘essentialist lure’, or essentializing tendencies operative in political struggles, and even the claim that it can work both ways—that the impossibility of the fullness of the social, can itself be positivized, hence distortedly represented as an ‘external obstacle’. What he disagrees with is Žižek’s claim that that such ‘essentialism’ is a necessary condition for politics. Laclau puts into question Žižek’s contention that the  Not only by transforming the negativity of the social into the posited (impossible) fullness of the social, but by transforming that unrepresentable negativity into a positive, reified and externalized representation, such that the ‘contingent’ hegemonic struggle can operate only by suppressing its contingency, by ‘naturalizing’ its claim. 82

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political can be operative “only insofar as it ‘represses’ its radically contingent nature, insofar as it undergoes a minimum of ‘naturalization’”, and the conclusion Žižek draws from this, namely, that it is impossible to adequately represent the ‘impossibility’ (negativity, antagonism) itself that “prevents the social from achieving its full ontological realization”.83 In connection with the first assertion, Laclau points out that a ‘minimum of naturalization’, which is inevitable in the political domain, does not automatically entail an ‘essentialist reduction’ that necessarily represses its own contingent, ‘hegemonic’ character. This minimal naturalization is, we saw, what Laclau takes to be the hallmark of modern democracy, which symbolically represents impossibility qua impossibility, as a’ positive value’, and derives its legitimacy from such representation. With respect to Žižek’s critique concerning the ‘merely political’ nature of this understanding of modern democracy, which does not extend to its determinate constitutive framing conditions (capitalism), there seems to be no inherent reason why such an understanding cannot in fact do so. For Laclau, it is possible to argue that the ‘minimal naturalization’, which keeps impossibility/negativity firmly in view, is what allows the “capitalist frame” itself to become visible as a (contingent) hegemonic social formation—hence in principle open to transformation.84 With respect to the second point, Laclau points out that the positivization of the impossibility of social fullness need not always result in an arbitrary, distorted representation (in the fantasy of the Jewish plot or the disruptive outsider/immigrant etc.). The apartheid regime, or Tzarism “[…] were actual obstacles to a plurality of democratic reforms and not just arbitrary targets positivizing an inherent impossibility”.85 However, insofar as they also represented the positivization of such impossibility, they provided the political struggles that attempted to overthrow these regimes, “their dimension of [universal] horizon”, which bestowed on these particular struggles (‘partial reforms’) a universal significance,

 Ibid. p. 100, cf. p. 198.  Cf. Ibid. p. 293. 85  Ibid. p. 199. 83 84

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l­eading to a “proper overdetermination amongst them” and the formation of a hegemonic discourse.86 Here, the real point of contention between Žižek and Laclau is the systematicity of capitalism, as the ‘frame’ of our contemporary political discourse, and the possibilities for political intervention and transformation it systematically affords, or prevents. Whereas for Žižek it is the immanent logic of capitalism that constitutes the unthematized ‘frame’ or terrain of political discourse that severely curtails the possibilities of political (structural) intervention, and the articulation of a hegemonic logic is merely a ‘symptom’ of this unthematized structural limitation; for Laclau the hegemonic logic extends to the frame itself, and therefore, opens up the possibility of a transformation at the level of structure. As Laclau puts it, “[…] there is no room for conceiving totality as a frame within which hegemonic practices operate: the frame itself has to be constituted through hegemonic practices”.87 However, I have been arguing that even if we grant that the notion of hegemony arises, as Laclau claims, in the wake of an understanding of capitalism that does not see in it an immanent structural movement towards greater homogenization and simplification (culminating in the emergence of the proletariat as the universal class), there is no inherent incompatibility between contingent hegemonic processes and the notion of ‘structure’. The ‘incompatibility’ (‘contradiction’) arises only from an inordinately strict conception of the ‘structural necessity’ operative in the immanent tendencies of capital. Before I explicate this more general unity between ‘contingency’ and ‘universality’ in the context of this debate with respect to the political, let us discuss Laclau’s specific response to some of Žižek’s objections. What conceptual resources does Laclau’s notion of hegemony offer, not only to meet these criticisms but to address the question of the possibility of political praxis still oriented by ‘universal’ claims? Laclau first addresses the apparent implication that ‘resignation/cynicism’ in the face of ‘impossible’ fullness restricts political action to solving ‘a variety of partial problems’. Žižek writes:  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 302.

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Does this solution not involve the Kantian Logic of an infinite approach to impossible Fullness as a kind of ‘regulative idea’? Does it not involve the resigned/cynical stance of ‘although we know we will fail, we should persist in our search’–of an agent which knows that […] its ultimate effort will necessarily fail but which nonetheless accepts the need for this global specter as a necessary lure to give it energy to engage in solving partial problems?88

Against this view, Laclau distances himself from the Kantian conception of ‘regulative idea’ on the grounds that for Kant the content of these ideas (or ‘heuristic fictions’ of reason) are pre-given, ‘once and for all’, whereas the concrete political struggles in which there is a ‘cathectic investment’ are ‘constantly changing’.89 Consequently, there can be no question of a ‘fundamental’ cynicism, at the basis of political action. As Laclau puts it, “[…] for the historical actors engaged in actual struggles, there is no cynical resignation whatsoever: their actual aims are all that constitute the horizon within which they live and fight. To say that ultimate fullness is unachievable is by no means to advocate any attitude of fatalism or resignation; it is to say to people: what you are fighting for is everything there is; your actual struggle is not limited by any preceding necessity.90

The only possible alternatives, which Žižek claims follow from Laclau’s apparent ‘Kantianism’—either ‘cynical resignation’ or the disavowal of impossibility and a fall back into naïve ‘enthusiasm’91—seem too strict and reductive. In particular, the sense in which, for Laclau, the problems to be solved are ‘partial’, with respect to their ‘universal’ horizon, show how the ‘impossibility’ of social fullness, the moment of ‘negativity’ or the irreducible gap between the particular content of political action and its universal orientation, can itself become a motivating factor, the source of (non-naïve, self-aware) political enthusiasm.  Ibid. p. 93.  Cf. Ibid. p. 196. 90  Ibid. 91  Cf. Ibid. pp. 316–17. 88 89

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The ‘partial’ character of the problems to be solved requires us to keep in mind the distinction between the ‘ontic content’ of the problem and the ‘ontological investment’ made in actually attempting to solve it. The latter always aims at universality—at global social transformation, emancipation etc. Consequently, their ‘partial’ character does not lie in dealing with each problem ‘one by one’ in a disconnected, ‘administrative’ manner. Rather ‘partial’ here refers to the “[…] the gap between the content which at some point incarnates the society’s aspiration to fullness, and the fullness as such”.92 Social-political movements, while struggling for particular causes, and achieving specific victories (in the form of new legislation etc.) can invest them with an anti-systemic universal ‘symbolic significance’ that goes far beyond those particular struggles. Laclau therefore, argues that Žižek’s criticism that the conception of contingent universality necessarily involves a ‘gradualist politics’ is based on a misunderstanding of what it means to ‘solve a variety of partial problems’. Žižek writes, This justified rejection [by Laclau] of the fullness of post-revolutionary society does not justify the conclusion that we have to renounce any project of a global social transformation, and limit ourselves to partial problems to be solved: the jump from a critique of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ to anti-utopian ‘reformist’ gradualist politics is an illegitimate short circuit.93

Laclau asserts that he entirely agrees that this short circuit is illegitimate, but it is Žižek who is doing the short circuiting.94 For, to say that social and political demands may be discrete is not the same as to assert that they may be “politically met through a gradualist process”. Rather, recalling the analysis presented in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau notes that in a society conditioned by ‘extreme oppression’, a series of discrete, particular demands can set up a ‘relation of equivalence’, and thus may come to acquire a larger, anti-systemic universal significance. The presence of an oppressive regime creates a line of demarcation or  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 101, quoted by Laclau, p. 197. 94  Cf. Ibid. 92 93

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‘frontier’ within society—for Marx, it comes to be seen as the ‘general crime’ of society—that constitutes the condition for the emergence of equivalences between a plurality of particular demands, and thus universalizes them in a way that over-determines each specific demand. As bearers of this anti-systemic significance, the meaning of each demand is internally “[…] split, from the very beginning, between its own particularity and a more universal dimension”.95 The more extensive this chain of equivalences between a diversity of specific demands, the more its inherent universal component becomes amorphous, and therefore, the greater the need for its representation in a ‘general equivalent’. However, insofar as this representative burden can only be borne by one of the existing demands in the chain, a specific demand comes to represent the general equivalence of the whole chain; which therefore constitutes the hegemonic moment. This schema (analogous in some respects to the money commodity in its initial ‘material’ incarnation in gold or silver, which comes to represent the general equivalence between commodities) can be represented as follows: T -------------------------------------------D₁

Θ=Θ=Θ=Θ… D₁

D₂ D₃ D₄

Where T designates ‘Tsarism’, the horizontal line demarcates the separation between the oppressive regime and the rest of society, D1, D2, D3 represent particular demands, Ө their general ‘anti-systemic significance’, and D1 positioned above the set of equivalent demands represents the hegemonic general equivalent.96 95 96

 Ibid. p. 302.  Ibid. p. 303.

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However, Laclau writes, the schema also allows for a second, opposite possibility, or direction of movement, where the dominant oppressive regime absorbs, or accommodates a few of these demands, thereby breaking the chain of their equivalence and ‘destabilizing the frontier’ between itself and society. By breaking their ‘general equivalence’ the dominant regime engages in a hegemonic operation of its own. Each demand comes to be seen merely as a specific demand, separate from the rest, and can then be ‘transformistically integrated’ into the system, thereby losing its universal, emancipatory significance. For Laclau, it is this movement towards specificity or the ‘logic of difference’ (as opposed to the logic of equivalence) that Žižek is worried about, in relation to the ‘capitalist frame’. However, the main point to be emphasized here is that these ‘articulatory logics’—the ‘logic of equivalence’ and the ‘logic of difference’—are integral to the operation of hegemony—the one seen from the perspective of the oppressed, and the other from that of the oppressor.97 Consequently, within a hegemonic logic, just as there can be no universality without mediation through particularity, there can be no particularity without its evoking a certain universal meaning. Thus, the destabilizing or blurring of the frontier implies not merely a particularizing of the elements of the chain of equivalence, but its hegemonic reappropriation into a “different set of equivalences”, constituting a different universalist significance, now tied to the hegemonic identity of the oppressive order. As Laclau, in broad agreement with Butler, puts it; There is no politics of pure particularity. Even the most particularistic of demands will be made in terms of something transcending it. As however, the moment of universality will be differently constructed in various discourses, we will have a struggle between different conceptions of universality or an extension of the equivalential logics to those very conceptions, so that a wider one is constructed. The chains of equivalences are always disturbed, interrupted by other hegemonic interventions that construct meanings and identities through different equivalential chains.98  Cf. Ibid. p. 305.  Ibid.

97 98

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For Laclau, this conception of competing universalistic constructions mediated through a set of particular ‘contents’ implies, as I noted, that there is no ‘frame’ (capitalism) ‘outside’ the domain of hegemonic processes, that is, outside the sphere of the political. Two points need to emphasized with respect to this central distinction between Laclau’s and Žižek’s positions. First, even if we accept Žižek’s contention that it is capitalism, as the unthematized ‘frame’ that leads to the emergence of the conception of contingent universality, hegemony etc. (such that the latter is ahistorical in its own self-understanding), it does not follow that capitalism itself is not a hegemonic system (albeit, for the theory advocating the primacy of contingent hegemonic universality over ‘structure’). Secondly, it is precisely the possibility of seeing capitalism as a specific, contingent hegemonic formation (mediated through a multitude of particular socio-economic institutional arrangements) that sets up the possibility of its ‘transformation’. For Laclau (and we saw, for Bilgrami), it allows us to ask productive questions capable of generating a political program—questions that are ruled out by Žižek’s seemingly overly structuralist understanding, which can only lead to a deterministic conception of the self-destruction of the system, in the traditional Marxian theoretical mold. It is worth quoting the complete paragraph, where Laclau contrasts the political ‘sterility’ of the old Marxist structuralist framework and the ‘productive’ character of the conception of hegemony. The imagery around the base/superstructure metaphor decisively shapes Žižek’s vision of political alternatives. Thus, he distinguishes between the struggles to change the system and struggles within the system. I do not think this distinction […] is a valid one. The crucial question is: how systematic is the system? If we conceive of this systematicity as the result of endogenous laws of development—as in the retroactive reversal of contingency into necessity—the only alternatives are either that these laws lead […] to the self-destruction of the system […] or to the system’s destruction from outside. If on the contrary, systematicity is seen as a hegemonic construction, historical change is conceivable as a displacement in the relations between elements —some internal and some external to what the system had been. Questions such as the following may be asked: How is it possible to maintain a market economy which is compatible with a high degree of social control of the productive processes? What restructuration of the lib-

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eral democratic institutions is necessary so that democratic control becomes effective, and does not degenerate into regulation by an all-powerful bureaucracy? How should democratization be conceived so that it makes global political effects which are however, compatible with the social and cultural pluralism existing in a given society? These questions are thinkable within the Gramscian strategy of a war of position, while in Žižek’s suggestion of a direct struggle for overthrowing capitalism and abolishing liberal democracy, I can see only a prescription for political quietism and sterility.99

Before turning to Laclau’s critique of Marxist ‘structural essentialism’, as reflected in Žižek’s position, let us underscore an obvious problem that presents itself in relation to Laclau’s position—that of a possible ‘normative deficit’ in the theory of hegemony. A first hint of the problem is contained in Žižek’s ascription of a certain ‘Kantianism’ to Laclau’s conception, which raises the issue (just as it had for Kantian ethics), of what motivates political/ethical action, within a hegemonic understanding, arising from, for instance, the types of ‘productive questions’ it is capable of instigating according to Laclau? This problem of motivation (of negotiating the extremes of ‘naïve enthusiasm’ or ‘cynical resignation’), is met (again, in line with a possible Kantian response) by treating the negative moment/gap/impossibility as a positive value, thereby consistently keeping within an orienting universal horizon. Indeed, such motivation is ‘internal’ (just as freedom is the innermost possibility of reason for Kant) to the ‘subject’ insofar as the subject itself is nothing but this ‘gap’. As Laclau puts it, the “[…] tropological movement which subverts the symbolic order is the place of the emergence of the subject. […] the subject is the distance between the undecidability of the structure and the decision”.100 However, there seems to be nothing inherent in the logic of hegemony that leads to greater universality, social inclusion or a more just society. As long as a particular content, whatever it may be, successfully comes to hegemonize the social field, it wins for itself a (contingently) ‘universal’ status. In the plurality of contingent hegemonic struggles, and the chain of equivalences they set up, there is no normative basis for favoring one  Ibid. p. 293.  Ibid. pp. 78–79.

99

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set of equivalences, one ‘universal horizon’ over another; yet it seems, this is precisely what Laclau does. As Žižek puts the matter; “Laclau’s notion of hegemony describes the universal mechanism of ideological “cement” which binds any social body together, a notion which can analyze all possible sociopolitical orders, from fascism to liberal democracy; on the other hand, Laclau nonetheless advocates a determinate political option, ‘radical democracy’”.101 Laclau’s response to this classical paradox between the descriptive and normative orders (or between the particular and the universal moment) is to, in equally classical fashion, deny the ‘strict’ demarcation between them (a demarcation he, in turn, locates in Kant’s distinction between pure and practical reason). If there is no such strict distinction between fact and value, then any political praxis will discursively constitute and posit its own ‘facts’, in the wake of its encounter with the socio-political field—the possibilities and resistances it offers—within which it operates. There is no ethically uncommitted position available to a hegemonic articulatory logic. “A theory of hegemony is not, in this sense, a neutral description of what is going on in the world, but a description whose very condition of possibility is a normative element governing from the very beginning whatever apprehension of facts as facts, there could be.”102 And yet, fact and value, even if inseparable, are irreducible to each other, and thus, are analytically distinguishable. As Laclau admits, the problem of how these ‘two dimensions’ are to be articulated, remains. The ethical dimension of a theory of hegemony lies in its basic commitment to the universal, empty horizon of any particular content of political praxis. And the latter therefore, constitutes the modes of articulation and critique of this particular ethical investment in content/normative order that comes to represent the necessarily posited yet impossible/ empty universal horizon of the social. The ethical commitment of a theory of hegemony is again, to the ‘gap’ (or the negativity of transcendence) between the ethically invested content/normative order of any political discourse and the empty universal/fullness it represents and by which it is necessarily oriented, such that the former is always subject to critique and 101 102

 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p.174, quoted by Laclau in Contingency, pp. 79–80.  Laclau, Contingency, p. 80.

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revision in light of the latter.103 Butler brings out this ethical dimension of the theory of hegemony very clearly when she writes: My understanding of the view of hegemony established by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) is that democratic polities are constituted through exclusions that return to haunt the politics predicated upon their absence. That haunting becomes politically effective precisely in so far as the return of the excluded forces an expansion and rearticulation of the basic premise of democracy itself.104

I will return to this interpretation, particularly with respect to the manner in which it hints at a possible ‘way out’ of the impasse between Žižek’s understanding of every socio-political formation, including modern democracy, as a concrete universality, hence necessarily exclusionary, discriminatory etc., blind to its capitalist frame and naively asserting a contingent hegemonic formation, and Laclau’s emphasis on the negative moment (of transcendence) inherent in modern democracy that constitutes its non-closure, and thus, the possibility of hegemonic political/ ethical emancipatory projects. I will argue that ‘structure’ and ‘hegemony’ are not antithetical notions, but open up the possibility of ‘structural transformation’ in the ‘third way’ advocated by Žižek. As Laclau points out, the capitalist ‘frame’ cannot be understood along the lines of the Lacanian ‘Real’, which is the unsymbolizable condition/ disruption of the symbolic order. For, capitalist institutions and processes participate in the symbolic order; otherwise, it would not be open to any kind of transformation, including ‘structural’ transformation. Rather, (and as I have tried to argue through the notion of the ‘constitutive outside’ of the capitalist system—colonialism, dirigisme etc.), it is because, Laclau writes, “[…]there are no symbolic totalities without holes […], capitalism as such is dislocated by the Real, and it is open to contingent hegemonic retotalizations”.105 For Laclau, it follows that capitalism cannot be the invisible framework within which political struggles are understood as contingent hegemonic struggles, rather, it is “itself the result of  Cf. Ibid. p. 81.  Ibid. p. 11. 105  Ibid. p. 291. 103 104

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partial hegemonic stabilizations”.106 Consequently, the totality (the capitalist system) itself cannot be ‘internally generated’ since it is “essentially contaminated by an ineradicable exteriority”.107 Thus, the Hegelian notion of the retroactive transformation of contingency into necessity that Žižek invokes, is an “[…] inadequate conceptual tool to think the logic of hegemonic retotalization”, and Laclau adds, for good measure, that “this is a good example of the short circuit that takes place whenever Žižek tries to combine his Lacanianism with his Hegelianism”.108 However, is there a fundamental incompatibility between an ‘ineradicable, constitutive exteriority’ and a systemic totality? Laclau’s critique is directed against Žižek’s argument (following Hegel) that even if capitalism has a contingent origin in a set of specific historical circumstances, and even if the liberal institutions to which it gives rise, such as political democracy, an independent judiciary etc. are open to hegemonic re-­ appropriations, this does not entail that capitalism itself is simply a concatenation of heterogeneous processes, rather than a systematic totality with an underlying logic. For Žižek, the systematicity of a totality can be “internally generated”, insofar as contingency of origin (and the possibility of rehegemonization) is compatible with systematic ‘totality’—in the sense that contingency is retroactively transformed into necessity, and reappropriated within a symbolic logical economy. Thus, the idea is that totality can be “internally generated” not ‘literally’, as a self-sufficient system, since Žižek doesn’t deny contingency/exteriority, but only insofar as its constitutive exteriority is disavowed in a renaturalization (de-­ historicization) of that totality. The latter amounts to a ‘determinate negation’ that for Marx, as we have been arguing, gets the logic of capital going. However, the implicit or appropriated contingency/exteriority manifests itself as a disruption of the system, in the form of ‘crises’,109  Ibid.  Ibid. 108  Ibid. pp. 291–92. 109  Thus, as Marx argues in Capital I, what breaks the closed cycle of ‘equivalent exchange’ (the ‘closed totality’ of the system represented in the C–M–C′ circuit) is the creation of surplus value, through the influx of living labour over dead labour (capital), in the production process, (represented in the M–C–M′ circuit) which reinstigates the cycle of exchange ever anew. Yet since this ‘excess’ of living over dead labour is again quantified, represented in the commodity itself, as its exchange-value (commodity fetishism), it is reappropriated within the symbolic economy of (‘equivalent’) exchange, thus within the ‘closed’ totality of the system. (cf. Capital I, pp. 188–89). 106 107

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both at the political-economic and planetary level. That is, exteriority and contingency (either of living labour or nature), when disavowed, manifests itself indirectly (or in a distorted ‘formal’ fashion) as ‘contradiction’ in the familiar logic of the ‘return of the repressed’ (akin to Butler’s suggestion with respect to the normative dimension of the theory of hegemony). […] Capitalism ‘retrospectively posited its own presuppositions’ and reinscribed its contingent/external circumstances into an all-encompassing logic that can be generated from an elementary conceptual matrix (the contradiction involved in the act of commodity exchange etc.) In a proper dialectical analysis, the necessity of a totality does not preclude its contingent origins and the heterogeneous nature of its constituents, these are, precisely, its presuppositions which are then posited, retroactively totalized, by the emergence of dialectical totality.110

For Žižek then, an ‘exteriority’, if it is to be a constitutive exteriority, must become part of the ‘interiority’—the symbolic totality—of the system, and its systematic movement, yet in a manner where it cannot be appropriated without remainder within that totality, but continues to manifest itself indirectly as a ‘contradiction’ within the system. To see this point more clearly, let us contrast it with Laclau’s account of the emergence of antagonism in relation to ‘class identity’, within capitalism. In his New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Laclau draws attention to an inner tension discernible in Marx’s notion of history, that again leads to two ‘incompatible’ versions; one, where the dialectical unfolding of history is governed by the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, and the other, by ‘class antagonisms’, which under capitalism resolve themselves into a direct confrontation between two fundamental classes—the capitalist and the worker.111 For Laclau, ‘antagonism’ constitutes the moment of contingency, the ineradicable ‘outside’, or non-closure of the ‘system’ that cannot be accommodated ‘inside’ the dialectical totality, that is, in a  Cf. Žižek, Contingency, p. 225.  See Ernesto Laclau. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London, New York: Verso, 1990, pp. 5–18 (Hereafter, ‘New Reflections’).

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formal-­rational dialectical contradiction between the relations of production and the forces of production (or between the ‘capitalist’ and ‘worker’, understood as depersonalized economic categories). […] a decent standard of living is impossible when wages fall below a certain level; and the fluctuations in the labour market affect housing conditions or the worker’s access to consumer goods. In this case however, the conflict is not internal to capitalist relations of production (in which the worker counts merely as the seller of labour power), but takes place between the relations of production and the workers identity outside them. […] the constitutive outside is inherent to any antagonistic relationship.112

This ‘constitutive outside’ inherent in antagonism, both prevents rational closure, or the self-sufficiency of “the identity of the ‘inside’”,113 and is also constitutive of such identity and of social identities as such. Thus, it is the latter, ‘constitutive’ aspect which, for Laclau, entails that ‘antagonism’, while being irreducible to ‘contradiction’ and the dialectical relational identities it sets up (the ‘worker’ and the ‘capitalist’ as economic categories), is inevitably reappropriated without remainder, into the ‘closure’ of dialectical relationality, that is, conceived (represented) as (dialectical) ‘contradiction’ within the totality, in Marx’s writings.114 I noted that placing the emphasis on the transformation of absolute into relative difference—a transformation that moreover, Laclau thinks remains unthematized in Marx, leads him to find only two symmetrical and incompatible conceptions of history in Marx—a strictly rational dialectical (closed) history driven by internal contradiction/ class struggle, and one based on contingency and antagonism. “For history to be grasped conceptually as a rational and coherent process, antagonism must be reduced to contradiction”.115 Since this is impossible, “[…] history, based on the necessary development of productive forces, is faced with an ‘outside’ which strips it of any ultimate rational coherence”.116  Ibid. p. 9  Ibid. p. 17 114  Derrida makes a similar point in his critique of the master-slave dialectic in Hegel. See Derrida, Jacques. “From a Restricted to a General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve”, in Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 115  Laclau, New Reflections, p. 8. 116  Ibid. p. 12. 112 113

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Laclau again invokes this distinction between antagonism and contradiction in the context of his critique of Žižek and his privileging of class struggle, as the ‘founding’ contradiction in relation to which the hegemonic game of ‘post-modern identity politics’ is played out. The irreducibility of ‘contradiction’ and ‘antagonism’ drives a wedge between forces of production and relations of production on the one hand and ‘class struggle’ on the other. For, the latter can no longer be assimilated to ‘formal’-dialectical contradiction, but must be thought of as ‘pure’ contingent antagonism. As Laclau puts it, “[…] the contradiction between forces and relations of production […] is a contradiction without antagonism […]”, whereas, “class struggle […] is an antagonism without contradiction”.117 Antagonism is not reducible to contradiction, thus, it is not inherent to the relations of production, since, for Marx, the constitutive elements of the latter—the ‘capitalist’ and the ‘worker’—are conceived not as “actual people”, but simply economic categories within the system. If class antagonism was inherent to the relations of production, then it would be possible to logically derive antagonism from contradiction. But “[…] the fact that surplus value is extracted from the worker”, does not necessarily entail that “[…] the latter will resist such extraction”.118 Antagonism, therefore, does not arise immediately from the ‘formal contradiction’ of the economic categories constitutive of the relations of production under capitalism, but (as Laclau emphasizes in the passage from New Reflections quoted above) from the workers ‘identity’ outside these relations—for instance, her identity as a human being entitled to a decent standard of living, which is threatened when wages fall below a certain level. The formation of such an identity is dependent on a whole range of contingent factors (what constitutes a decent standard of living in that society, political attitudes, personal affiliations etc.) and there need not be anything ‘intrinsically anti-capitalist’ in the worker’s outlook, just in virtue of occupying the position “seller of labour-power”.119 Thus, such an  Cf. Laclau, Contingency, p. 202.  Ibid. 119  A point that, I noted, Lukács also emphasizes, with the distinction between objective/formal possibility and its actualization. 117 118

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‘identity’, including the ‘anti-capitalist identity’ of the worker engaged in ‘class struggle’, is a matter of hegemonic contestation and formation, such that class struggle, instead of being ‘foundational’, “[…] is just one species of identity politics”.120 Moreover, with the proliferation of ‘identities’, emerging ‘identity struggles’, and political agencies, which in turn are tied to the increasing ‘complexity’ and heterogeneity of capitalist processes under globalization (indicated in the contemporary absence of a central metropolitan, imperialist ‘core’, for example), ‘class struggle’ is steadily diminishing in importance as a central analytical category with which to understand the contemporary world. For Laclau (as for Lefort), ‘class struggle in its ‘foundational’ Marxist sense is a relic of the past, “[…] an old-fashioned conception which saw in an assumed proletarianization of society the emergence of the future burier of capitalism”.121 Laclau’s critique of Marxian (and Žižekian) ‘essentialism’, ranges over many interconnected levels and touches upon many issues—from the ‘strictly necessary’ conception of the dialectical unfolding of history (the contradiction between forces and the relations of production driven by class struggle), to the base/superstructure relation in terms of which the movement is understood; to its culmination in a totalitarian state (unmediated universality) in keeping with the unacknowledged commitment to a ‘metaphysics of presence’. Laclau cites increasing complexity and lack of homogeneity in modern capitalism, the fragmentation of political identities, agencies and struggles to which it gives rise, the “disappearance of the peasantry”, of the proletariat and indeed, of ‘class’ itself, as a useful category of social analysis in the so called ‘post-industrial’ societies of advanced capitalist countries, as reasons for abandoning the old Marxist framework, and replacing it with the articulatory logic of hegemony.122 As a corollary, Laclau points to the fact that Žižek (unlike Marx, Lenin or Trotsky, to mention just a few names) never specifies what shape the global emancipatory political struggle, and its transformation of the ‘capitalist frame,’ would take, or how the ‘foundational conception of class struggle’ is to be understood. In the absence of any such positive  Ibid.  Laclau, Contingency, p. 203. 122  Cf. Ibid. p. 206. 120 121

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conception or explanation, Žižek’s invocation of these terms (‘class’, ‘class-­struggle’, ‘proletariat’ etc.) remains bereft of meaning, functioning merely as empty place-holders for ‘systematicity’. For Laclau, it is precisely the understanding of socio-political processes and identities as hegemonic articulations that extracts us from the morass of these increasingly (in relation to the contemporary world) empty, meaningless Marxist categories and the essentialist framework to which they belong. Moreover, this constitutive understanding of hegemony allows the possibility of raising productive questions that can set the agenda for ‘viable’ emancipatory political struggles and the formation of more just and egalitarian social institutions, even within a world that is predominantly capitalistic in its organization.123 It is this latter possibility within Laclau’s theory of hegemony, that is, the compatibility between emancipatory hegemonic articulations aiming towards greater justice, equality, rights etc. (as part of liberal democratic society) and capitalism that constitutes a basic difference between Laclau’s and Žižek’s positions. Further, this difference in positions concerning compatibility/incompatibility hinges on the response to the question that Laclau raises: “how systematic is the system?” As I noted, if Laclau is right and systematicity and contingency are fundamentally antithetical, that is, if contingency cannot be accommodated within systematicity in the manner in which Žižek suggests (the retrospective transformation of contingency into necessity, though not without remainder, from within the horizon of the “system”), then of course we are left with ‘merely’ hegemonic articulations. However, I have tried to show that such a clear-cut demarcation between ‘contingency’ and ‘necessity’ (systematicity), hence, between ‘antagonism’ and ‘contradiction’, ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, ‘irrational’ and ‘rational’ history (culminating in self-transparent ‘closure’), cannot be unproblematically attributed to Marx, and can indeed be challenged from within Marx’s discourse. The issue, as I have underscored, turns on which of the two tendencies/orientations is emphasized within Marx’s discourse—the transformation (through re-presentation) of contingency/the constitutive outside into necessity/rational closure, or the manifestation of  Cf. Ibid. p. 293.

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contingency in and through such ‘closure’. For Marx, the latter, when left unacknowledged, leads to capitalist crisis, and when thematized, opens up the possibility of ‘universal’ emancipatory politics. Whereas Marx emphasizes both tendencies as intrinsic to a dialectical logic, Laclau’s critique emphasizes the former and ignores the latter. However, he does not ignore it when it comes to his own differential conception of universality, conceived as the ‘gap’ between the specific political content, which “at any given point incarnates the society’s aspiration to fullness, and the [impossible] fullness as such”. This becomes clear from Laclau’s interpretation in the passage from New Reflections I cited. It is not simply the case that conflict/antagonism lies between ‘relations of production and the workers identity outside them’, where the identity in question is relatively inessential to, or independent of, the relations of production; rather, as Marx argues in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the ‘conflict’ between the worker and the capitalist stems from the possibility that should it go unchecked, wages will fall below the level required to sustain or reproduce the worker’s capacity to labour, thus, the capacity to continue to occupy the economic category “seller of labour-power”. Yet, if this occurs then, in principle, the formal relations of production (not only the ‘worker’, but also the capitalist, as ‘the owner of the means of production’), cease to exist. In practice, however, the excess supply of labour, or the ‘reserve army of labour’ leads to competition amongst workers and the wages of individual workers can be squeezed to the point where they fall below the minimum required to sustain their capacity to labour. Under capitalism, so long as the “race of workers doesn’t die out”, individual workers are endlessly substitutable. Thus ‘contradiction’ within capitalism, consists in the self-defeating character of its processes, which are self-defeating precisely because they come up against the ‘material’ basis of ‘labour-power’, of commodities as use-values, and of nature itself. In other words, as Lukács’ emphasizes, the ‘contradiction’ rests on the necessary underpinning of ‘quantity’ on ‘quality’. Thus, if as Laclau claims, Marx “conflates” (logical) contradiction and (contingent, extra-logical) antagonism, it is because for Marx (just as for Hegel), ‘contradiction’ is never simply formal, but is ultimately based on the material conditions of production. As Marx writes:

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Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker. Victory goes necessarily to the capitalist. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than can the worker without the capitalist. […] The lowest and only wage rate is that provided for the subsistence of the worker for the duration of his work and as much more as necessary for him to support a family and for the race of workers not to die out. […] Should supply greatly exceed demand, a section of the workers sinks into beggary and starvation. The worker’s existence is thus brought under the same condition as the existence of every other commodity.

It is these ‘material’ (qualitative) conditions, which include concrete labouring activity, its reproduction, use-values etc. that are necessarily quantified, while in their qualitative, constitutive dimension, escaping complete quantification. The former process, involving abstraction and quantification, is the process of reification in the commodity form, essential to the functioning of the capitalist social formation.124 The latter process—the inevitable failure of complete appropriation, owing to the ‘constitutive’ status of the ‘outside’, and the lack of any institutional mechanism within the capitalist system for recognizing this constitutive dependence on the ‘outside’, manifests itself formally as a ‘contradiction’ that eventually leads to systemic crisis and breakdown (which can only be prevented through intervention from the ‘outside’) and thus, opens up ‘universal’ emancipatory political possibilities of transcending the system as a whole. In other words, without the foundational contingency inherent in the ‘systematicity of the system’, the latter, universal political possibility, would also be blocked. We saw that in Laclau’s notion of ‘differential universality’, the dimension of universality inherent in any hegemonic formation lies in the ‘gap’, negativity etc. between the ‘impossible fullness of the social’ (the empty universal), and the specific ‘political content’ that, by setting up a ‘chain of equivalences’ with other contents or causes within the political field, comes to be cathected (acquire hegemony) as a stand-in for the empty universal in contemporary (post) modernity. It is this claim to  At the level of political consciousness, these modes of reification, when not recognized as such, may fuel a ‘politics of resentment’, by constituting an ‘other’ as the enemy, who may be held responsible for the processes of dispossession and disenfranchisement wrought by global capitalism. 124

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‘universality’ (analyzed in this differential sense) inherent in ‘hegemonic’ formations that mitigates the charge of a ‘normative deficit’ in the theory of hegemony. That is, it gives hegemonic formations a certain normative-­ ethical charge, and prevents the complete empiricization of the political, as a domain of interminable conflicts and provisional victories. If, following my analysis of Marx’s writings, we take this notion of differential universality, (which Laclau elaborates as a critique of Marx) to be not incompatible with Marxian ‘systematicity’, then (in keeping with Žižek’s ‘third way’) this opens up new possibilities of reimagining universal emancipatory politics, from within the basic coordinates of Marxian political economy, and critique of capitalism. The need for this reimagination acquires greater urgency in the present neo-liberal phase of capitalism. For, I am claiming that far from the tendencies toward ‘increasing complexity and lack of homogeneity’, the emergence of ‘post-industrial societies’, and disappearance of the ‘proletariat’ etc. that post-Marxist thinkers such as Hardt, Negri, Laclau and Mouffe identify in contemporary globalized capitalism, the latter leads to greater homogenization, informalization and precarity of labour. However, on the one hand, these characteristics remain hidden from view, particularly in the (Western) metropolitan centers of capitalism, since outsourcing (motivated by cutting costs, and made possible by the mobility of finance under globalized capitalism), removes industries (particularly polluting and hazardous industries) from the first-world and relocates them in the third-world (also third-world industries come up to provide cheap goods/services to the first-world), often without the range of protections that workers in the first-world countries have established through their long struggle in the face of capitalism and its long history in the West. Thus, the more rapacious aspects of neoliberal capitalism are hidden from view (in a manner similar to Žižek’s analogy of ersatz production staged in first-world supermarkets), even as the neo-liberal order establishes hegemony by invoking the normative-universal dimension of ‘inclusive, homogenous growth’. Here the ‘performative contradiction’ lies in how globalized capitalism appeals to universality, while exploiting the differential aspects of cheap labour resources, raw materials, and climatic conditions for profit. The systematicity of such exploitation calls

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for a  systematic response, on the interconnected political, economic, ethical, and environmental fronts. On the other hand, where the necessary exploitation and exclusion from ‘universal economic growth’, (through rising unemployment, informalization and precarity of work, withdrawal of basic services by the state, such as healthcare, education, food security etc., owing to increasing privatization based on the hegemony of neo-liberal capitalist ideology), does manifest itself, as Žižek emphasizes, it often takes the distorted form of regressive identity politics. Today, the (re)emergence of hardline right-wing political tendencies, both in south Asia and the traditional metropolitan centers of capitalism in Europe and the United States, provide evidence for these ‘distortive’ figurations of ‘empty universality’— the content, or determinate representation that ‘fills in’ the ‘impossible fulness’ of society, and thus becomes the dominant hegemonic formation. Here Butler’s critique (following Hegel) of enlightenment universality, as emerging from ‘founding acts’ of exclusion, while still having the potential for inclusive revision, proves useful. In relation to the necessarily excluding dimension of any universalist discourse (qua concrete universality), she points to how ‘the doctrine of universality’ has been used “[…] in the service of colonialism and imperialism.” Thus, “the fear is of course that what is named as universal is the parochial property of dominant culture, and that ‘universalizability’ is indissociable from imperial culture.”125 The proceduralist response to this problem is to assert the very ‘emptiness’ or contentless of the universal, (it makes no assumptions concerning human nature etc.), since it is merely the formal procedure of ‘universalizability’. Yet, this Kantian strategy (repeated, we saw, in various modalities by the thinkers we have discussed) is disingenuous, insofar as it dissimulates its own reliance on ‘substantive’ conceptions of ‘rationality’, human ‘capacity’ for autonomy, dignity etc. As Butler underscores, first drawing on Hegel’s critique of Kantian formalism, and then, in relation to the specifically political domain, his analysis of the ‘terror’ unleashed by the state after the French Revolution, “such formalisms” are never “as  Butler, Contingency, p. 15.

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formal as they purport to be”.126 Any formal procedure that gives rise to, even “empty” universality (the ‘pure’ universalizability itself ) involves a process of abstraction from the concrete, which therefore, “[…] leaves a trace or remainder of this separation in the very working of abstraction itself. Thus, […] abstraction cannot remain rigorously abstract without exhibiting something of what it must exclude in order to constitute itself as abstraction”.127 Both the separation, which defines the abstract precisely in its ‘binary opposition’ to the concrete, and therefore, its constitutive contamination by particularity/concreteness, imply a necessary ‘doubling’ of the universal, where it is simultaneously abstract and concrete. I have already discussed this dialectical movement of doubling in relation to the “Force and Understanding” chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Here the question that arises again is, can this dialectical movement itself be understood purely formally?128 On Butler’s reading of Hegel, the answer is ‘no’, since the dialectical movement is shot through with contingency, (difference, constitutive dependence on an ‘outside’, recognition by and of the other etc.), and equally, such contingency, as I have been arguing, can be indicated and acknowledged, from only within the field of meaning (for Butler, ‘meaning’ is the ‘cultural field’, while here, in relation to Marx’s discourse, it is ‘relations of production’).129 Butler makes this argument by invoking Hegel’s critique of the Kantian notion of abstract freedom—tied to the abstract ‘I’, in its ‘pure’ self-­transcending movement (negativity/universalizability). In contrast, as we know, Hegel develops a relational, interdependent notion of freedom, based on reciprocal, intersubjective recognition.130 Moreover, for Butler, universal ‘ethical substance’ (Sittlichkeit) is nothing but the customs that determine the cultural field, within which recognition occurs. This implies that “any  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 19. 128  Ibid. pp. 18–19. 129  Ibid. p. 20. 130  It is possible to argue that a preliminary conception of ‘universality’, and inextricably tied to it, ‘autonomy’, based on reciprocal intersubjective recognition, is prefigured in Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative, involving a ‘kingdom of ends’. This line of argumentation, developed, for example, by Hannah Arendt, complicates Kantian ‘formalism’. 126 127

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effort to establish universality as transcendent of cultural norms seems to be impossible”.131 In the political context, the dangers of attempting to establish unmediated abstract universality are brought home through Hegel’s analysis of the French revolution and the ‘terror’ that ensues. In the section, “Absolute Freedom and Terror”, in the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that under conditions of absolute, unmediated freedom, the individual cannot externalize her freedom in an object by working on it, and thus loses the ability to reflect on her activity. For, “consciousness has lost its capacity for mediated self-expression”,132 since “it lets nothing break loose to become a free object standing over against it”.133 Reworking the analysis of the master-­slave dialectic at a more general political level, Hegel claims that absolute unmediated self-consciousness or freedom, qua pure negativity (the ultimately self-defeating moment of ‘lordship’), can assert itself only by ‘venting its fury’—in the ‘reign of terror’ that destroys/assimilates all otherness, particularity, difference etc. Thus, absolute freedom amounts to pure nothingness and death—the annihilation of all otherness. As Hegel famously asserts, it is the “coldest and meanest of deaths, […], as meaningless as cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water”.134 Absolute freedom/universality is, therefore, “[…] death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive […]”.135 The self-defeating character of this nihilistic movement of absolute freedom/universality, qua pure negation, lies precisely in the vanishing or effacement of all otherness, since on the on hand, it is fundamentally dependent on this effacement in order to constitute itself as a ‘pure’ universal. On the other, in not recognizing its dependence, it must itself vanish in its ‘immediacy’ (or immediate self-confirmation) through such effacement.136 As Hegel shows in the master-slave dialectic, without the resistance and recognition (not coerced, but freely given) offered by  Butler, Contingency, p. 20.  Ibid. 133  Hegel, Phenomenology, para 588; quoted in Butler, Contingency, p. 21. 134  Hegel, Ibid., para 590, quoted in Butler, Ibid. p. 22. 135  Hegel, Ibid., para 594, quoted in Butler, Ibid. p. 23. 136  Cf. Hegel, Ibid., Butler, Ibid. pp. 23–24. 131 132

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‘otherness’, (absolute, abstract) freedom, (and universality in the ‘general will’), turns out to be ‘dissatisfactory’ in its immediacy, since such immediate self-confirmation is no confirmation at all, insofar as there is no ‘otherness’ to (freely) recognize it. For my purposes, two aspects of the universal in the political domain must be emphasized, based on Butler’s reading of Hegel: (1) the universal is founded on exclusions constitutive of it; (2) these exclusions can come to haunt it, forcing reflection, and eventual expansion of universality. From these two points, it follows that universality is not a finished, static concept or state of affairs—that “not only does universality undergo revision in time, but its successive revisions and dissolutions are essential to what it ‘is’”.137 This dynamic, temporal conception of universality is what Butler understands by the ‘universal in becoming’, and identifies as the ‘normative and optimistic moment’ of Laclau’s theory of hegemony, (and of politics in general). This “normative and optimistic moment” of hegemony, “consists precisely in the possibilities of expanding the democratic possibilities for the key terms of liberalism, rendering them more inclusive, more dynamic and more concrete”.138 Further, for Butler, such possibilities of expansion and greater inclusion, inherent in the ‘universal in becoming’, cannot be “precluded by a theoretical overdetermination of the structural constraints on the field of political articulability”.139 Butler’s remark appears to be directed against Žižek’s point concerning the possibility of the distortive reification of the ‘gap’, or ‘impossibility of fulness of the social’ itself, and its projection onto an arbitrary ‘sign’ (group, race etc.), which “not only appears essential to what it signifies, but actively organizes the thing under the sign itself ”.140 Invoking the Lacanian notion of ‘point de capiton’ (in parallel with Hegel’s argument), Žižek illustrates this point through the figure of the shark in Spielberg’s Jaws—the shark becomes a ‘container’ or reified figuration for all “free floating, inconsistent fears”. “The ‘point de capiton’

 Butler, Ibid. p. 24.  Ibid. p. 13. 139  Ibid. 140  Ibid. p. 26. 137 138

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or container anchors and reifies this unruly set of meanings and blocks any further inquiry into the social meaning”.141 This would imply that the impossibility of the fullness of the social, of ‘pure’ universality, despite its founding exclusions, need not result in its democratic expansion, but just the opposite. Therefore, the ‘optimistic’ (and normative) moment of hegemony may turn out to be too optimistic (and normative), if it is understood as implying that political exclusion and resistance always leads to such expansion. On the contrary, Žižek argues, such resistance can also be unwittingly co-opted as the very instrument for the exercise of domination. Thus, while Butler objects to the ‘formalism’ or structural dimension of this process (of reification of the ‘gap’), insofar as it seems to be a “transexemplary identity-constituting function”,142 ‘applicable’ across socio-cultural contexts, the same can be said for the democratic-normative potentiality of ‘universality in becoming’, if it is invoked without qualifications. I have tried to think through the unity of contingency and structural necessity in the domain of the political, to argue that even as ‘systematicity’ appropriates contingency and retrospectively shows it up as ‘necessity’, contingency can show itself only from within systematicity, as its differential limit. Further, I am suggesting that these dialectically interrelated tendencies are articulated in Marx’s thought, and open up the possibility of a ‘universal’ emancipatory politics, which must be realized in socio-political-economic institutions that, minimally, acknowledge these tendencies towards reification, in either direction (necessity or contingency). Butler asks, “where do we go from here? Does the exposition of an aporia, even a formal aporia […] work in the service of a counter hegemonic project?”143 “How [does] one move beyond such a dialectical reversal or impasse to something new?”144 These are the questions with which this study is also concerned, and I have been arguing that this ‘something new’ (that emerges from what Butler terms, recalling Husserl, the “subversion of the natural attitude within which we live”), must consist in ‘unalienated existence’, understood  Ibid.  Ibid. 143  Ibid. p. 28. 144  Ibid. p. 30. 141 142

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not as the ‘immediacy of presence’, but as a mode of mediated, reflective acknowledgement, which acknowledges precisely the inevitability of mediation or ‘representation’ (thus its own ‘conditions of possibility’), and therefore does not succumb to the harmful effects of reification, that is, when representation/appearance is understood in the ‘natural attitude’. In the concluding chapter, I will discuss the specific form that unalienated existence may take, in the face of the contemporary impasses (economic, political and environmental), in which modernity is enmeshed. As I have been arguing, these impasses (‘aporias’) are not ‘purely’ formal. The aporia reappears today in the guise of the ‘real’ of ‘nature’, which I noted, is tied to the ‘real’ of the biological existence, not just of the proletariat, but of the human species as such. Thus the ‘real’ of nature, may prove to be the absolute limit of capitalism, insofar as it cannot be acknowledged (as the ‘constitutive outside’) within the system, nor accommodated through the temporary suspension of the normal functioning of the system.

Bibliography Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, Herausgegben von Franz Mehring, (4 Vols.), Vol. II, Stuttgart 1902, p. 132 (The Holy Family, Chapter 4); quoted in Reification, p. 149. Butler, Judith, Laclau, Ernesto, and Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London, New  York: Verso Books. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. From a Restricted to a General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve. In Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hegel, G.  W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.  V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Hudis, Peter. 2012. Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Kant, Immanuel. 1929. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan.

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Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London, New York: Verso Books. Laclau, Ernesto. 1999. The Politics of Rhetoric. In Material Events: Paul De Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen, J.  Hillis Miller and Barbara Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Lefort, Claude. 1986. Marx: From One Vision of History to Another. In The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Massachusetts. The MIT Press. Lukács, Georg. “Class Consciousness”, in History and Class Consciousness, p. 46. Lukács, Georg. 1971a. Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat. In History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Lukács, Georg. 1971b. Class Consciousness. In History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Marx, Karl. 1904. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. N. I. Stone. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr &Company. Marx, Karl, 1975. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl, 1974. Capital Vol. III, Ed. F. Engels, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl, 1978. Capital Vol. I Trans. Samuel Moore, Edward Aveling, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political, Trans. George Schwab. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion. London, New York: Verso Books. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology. London, New York: Verso Books.

8 Unalienated Life and Negative Dialectics

In this concluding chapter, my aim is to bring together the various strands of thought that I have been discussing, with a view to outlining the form that unalienated life, both in relation to each other, and to ‘nature’, under conditions of modernity, might take. Part of my argument would be to show how these two domains—the social and the natural—are so imbricated and interdependent that one cannot think of overcoming alienation in the former without overcoming it in the latter. It is clear that such an articulation must learn from, and respond to, historical experience and its reflective analysis—specifically, the inevitable tendencies towards ‘reification’ (which I now use interchangeably with ‘presence’) of nature and society that we have become all too familiar with in the ‘long’ twentieth century.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Patnaik, Modernity and its Futures Past, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32107-8_8

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8.1 The Realization of Unalienated Life in Post-Capitalist Society: Political-Economic Relations Let us first turn to the question concerning the unalienated form of human society. We saw that Marx’s critique of capitalism already provides some indications of the shape that its transcendence in a post-capitalist society must take. The central insight that emerges through Marx’s critique of capitalism lies in the distinction between value and exchange-­ value, and the working out of their precise interrelation. Although the conceptual distinction was implicit in much of Marx’s earlier analysis, Peter Hudis shows1 that it was only as late as the second German edition of Capital in 1872 that Marx explicitly distinguishes the terms ‘value’ and ‘exchange-value’. Even as late as the first, 1867 edition, these terms were used interchangeably. In the 1872 edition, Marx writes, “Exchange value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the ‘form of appearance’ (Erscheinungsform) of a content distinguishable from it […] The progress of the investigation will lead us back to exchange-value as the necessary mode of expression or form of appearance, of value.”2 As I discussed in the previous chapter, the necessity of this ‘mode of expression’ or ‘form of appearance’ of ‘value’ qua ‘exchange-value’ points to the inevitability of the process of reification, that is, the inevitable transformation of living into dead labour, of the qualitative into its quantitative expression in commodities, of absolute into relative difference, of contingency into ‘necessity’ etc. This transformation, we saw, is constitutive of the capitalist system at every level of its functioning, and cannot therefore, be acknowledged within the system, at least considered in its theoretical ‘purity’. It is the impossibility of institutional modes of recognition and acknowledgment within the system that Marx thought would eventually lead to recessionary crisis. Further, I will argue that it is the same ‘impossibility’ that results in the environmental crisis that looms large today.  Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of an Alternative to Capitalism, Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012, p. 148. 2  Marx, Capital Vol I, 1976, trans. Ben Fowkes, U.K.: Penguin Books, pp. 127–28. (All references in this chapter are to this edition), Quoted in Hudis, Ibid.  1

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To be sure, I also argued that no historically extant mode of capitalism was, or is, ‘pure’ in this sense—as a self-standing, ‘closed’ system. This lack of purity is evident in the constitutive ‘outside’ (consisting, for instance, in primitive accumulation through colonial expansion, expropriation, and appropriation of material and human resources) on which the ‘normal’ functioning of the system historically depended, and I argued, continues to depend in modified form under the neo-liberal regime. It is also evident in the dirigiste intervention from ‘outside’, in the form of a host of welfare measures (including a minimum wage, various forms of subsidized education and healthcare services, subsidized agriculture, protectionist tariffs etc.), prevalent in advanced capitalist countries, as well as in direct government ‘bail outs’ of companies in times capitalist crises. All these measures serve to mitigate the effects of the inescapable structural process through which qualitative (though still abstract) ‘value’, in the form of a definite duration of homogenous labour-power expended on, and embodied in, the product of labour (as use-value), finds quantitative expression in the exchange-value of that product, as a commodity. Thereby, these measures either stave off capitalist crisis, or prevent the system from imploding when these periodic crises do arise. While this ‘shoring up’, and ‘staving off’, in part explains the adaptability and longevity of capitalism—which Marx perhaps underestimated—it does not invalidate his analytical insight concerning the structural transformation of value into its quantitative expression in the commodity as exchangevalue, and the modes of reification (leading to commodity fetishism), to which it gives rise, resulting in the various modes of alienated existence under capitalism, insofar as it goes unrecognized or unthematized within the system. However, the question I want to address here is: what bearing does this insight have on Marx’s conception of a post-capitalist, unalienated society? Without rehearsing the argument, I claimed, in a preliminary negative manner that (1) if Marx recognizes that such reification is inescapable because it is structural, then overcoming capitalist alienation cannot be understood as overcoming reification all together, in full ‘presence’, reflective coincidence, self-transparency etc., by uncovering the ‘real’ of labour underlying its ‘appearance’ as quantified value. The latter misconception

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leads to the charge that a modern form of totalitarianism is seemingly inherent in Marx’s theory, since it appears that for Marx, the immanent sphere of the social must become all-encompassing—a ‘closed totality’, with no ‘outside’. Since (2) the ‘appearance-reality’ model does not hold vis-à-vis Marx’s analysis of capitalism, overcoming capitalist alienation must involve social modes of acknowledging the structural inescapability of reification (rather than getting to the ‘real’ of ‘labour’ underlying its ‘appearance’ as exchange-value), and therefore, render its alienating effects ‘harmless’ (in the Kantian sense). The first step in this process is to see that Marx’s insight concerning the dual character of ‘labour’—as homogenous, undifferentiated labour-time embodied in its product, which constitutes the ‘substance’ of value, and its quantitative and relative ‘expression’ qua exchange-value of a commodity, are both abstractions. Thus, the ‘real’ of living, concrete labour can only be thought of as pure ‘difference’ within the sphere of circulation, and therefore, the genetic reference ‘backwards’, from ‘exchange-­ value’ to ‘value’ that Marx wants to trace in his critique of the political economy of capitalism, still moves from one form of quantified abstract ideality to another. With reference to a post-capitalist, unalienated society, this implies not only that the pure differential aspect of living labour can only be acknowledged indirectly, but also that such indirect acknowledgement cannot occur at the level of exchange, that is, merely by altering exchange relations. Rather, what must be altered, in order to indirectly recognize the differential aspect of living labour within the ideal social domain of circulation (no longer of commodities, but of use-values), is ‘value production’ itself. As Hudis puts it, “Since value must show itself as exchange-value, it appears that uprooting value-production depends upon altering relations of exchange. However, altering relations of exchange in lieu of changing conditions of labour cannot eliminate value production”.3 Here ‘value production’ under capitalism, refers to the socially necessary labour-­ time congealed in a commodity and expressed as its exchange-value. In other words, the aim is not to uncover the ‘real’ of concrete, living labour underlying its (distorted) ‘appearance’ as the exchange-value of a  Hudis, Marx’s Concept of an Alternative to Capitalism, 2012, p. 152.

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commodity (including its own ‘appearance’ qua labour-power quantified in socially necessary labour-time and expressed through its exchangevalue—its price as ‘wages’), but to transform the very conditions of labour as ‘value’ producing. As Marx writes, still with reference to his analysis of capitalism, “It is not sufficient to reduce commodity to ‘labour’; labour must be broken down into its twofold form—on the one hand, into concrete labour in the use values of commodities, and on the other, into socially necessary labour as calculated in exchange value”.4 Here the two-fold form of labour (as opposed to living labour itself ) that Marx mentions, namely concrete ‘labour’ congealed in its products as use-values, and socially necessary labour-time, quantified as the exchange-value of a commodity (including itself as a commodity), gives rise to a threefold mediation. First, concrete, qualitatively differentiated living labour is mediated in and through its products as distinct use-­ values; second, it is ‘reduced’ to abstract, homogenous labour congealed in the product as socially necessary labour-time required for its production, and third, it is ‘expressed’ as the exchange-value of the commodity. In this threefold mediation, abstract, homogenous labour functions as the middle term, involving both qualitative and quantitative aspects, and enabling the transformation of differentiated, concrete labour into exchange-value. Yet, the nature of ‘value’, whose ‘substance’ consists in ‘abstract, equivalent labour’ (understood as ‘labour-power’ and quantified as the socially necessary duration of the expenditure of such labour-power congealed in any commodity, including the commodity ‘labour-power’ itself ), is misrecognized under capitalist relations of production as a property of the commodity itself, and this results in the phenomenon of commodity fetishism. Insofar as such misrecognition is structural, the only way to ‘escape’ commodity fetishism, is to go beyond the capitalist frame—its relations of production. As Marx puts it, “The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production.”5  Marx, Capital Vol I, 1976, p. 992. Quoted in Hudis, Ibid.  Ibid. p. 169; cf. Hudis, p. 155.

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Some of these ‘other forms’ consist in, for example, self-sufficient individual production (Robinson Crusoe on his island), or the feudal relations of production in medieval Europe. Whereas in the case of simple individual production for subsistence there is no social mediation, and all products of the producer’s own labour immediately present themselves to the producer as use-values, feudal relations of production are socially mediated, but they remain recognizably social and are not distorted, as in the capitalist frame, via mediation through the commodity form. In other words, the feudal world was still based directly on social dependencies and hierarchies, even if the broader normative basis for these hierarchies was dissimulated by being projected onto a posited transcendent, sacralised order (rather than being understood as immanent to the human order). After indicating these pre-capitalist ‘alternative forms’ (both hypothetical and extant), Marx provides an initial indication of a specifically modern, post-capitalist form of production when he asks us to. […] imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are repeated here, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual”.6

Thus, just as in the case of simple individual subsistence production, in a post-capitalist mode of production, there can be no production of commodities as exchange-values. Rather, there can be only the production of use-values7; with the important difference, however, that labour and its products are here socially mediated in an explicit sense. The commodity-­ form consists precisely in a mode of reification that remains ‘unreflected’, and therefore, gives rise to various baneful effects—more narrowly, commodity fetishism, and more broadly, the recessionary crises. This is because, insofar as the means of production are not ‘held in common’, and thus, the surplus is appropriated by the particular class which owns  Ibid. p. 171; cf. Hudis, p. 156.  Cf. Marx, Ibid.; cf. Hudis, Ibid.

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the means of production, the common, social character of the ‘value’ produced, is necessarily misrecognized. In a post-capitalist society, in addition to products of labour directly presenting themselves as ‘use-­ values’, production is carried out by an association of ‘free’ human beings. That is, unlike either the feudal or the capitalist order, ‘social relations’ are recognized precisely as (immanent to the) social, and therefore, in principle, freely constituted. They are not dissimulated either through their sacralization/naturalization via appeal to some transcendent source of legitimacy (the basis for the unfree hierarchical order in pre-modern, pre-­ capitalist modes of production), nor distorted through their (unthematized) reification and quantification in the commodity-form, the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, or in the labour-time’ ‘socially-necessary’ for the production of any given commodity that it dictates (based on the state of technology, and demand and supply). Further, since the means of production are held in common, the freely constituted association of producers directly decide on how the total product is to be distributed and consumed. This implies that the total product is immediately understood as a ‘social product’, which in turn, allows it to distributed in a ‘planned’ and therefore, more rational manner, compared to distribution based on vagaries of the ‘laws’ of the market (which in any case, operate behind the backs of the producers, and consumers). Marx writes: The total product of our imagined association is a social product. One part of this product serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another part is consumed by the members of the association as a means of subsistence. This part must therefore be divided amongst them. The way this division is made will vary with the particular kind of social organization of production, and the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers.8

Marx leaves the question of the manner in which the division is to take place, both between the part that is reinvested in the production process and that which is consumed, and within the latter, the distribution  Ibid. pp. 171–72.

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among the members of the association, open ended. However, it is clear, as Hudis emphasizes, that the decision is to be taken by the “conscious deliberation the free association itself ”,9 and no external mechanism such as the ‘market’ imposes the decision on them. However, with respect to the division of the part of the social product for consumption among the producers, Marx suggests that each individual’s share would be based on their labour-time expended on the total product. We shall assume, but only for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would, in that case, play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations. On the other hand, labour-time also serves as the measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labour, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the producers both towards their labour and the products of their labour, are here transparent in their simplicity in production as well as distribution.10

This key passage has given rise to much debate in the Marxist literature, and calls for careful analysis. In particular, Marx’s assertion concerning “a parallel with the production of commodities” has misled many commentators, including Lukács,11 into assuming that Marx still wants to retain at least a modified form of value production in post-capitalist  Hudis, p. 157.  Marx, Capital Vol. I, 1976, p. 172. 11  In The Process of Democratization, Lukács writes: 9

10

For Marx, labour exploitation can exist under socialism if labour time is expropriated from the Labourer, since ‘the share of every producer to the means of production is determined by his labour time’ […] For Marx, the law of value is not dependent on commodity production […] according to Marx these classical categories are applicable to any mode of production (Lukács, 1991, pp.120–21; quoted in Hudis 2012, p. 158).

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society.12 However, Hudis points out, when Marx takes labour-time as the determining factor for each individual’s share in the consumption of the total product, he does not mean ‘socially necessary labour-time’.13 The latter constitutes the basis of value-production under capitalism, and is determined by factors beyond the control of individual producers (or capitalists), such as the prevalent state of technology (which determines average labour productivity), or the demand and supply of the particular commodity on the market, or even the social recognition of what constitutes value production. For example, if a weaver expends 10 hours of labour-time in weaving a certain quantity of cotton cloth, which on current technology, and thus, productivity of labour, can be produced in 2 hours, then the weaver has done 8 hours of socially unnecessary labour, for which he will not receive any return on the market. The cloth produced by weaver, if it is to sell at all, must sell at its currently prevailing price, determined by the socially necessary average labour-time needed to produce it (that is, at the prevalent average productivity of labour). Similarly, at the aggregate level, if supply exceeds demand for a particular commodity, then (assuming wages remain constant) more than the socially necessary average labour-time has been collectively spent on that commodity (and if supply is less than the demand, less than the socially necessary labour-time has been spent on the commodity). Further, certain forms of labour, such as domestic work, or child care within the family, are not socially recognized as value producing under capitalism, and therefore, remain outside the realm of circulation and exchange. That is, such modes of concrete labour do not take on a commodity-­ form (labour-power), and thus, have no exchange-value (wages) associated with them. In this sense, these types of concrete labour remain another ‘constitutive outside’ to capitalism, insofar as they are  The distinction between ‘socially necessary labour-time’ and ‘actual labour-time’ explains how Marx can critique, without contradiction, ‘Proudhon and the socialist neo-Ricardians’, who also proposed the use of labour vouchers and time-chits, instead of wages, as a way of rationally organizing exchange, thereby attempting to overcome the appropriation and exploitation of labour-time within the capitalist frame. Marx’s argument against such ‘utopian petty bourgeois socialism’, is that it misunderstands socially necessary labour-time, as actual labour-time, since it remains within the capitalist frame, that is, within commodity production. In attempting to abolish ‘money itself ’, while leaving the commodity-form and exchange intact, Marx writes, “One might as well abolish the Pope while leaving Catholicism in existence” (Capital Vol I, p. 181 footnote 4; cf. Hudis, p. 159). 13  Cf. Hudis, pp. 159–60. 12

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indispensable to the reproduction of labour-power (they form the source and renewal of the capacity to labour), that is however, not recognized within the capitalist system.14 In contrast, in a post-capitalist society, within the association of producers, each member’s share of consumption in the part of the social product set aside for consumption is proportionate to the actual labour-­ time they have expended on the product. That is, once the individual producer is no longer subject to the tyranny of ‘time’ as an external, anonymous ‘force’, the social relation of the producers to their labour and its products, becomes “transparent in its simplicity”, with respect to both production and distribution. “The same amount of labour which [s]he has given to society in one form, [s]he receives back in another”.15 It follows that this (transparent) principle of “equivalence” based on actual labour-time, can accommodate types of qualitative, concrete labour, such as domestic labour, not recognized under capitalism. Moreover, the ‘transparency and simplicity’ inherent in relations of production based on actual labour-time, that is, their directly visible social character, is reflected on a larger scale, in the possibility of collective and conscious decision making in a ‘planned economy’. As Hudis explains: With the creation of a free association of individuals who consciously plan out the production and distribution of social labour, labour ceases to be subject to the dictatorship of time as an abstract, and impermeable force governing them irrespective of their wills and needs. Once time becomes the space for the individual’s deliberation and development, social relations become ‘transparent’, since they are no longer governed by an abstract average that operates behind their backs. Society no longer appears as a person apart, but rather as the sum total of the free and conscious activity of the individuals. Labour again becomes directly social, but on the basis of freedom.16

 For a recent collection of illuminating essays on this theme, see Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya, London: Pluto Press, 2017. 15  Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1968, p. 319, quoted in Hudis, p. 194. 16  Hudis, p. 160. 14

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However, this appraisal might appear somewhat optimistic, since the question that immediately comes to mind is: what prevents the “sum total of the free and conscious activity of individuals”, from again becoming a “person apart”, that is, imposing a ‘social average’, upon the free association? For, otherwise, in principle, an individual can take as much ‘actual’ time as he/she wants in the production process. This problematic, stemming from the part-whole, or individual-collective, interaction, admits no simple solution, and indeed seems to inevitably lead to the emergence of permanent, centralised socialist ‘state’ as a planning and distributive agency, which then leads to unwanted political consequences. Although Marx leaves the question of the concrete institutional organization of post-capitalist societies open-ended, this issue has long been a staple of debates in the tradition, instigated by both historical experience and theoretical concerns. I cannot enter the debate here, which attempts to find a modus vivendi between the ‘collective’ and the ‘individual’, through some form of ‘democratic decentralization’, where the ‘soviets’ (association of free individuals, or workers cooperatives) have a certain autonomy and agency in the production process. Yet, in response to this problematic, several points must be emphasized. First, it bears repeating that these debates that emerge within a post-capitalist frame, do not occlude the ‘transparency and simplicity’ won in relation to capitalist society. For, ‘transparency’ in this context does not amount to overcoming ‘reification’ in getting to some state of immediacy or ‘presence’ with respect to the ‘real’ of labour. Rather, I suggested, it lies in the social acknowledgement of the inevitability of reification, including the reification of the ‘collective’ in the (centralised) state, while guarding against its baneful effects. Thus, in a post-capitalist society, living, concrete labour is still mediated through its abstraction and quantification in labour-time (just as individual agency and freedom is mediated through the collective), but in a manner that is socially acknowledged, such that it no longer takes on a distorted appearance in the commodity-­form—for instance in its ‘symptomatic’ appearance as commodity fetishism. Moreover, we saw how Marx traces the transformation of ‘money into capital’, that is, the (historical) transformation of C–M–C1 to M–C–M1 (where M1 = M + ΔM) hence, the very birth of capitalism, to (the

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continuous process of ) primitive accumulation. As I discussed in the preceding chapter, Marx’s basic insight is that while capital must be necessarily ‘expressed’ in and through circulation as a ‘relative difference’—as the ΔM (profit) in the M–C–M1 circuit, it cannot be generated through circulation (‘equivalent exchange’) alone. Rather, it requires the ‘absolute difference’ introduced by primitive accumulation from ‘outside’ the system of circulation/equivalent exchange (C–M–C1–…). Thus, Marx writes, “Capital therefore cannot arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible for it arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in and not in circulation.”17 Primitive accumulation then, refers to the expropriation of the individual producer from his/her privately owned means of production. Yet the term ‘primitive’ should not mislead us into thinking that the process of capitalist accumulation is restricted to the past—confined to the historical period at the ‘birth’ of capitalism. Rather, it is an ongoing process, insofar as the dispossession of (pre-capitalist) petty producers (peasants with small land-holdings, craftsmen, weavers, fishermen etc.) from their means of production, their expropriation from their traditional occupations, is essential to the global expansion of capital (both on the supply and demand side).18 I argued that this in turn, implies a neo-imperialism continuous in many respects, with the political economy of imperialism in the traditional sense. It is only through such dispossession and expropriation that ‘free labour’ (labour ‘free’ from the means of production) becomes available on the market as a commodity—as labour-power—for the ‘capitalist’ (the owner of the means of production). Yet, unlike any other commodity,  Marx, Capital Vol I, 1976, p. 268.  As Marx writes:

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The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. The process therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour … (Marx, Capital I, p. 874; quoted in Hudis, p. 164.

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labour-power generates ‘surplus value’, that is, a value greater than itself (its own exchange-value), although since this surplus-value is again transformed into, or ‘expressed’ as, quantified exchange-value (ΔM or relative difference), its true source is inevitably misrecognized. In ‘interest bearing capital’, for instance, the money-commodity is fetishized insofar as it appears as if ‘capital’ in and of itself, without the intervention of labour and the production process, generates ‘surplus value’. Consequently, ‘transparency’ in a post-capitalist society, also entails the eradication of not only wage labour, but its distorted, reified expression in money as a commodity—as ‘capital’. With collective production money capital is completely dispensed with. The society distributes labour power and means of production between the various branches of industry. There is no reason why the producers should not receive paper tokens permitting them to withdraw an amount corresponding to their labour-time from the social consumption fund. But these tokens are not money; they do not circulate.19

In post-capitalist society, comprising a ‘free association of producers’, the relations of production, hence the interdependent processes of both production and consumption, are transformed such that they become ‘transparent’ in the sense I just discussed. On the production side, the social ownership of the means of production entails that wage labour is completely eliminated. Its representation in, and determination through, the ‘anonymous force’ of ‘socially necessary average labour-time’ that determines its exchange-value on the market, is replaced by calculation based on ‘actual labour-time’. Thus, on the consumption side, the ‘social allocation of resources’ for individual consumption occurs in a transparent manner, through time-tokens representing each individual’s contribution in terms of their actual labour-time share in the total social product. The elimination of wage labour is nothing but the elimination of capitalist property relations (relations of production). Since wage labour comes into being through the dispossession/expropriation of the private  Marx, Capital Vol II, trans. David Fernbach, New York: Vintage, 1978, p. 434; quoted in Hudis, p. 175. 19

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property (means of production) of the small-scale direct producer, and its replacement by large-scale private property (capital) of the capitalist, in a post-capitalist society the latter, in turn, is relaced by the ownership of property (insofar as it is a means of production) in common, as immediately social property belonging to all producers. Marx describes this movement in terms of Hegel’s determinate negation (the ‘negation of the negation’).20 As Hudis elaborates, the second negation (explicitly social ownership), which negates the first negation, namely, the negation of the private property of the small producer and its assimilation and increasing concentration as capital in the hands of the capitalist class, does not entail the restitution of a pre-capitalist state of affairs, with its small and fragmented private property holdings. The greater ‘reflective transparency’ of the post-capitalist society, which does away with all value production, hence the commodity-form itself, means that ‘property’ is explicitly recognised as social, or common property. Such ‘recognition’ overcomes, at a higher, more thematic level, the rift between the ‘worker’ and the means of production,21 replacing it with “[…] cooperation and possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself ”.22 I will return to this idea in the context of the current environmental crisis, and the promise that social ownership and cooperation holds as a possible response to the crisis. If one of the central threads of Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production is that it creates an alienating and unsustainable rift in the ‘metabolic exchange’ between humans and ‘nature’ (the ‘objective conditions of labour’), then post-capitalist society, self-reflectively constituted as unalienated, sustainable etc., must be capable of ‘healing’ this metabolic rift, without however, returning to some pre-modern, sacralised unity with nature. For the moment, keeping within the domain of the political-economic organization of a post-capitalist society, we must address its ‘political’ dimension more directly. As many commentators have argued, in a ‘planned’ economy, the problem on the ‘political’ front lies in the  Cf. Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 929; Hudis, p. 168.  Cf. Hudis, Ibid. 22  Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 929; quoted in Hudis, p. 168. 20 21

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‘inevitable’ re-emergence of a centralised planning agency, that is, a ‘state’ that would make all the investment and distribution decisions. This gives rise to the all too familiar danger of an unthematized (non-transparent) mode of reification of the ‘collectivity’ in the state, which, many have argued, eventually may lead to a ‘totalitarian’ society. Here, Hudis’ observation that Marx does not once mention the ‘state’, preferring instead to use the term ‘society’, free association etc., is insufficient to address the problem, either at the theoretical or historical level. Even if we do not immediately invoke the spectre of ‘totalitarianism’, it is certainly true that in such a post-capitalist society, the ‘individual’, as the preeminent category of liberal thought, is de-emphasized in the face of the ‘collective’. Marx’s critique of the political economy of capitalism, in terms of the figuration that the liberal-normative social order (liberal democracy) inevitably takes, provides a primarily negative argument. It shows how ‘individuals’ are, in manifold ways, not really ‘free’ under the liberal-­ capitalist regime, even as (depending on their particular class membership) they tend to either misrecognize their situation as uncoerced or freely chosen, or the actual conditions of their deep sense of alienation. I have already emphasized how, in a post-capitalist society, ‘transparency’ in relation to the production process does not amount to overcoming reification in ‘unmediated presence’. Rather, it consists in the institutional recognition of the very processes of reification, such that their damaging, coercive, and alienating consequences can be neutralized. Can a similar case be made for the (more overtly) political problematic, concerning the transformation of a ‘collectivity’ into a centrally organized ‘state’? That such a ‘transformation’ is unavoidable seems beyond doubt, since any large-scale economy would require planning, coordination and logistics between the various associations of producers.23 However, the question is, can we avoid the dangers of the centralization of control and power, associated with an all-encompassing state?  It is true, as Hudis points out, that Marx was greatly influenced by the formation of the Paris commune (1871), and he saw in it a partial pre-figuration of future socialist society that would incorporate direct democracy (in all areas of decision-making) from ‘below’, that is, without the centralized mediation of the state. However, the commune lasted only 6 months, and was confined to the city of Paris. It was simply too miniscule a scale of social organization to provide a ‘blueprint’ for the organization of planned economies on a large scale. 23

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As I mentioned, Marx did not spell out the institutional mechanisms for how the collectivity (free association of producers) would decide on the division and allocation of the total social product among the various sectors of society as a whole. However, if we accept the inevitable transformation of the collectivity into a state, then to mitigate the effects of such ‘reification’ would require some form of democratic decentralism. As the economist, C. P. Chandrashekhar points out, this would mean that the state only sets certain broad production and distribution parameters, has the right to access resources, provides and maintains infrastructure etc., while much greater autonomy is afforded to the ‘worker collectives’ in decision-making with respect to the actual production process, both in terms of the resources required and concerning how those resources would be best utilized, to reflect local priorities. Such decentralised decision-making in allocation, investment, and distribution would in turn require an informational feedback mechanism from ‘below’.24 In analysing the failure of ‘actual attempts to implement’ centralized planning and investment, Chandrashekhar draws attention to a basic presupposition on which planning depends, namely, the belief in a broad ‘political consensus’, around the “objectives considered appropriate by the central planners”.25 In practice however, such a consensus, even if it existed originally, is difficult to sustain over a long period of time, and therefore, is increasingly seen as imposed from ‘above’. Here, the institutional mechanism of decentralization can provide a basis for maintaining a dynamic equilibrium, between the ‘collective and the individual’ (or smaller collectives), without reducing one to the other. Yet, it is clear that a post-capitalist society based on decentralized, collective decision making, still fundamentally depends on, even as it fosters, a broad (but more internally flexible) political, and ultimately, ethical-normative consensus. This consensus consists in the individual’s sense of belonging to, or having a stake in, society, that is, to a collectivity greater than oneself or one’s immediate family. It is only from such a perspective of participating in something greater than oneself that  Cf. C. P. Chandrashekhar, “Democratic Decentralisation and the Planning Principle: The Transition from Below.”, in Social Scientist, Nov–Dec 2001, Vol. 29, No. 11/12, pp. 41–56. 25  Ibid. p. 43. 24

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problems of the type raised earlier concerning what prevents an individual from maximizing his or her ‘actual time’ in the production process— dissolve as problems. The latter appears as a problem only when individuals perceive themselves as opposed to the collective, that is, insofar as they are alienated. As I discussed in relation to Akeel Bilgrami’s position, as soon as individual self-realization and freedom is understood as constitutively dependent on collective self-realization and freedom (rather than arising at their expense), the problem, stemming from our alienated existence under capitalism, ceases to present itself as a problem. A post-­ capitalist socialist society develops the socio-economic institutional modes of this recognition of our constitutive dependence on others, and therefore, is also fundamentally dependent on this ethical-normative framework (at the basis of the political consensus) for its functioning.

8.2 The Realization of Unalienated Life in Post-Capitalist Society: The Ethical Basis of Political-Economic Relations It is only against this ethical background that Marx’s well-known assertion in the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)—“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”,26 makes sense. To make the context of this assertion—which outlines the conception of unalienated labour that would emerge in a more fully developed communist society— clear, it is worth quoting the whole passage; In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and  Marx (1875) “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd., 1970, p. 321. 26

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society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.27

It bears repetition that this reflective recognition of our mutual dependence (hence constitutively ‘collective’ existence), is necessarily mediated through the socio-political and economic institutional forms it takes. Marx shows how the capitalist normative-institutional understanding of ‘equality’ (and ‘freedom’), mediated through abstract, socially necessary average labour-time that underlies the commodity form, including the commodity ‘labour-power’ and its ‘price’ (exchange-value) expressed in wages, turns out to be illusory (though a ‘necessary illusion’, due to reification), and actually brings about its opposite—inequality and unfreedom. It is only by going beyond the capitalist notion of ‘equality’ (based on the illusory appearance/mediation of equivalent exchange through commodities), to one mediated through the ‘actual labour time’ that the individual expends on the total social product, that the normative content (recognition of mutual dependence, hence ‘equality’ etc.) is properly and explicitly realized. The socialist conception of ‘equality’ is not that of the seemingly ‘exact’ quantified ‘equivalent exchange’ of capitalism. It involves a mode of equality, which on the criterion of exact, quantified equality (even if it were to be realized), turns out to be a form of “inequality”—yet, in a manner where this “inequality” is explicitly thematised as restricted to the factual domain, such that at the normative level, equality is maintained precisely through unequal returns, due to differences in individual capacities, and circumstances. The thematized, and thus, freely accepted, (factual) “inequality” of socialist society stems from the acknowledgement that each individual, through their actually expended labour-time, contributes to the collective social product, but does not receive the exact equivalent or ‘undiminished’ return for it (as was the illusory promise and appearance of seemingly ‘equivalent-exchange’ mediated through the products of labour qua commodities under capitalist relations of production).

 Ibid. pp. 320–21.

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This is the ‘ethical substance’ of Marx’s assertion, “[…] from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.28 Marx makes the assertion in the context of his critique of the unified programme that the two major camps in the socialist workers movement in Germany formulated in the city of Gotha. The ‘General Union of German Workers’, led by Ferdinand Lassalle, and the Eisenachers, led by August Bebel and William Liebknecht, entered into negotiations at Gotha, and formed a united organization (that eventually became the German Social Democratic Party), with a common programme. Marx critiques the ‘Gotha programme’, as it came to be known, on several points, but he is particularly irked by its principle that in a socialist society ‘every worker must receive his ‘undiminished’ share of the total social product’. Against this Lassallean conception, Marx points out that deductions would have to be made for the depreciation of (the socially held) means of production, reinvestment for expanding production and to maintain a common insurance fund against accidents, for healthcare, education, and ‘those unable to work’ (old-age pensions etc.).29 Thus, all these ‘deductions’ would be made for the ‘sake of the collective’, such that “‘the undiminished proceeds of labour’ have already, unnoticeably become converted into the ‘diminished’ proceeds, although”, as Marx writes, “what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a member of society”.30 The ethical-normative basis of this considerably diminished share of the individual in the total social product therefore, lies in the uncoerced, freely given recognition on the part of individuals—through the actual labour-time that, according to ‘their ability’, they contribute to the aggregate social product—of their mutual or co-dependence as a collective. Such uncoerced recognition based on actual labour-time is quite different from the latent, unthematized, and thus misrecognized coercion of the ‘market’ (commodity production) that results from the inescapability of ‘socially necessary average labour-time’, as the determining ground of value under capitalist relations of production.  Ibid. p. 321.  Cf. Ibid. p. 318. 30  Ibid. p. 319. 28 29

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Yet, in an obvious sense, this ‘diminished return’ for the labour-time expended also holds for extant capitalist societies, insofar as the surplus accrues not just to the capitalist, but also to the state, in the form of taxes for the sake of the ‘collective’ (social security, education, internal and external security etc.). Is the ethical-normative difference between capitalist and socialist society then, just a matter of degree? Does Marx envision socialist society as merely fulfilling, to a greater degree, the norms that were already at work, in a limited manner, in capitalist societies? In point of fact, Marx’s ethical vision of a socialist society is more radical than it appears at first glance. Not only does it mark a qualitative break with capitalist society, but even with its own initial formulation in terms of the principle of ‘equivalent exchange’ based on ‘actual labour-time’. For, this principle—the distribution of the means of consumption determined in proportion to ‘actual labour-time’—still bears the ‘birthmarks’ of capitalist society from which it has emerged, and therefore, pertains to an initial, provisional form of socialist society. What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it.31

Thus, although its ‘content’ and ‘form’ has changed, this principle of ‘proportionate exchange’ between actual labour-time and the ‘social stock’ of the means of consumption, is the same as the one that ‘regulates the exchange of commodities’—“a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for a given amount of labour in another form”. Here the notion of the ‘equal right’ of individuals based on the principle of proportionate equivalence (thus exchangeability) of their labour-time with that of others is still a bourgeois conception of equality and right, and therefore, suffers from the same limitations as found in bourgeois society. The  Ibid.

31

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bourgeois notion of equal right, based on a precise quantitative ‘measure’, turns out to be an “unequal right for unequal labour”. For, as Marx points out […] one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right.32

Here, in essence, Marx articulates a version of what has come to be known as the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ following G. E. Moore, and the closely related, ‘is-ought’ distinction by Hume. No normative principle of equality is wholly reducible to a factual/empirical criterion, such as the ‘actual’ duration of labour. For, (in addition to the formal argument against such a reduction), to do so would risk admitting factual inequality, arising from contingent social and natural factors, into the normative order. That is, it would risk endowing factual, contingent inequality (such as physical or mental superiority), with an ethical-normative status. The bourgeois conception of ‘equal right’ (based on an ‘exact’ quantified conception of equivalent exchange) does precisely this, and thereby commits (a version of ) the naturalistic fallacy. Therefore, for Marx, bourgeois “[…] equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour”.33 To prevent such a reduction of the ethical to the factual, Marx asserts that in an ethicalnormative sense, “[…] rights, instead of being equal, have to be unequal”. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only—for instance, in the present case, are regarded only 32 33

 Ibid. p. 320.  Ibid.

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as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.34

As I will discuss shortly, Peter Singer makes a similar argument in the context animal rights. The concept of ‘right’ entails that in order to be normatively equal, it needs to be factually unequal. This insight, which Singer captures in his conception of (normative) right to ‘equality of consideration’ (of the interests of different species), despite wide ranging factual inequality in terms of physical and mental capacities, is clearly at work here, in Marx’s vision of the ethical order inherent to a fully developed socialist society, encapsulated in the assertion in question—“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. This entails that the ‘ethical substance’ of a future, fully developed socialist society would consist in the recognition of mutual dependence, and therefore, the sense of belonging to the collective—a recognition that is institutionally mediated through social ownership of the means of production, democratic, decentralised planning, and distribution based on ‘need’. Once this recognition takes hold, unlike in liberal capitalistic democracy, the individual is no longer understood as opposed to the collective, or in Bilgrami’s terms, ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ do not stand in immediate opposition. We saw how Bilgrami analyses the ethical basis of liberal democracy, with its capitalistic political-economic framework, through this constitutive tension, which appears as an opposition, between freedom and equality. This opposition arises because ‘freedom’ is understood predominantly as individual freedom, and therefore, equality—the ‘collective’ dimension—becomes reduced to either factual, quantitative equality, or when thought normatively, to a primarily negative conception right, enshrined in ‘individual rights’, where the latter

 Ibid.

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boils down to the ‘right to non-interference’ (by the state, and other individuals). I am not suggesting that the tension between ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’, the individual and the collective, would disappear in a future socialist society, nor that it ought to be wholly ‘reduced’ in favour of the ‘collective’, since the dangers of such a reduction to the ‘opposite’ collective pole are all too familiar. Rather, the claim is that once this ethical transformation is effected, the opposition between the individual and the collective ceases to appear as a ‘given’, and an alternative, non-alienated mode of co-existence becomes conceivable. Unalienated modes of co-existence are not unique to socialist society—I have discussed their pre-modern, pre-capitalist forms, in terms of the various types of communal property relations that have existed throughout human history. Yet, these remain sacralised and naturalised modes of co-existence, which therefore remain unthematized, and perpetrate their own modes of subjugation and exploitation. In these pre-­ modern forms, the collective exists ‘immediately’, without mediation through the ‘individual’, and thus there is no ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’, nor any ‘tension’ between the two. The tension, along with the question of the social organization that would best contain it, arises only with modernist forms of disenchantment and alienation. Further, various types of explicit collective identity also manifest themselves in various domains, within the overall liberal democratic capitalist framework—for instance, in the phenomenon of nationalism, and the sacrifice of the individual (soldier) for the ‘nation’—but these only appear as exceptions to the rule (in ‘reality’, the power of the unthematized ‘collective’, dominates the individual under capitalism) and are, for that reason, over-valorised in these societies. In contrast then, what is unique about a post-capitalist, socialist society, is its realization of unalienated existence in a manner that (1) is not constituted in ‘immediate’ fashion, but carries the experience of diremption and necessary meditation through the ‘individual’ within it, such that unalienated co-existence in the collective is constituted in explicit, thematic fashion, and is thus, uncoerced. That is, it is constituted precisely as a ‘free’ association; and (2) pervades the whole of society, in its total organization.

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While this thematized and uncoerced sense of belonging to a greater whole is constitutive of our specifically modern form of unalienated co-­ existence, it is clear that the scope of this belonging can be extended beyond one’s own community, nation etc., to all of humanity (in keeping with the ‘internationalism’ that Marx envisaged). However, today, in light of the environmental crisis, there is a dire need to extend this scope even further, to non-human animals and to nature as a whole. What resources does modernist thought offer for such an extension beyond the human, without however, again succumbing to a positivistic or objectivist understanding of the ‘non-anthropocentric’? I have already delineated the main contours of the problematic, and with it, the possible responses to it. The experience of modernity contains within it the explicit, thematic experience of disenchantment and alienation, and this means that a specifically modernist response to the problematic cannot entail a return to pre-modern, sacralised conceptions of ‘nature’. However, I also argued, through the discussion of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, that there is no easy recourse to ‘objective nature’, or nature “in-itself ”—that mediation through ‘meaning’ (in its historicity), is constitutive of our sense of ‘nature’, including ‘nature in-itself ’. ‘Meaning’ (and value) therefore, is as inescapable in the realm of natural ontology as it is in that of moral ontology. Indeed, I argued that mediation, thus separation, difference etc. (‘alienation’ in the widest sense), is the constitutive condition of ‘representing’, or ‘having’ a (meaningful) world. If this sense of ‘difference’ becomes explicit in modernity, but also reified and distorted in various ‘dualisms’, then the question is, what would an unreified, explicitly differential relation to nature amount to? Moreover, how is such a notion, which I am suggesting, is the basis for a specifically modernist form of our unalienated relation to nature, tied to our unalienated relation to each other that I just outlined? To address these issues, I will again turn to Marx’s ecological thinking via John Bellamy Foster’s work, before drawing on a few different, but, theoretically interrelated sources, including the work of Peter Singer, Jay Bernstein, and Adorno and Horkheimer.

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8.3 The Realization of Unalienated Existence in Post-Capitalist Society: The Relation to ‘Nature’ Foster, along with other commentators, has in recent years highlighted the ecological dimension inherent in Marx’s thought, and analysed its implications for the contemporary ecological crisis. I will not rehearse the arguments for the latter, nor discuss its specific content, magnitude, and urgency, since they are reiterated in every work dealing with the subject. In Capitalism in the Anthropocene, for instance, Foster himself does a good job of summarizing both the history and trajectory of climate change discourse, as well as underscoring the magnitude of the environmental catastrophe looming ahead of us in the very near future, if it remains ‘business as usual’, and humanity continues on its present course of production and consumption within the capitalist framework. Instead of rehearsing these arguments, my interest here is, first, to explicate the link between the capitalist mode of production (as the dominant socio-economic reality today), and alienation vis-à-vis nature, as a parallel to the alienation vis à vis the self and the other, within capitalist society that Marx indicates. And thus, second, to articulate an unalienated relation to nature, in parallel with an unalienated relation to each other (society) that I discussed in the preceding sections. With regard to the first set of concerns, as many thinkers in the eco-socialist tradition have argued, the link can be traced back to Marx’s notion of a ‘metabolic rift’ between human social existence and nature, engendered by “capitalism’s alienated social metabolism”.35 Foster shows that, beginning with his writings from the 1850’s and continuing through to the composition of Capital (1867), Marx developed a notion of the ‘social metabolism of humanity and nature’, arising from labour and the production process. On the one hand, this ‘metabolism’ is social (irrespective of the form of the social), since it refers to the labouring activity of human beings in transforming nature, and such activity always occurs within certain (social) relations of production. On the other, Marx maintains that the 35

 Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 2021, p. 27.

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notion of social metabolism is itself part of the ‘universal metabolism of nature’. Against the opening claim of the Gotha Programme, namely that “Labour is the source of wealth and all culture […]”, Marx asserts, “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power”.36 Thus, just as with the use-values it produces, human labouring activity is both a natural power and socially mediated, and thus, simultaneously belongs to the universal metabolism of nature, and to the social metabolism with nature. Further, Marx claims that just as the capitalist mode of production produces alienation within human society, it produces alienation between the ‘social metabolism’, that is, the socially mediated metabolic relation with nature, and the ‘universal metabolism of nature’. This leads to a “‘rift in the […] social metabolism’, or metabolic rift” that, as Foster underscores, may be understood as the main source the “ecological crisis under capitalism”.37 The immediate context of Marx’s articulation of the ‘metabolic rift’ in Capital was the loss of nutrients in the soil that became apparent with the introduction of large-scale industrial agriculture in the mid-nineteenth century. In attributing this loss to the metabolic rift between the social metabolism with, and and universal metabolism of, nature, this “triad of concepts” and their interrelation provides Marx with a nascent ‘ecological’ understanding that, Foster point out, is complex enough and rich enough, to encompass “[…] both Earth change and social system change, and their coevolution within the historical process”.38 Marx’s approach shows how humanity’s historically mediated, changing social metabolism with nature, (which is historically mediated since it is fundamentally dependent on relations of production), eventually leads, under the capitalist form of social metabolism, to a ‘metabolic rift’ with (the metabolic processes of ) nature. It follows that if the social metabolism of capitalism gives rise to the metabolic rift, then socio-economic alienation and ecological alienation (alienation from the metabolic processes of nature) are two sides of the  Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, 1968, p. 315. 37  Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 2021, p. 27. 38  Ibid. 36

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same coin. Here the ‘link’ between economic and ecological alienation begins to emerge more clearly—as Foster explains, it consists in “capitalism’s exploitation of labour, on one side, and its expropriation of people and the earth, on the other”.39 As I discussed, the emergence and continuing sustenance of capitalism calls for the expropriation of large sections of the population from “the land and thus, from the organic means of production”.40 Or as Nancy Fraser writes, “Capitalism brutally separated human beings from natural, seasonal rhythms, conscripting them into industrial manufacturing, powered by fossil fuels and profit-driven agriculture, bulked up by chemical fertilizers, […]” introducing what Marx called a “‘metabolic rift”.41 For, it is only through such expropriation from the land (and from the subjection to nature’s metabolism), that a ‘capitalist’, as the owner of the means of production (that is, ‘capital’, including land), can encounter a ‘worker’, as the owner of only his/her labour-power, which appears (even to the worker) as a commodity that s/ he sells on the ‘market’. This expropriation and transformation of communal property into private property—the privatization of the commons on a world scale (in an interdependent dynamic between the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery’, constitutive of colonialism)—is what Marx designates the ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital. The latter, I argued, is an ongoing process that indicates the constitutive dependence of the seemingly closed capitalist system on an ‘outside’—a dependence that (just as the dependence of ‘surplus’ value on living labour) cannot be acknowledged, or institutionally recognized within the system. Expropriation from the commons, and its transformation into private property/capital, constitutes the (explicit) alienation from nature, and is the source of social alienation under capitalism. The reason that such alienation proves harmful and potentially ‘destructive’ is that the capitalist system can no more recognise its constitutive dependence on the ‘difference’ or excess (over its own cost of reproduction) introduced by the labouring activity of the worker, than it can recognize its constitutive  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 28. 41  Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism,” New Left Review 86 (2014): 63; quoted in Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, pp. 34–35. 39 40

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dependence on the earth. Thus, the capitalist system is as unsustainable in relation to human society (and survives despite the unemployment, income inequalities, and periodic crises only though ‘outside’ intervention), as it is in relation to nature. However, unlike individual human beings, who are replaceable (particularly given the reserve army of labour) and might therefore, be considered a “renewable resource” within the capitalist system, the earth presents an absolute limit. The earth’s destruction amounts to the destruction of the very conditions of existence, not only of capitalism, but of the human species. As Foster writes, “this twofold alienation from nature and other human beings constitutes the source of capitalism’s continuing creative destruction of the conditions of existence of humanity itself.”42 For Foster, our contemporary global situation has therefore, reached a point where the “struggle for freedom and the struggle for necessity”43 coincide, that is, where the ‘political’ struggle for human freedom and the ‘biological’ struggle for the survival of the human species as a whole, can no longer be seen as separate. As the subtitle of his book, Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution, suggests, like any point of ‘crisis’—in the overlapping senses of a ‘tipping point’, a point of ‘no return’, and also a point of ‘decision’—the current situation can unfold in either of two directions. It can result in the revolutionary overthrow of the unsustainable capitalist order and the establishment of a more sustainable social metabolic relation with the earth, or it can lead to ‘ecological ruin’ on a planetary scale, where the very continuance of “the chain of human generations” is at risk. If indeed such a post-capitalist society, with a sustainable relation to nature, that is, one that can ‘heal the metabolic rift’ between the human social metabolic exchange with nature and its universal metabolism (its ‘inner’, self-regulatory mechanisms and processes) is possible, then it must be based on socialist, collective values. Only then can we break out of the unsustainable, individual-centric, negatively conceived values (the right to non-interference) privileged under capitalism—both in terms of consumption and life-style patterns, as well as the inherent inequality it engenders through the exploitation of the vast majority. This  Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 2021, p. 28.  Ibid. p. 35.

42 43

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post-­capitalist, socialist, communal order would therefore, be at once egalitarian and sustainable (in its metabolic exchange with the metabolism of nature) and thus represent a new ‘ecological civilization’. Moreover, Foster suggests that the struggle for such a society would not be confined to the ‘proletariat’ understood in the classical sense of the industrial working class, but would increasingly include what he terms, the “environmental proletariat”.44 The latter is simply a new term for a phenomenon at least as old as capitalism itself. Foster points out (and as I mentioned in the discussion of the emergence of the ‘Levellers’ and ‘Diggers’ during the English revolution), much of the resistance against capitalist expansion through expropriation of people based on the privatization of the commons, has originated from what may be called (anthropocentric) ‘ecological motivations’, that is, “the struggle over land, food and environmental conditions”.45 This is not to suggest that the industrial and environmental proletariat are completely distinct; rather, the ‘social metabolic relation’ with nature under capitalism entails that the two categories are bound to overlap. Engels, in his Conditions of the Working Class in England, provides an account of the working conditions in the industrial city of Manchester, drawing attention to the terrible environmental conditions in which the workers had to live. Marx picks up on this connection Engels makes, when he writes: Even the need for fresh air ceases to be a need for the worker. Man reverts once more to living in a cave, but the cave is now polluted by the mephitic and pestilential breath of civilization. Moreover, the worker has no more than a precarious right to live in it, for it is for him an alien power that can be daily withdrawn and from which, should he fail to pay, he can be evicted at any time. He actually has to pay for this mortuary. A dwelling in the light, which Prometheus describes in Aeschylus as one of the great gifts through which he transformed savages into men, ceases to exist for the worker. Light, air, etc.—the simplest animal cleanliness—ceases to be a need for man. Dirt—this pollution and putrefaction of man, the sewage (this word is to be understood in its literal sense) of civilization—becomes

44 45

 Ibid. p. 36.  Ibid. p. 483.

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an element of life for him. Universal neglect, putrefied nature, becomes an element of life for him.46

Thus, the social metabolism with nature includes both political-­ economic and environmental factors, and the capitalist form of this social metabolism gives rise to contradictions in both domains. Consequently, the source of the resistance and revolutionary movements that historically arose due these contradictions, and will continue to arise in the future, cannot be reduced to ‘merely economic’ causes (narrowly conceived), but must be understood as, in part, stemming from the destruction of the most basic living conditions, along with the ‘organic means of production’, and thus, reproduction. The former, reductive ‘economistic’ tendency, has come to dominate later socialist discourse (and, I argued, shaped the ‘post-Marxist’ discourse/critique of Marx), particularly when combined with a ‘stagist’, and deterministic understanding of the dialectical movement of history. That is, where increase in the productive forces, which then cannot be accommodated within the existing relations of production, and come into conflict with them, is seen as the ‘automatic’ mechanism of historical change. As long as this ‘contradiction’ is understood purely formally, at most it brings to light only the ideal objective possibilities of historical transformation. However, I have shown how actual transformation is contingent on the (always socially mediated) metabolic exchange with the ‘outside’ of nature, (including the contingencies of land, water, food, ‘natural resources’), that is, the conditions that sustain life. It is the awareness of the irreducible interdependence between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘material’, necessity and contingency, the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ etc. that prevents Marx and Engels (unlike the later tendencies within the tradition), from discounting peasant struggles against the bourgeoisie, as simply ‘reactionary’ attempts to restore the old order. Foster points out that this awareness enables them to understand the resistance and struggles of peasants and indigenous people throughout the colonized world as revolts against the expropriative and exploitative tendencies inherent in the expansionary, colonizing logic of capital itself.

 Karl Marx, Early Writings, London: Penguin, 1970, pp. 359–60; quoted in Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, p. 484. 46

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It is this complex understanding of the struggle for the land/nature/environment, which was crucial to classical historical materialism, that explains why Marx and Engels, while emphasizing the role of the proletariat as the leading revolutionary force in developed capitalist economies, never denied either the past or present significance of peasant revolts in the struggle against bourgeois society—an approach that also extended to their growing support from the late 1850s on for all Indigenous struggles against colonialism. Thus, classical historical materialism, as distinct from some socialist tendencies, never portrayed the peasantry as simply a reactionary class. The very issue of proletarianization in the age of “so-called primitive accumulation” (or the age of original expropriation) was connected to the enclosure of the commons and the overthrow of the customary rights of the workers. For Marx, this could not be explained in terms of some kind of economic determinism or the superior productivity of capitalism, but rather was a product of “the opportunity that makes the thief ”.47

Thus, the collective ownership of the means of production calls for, as its prerequisite, the collective ownership of the ‘original’, organic means of production, that is the natural commons, consisting of land, water, forests etc. Further, if the ‘metabolic rift’ originates with the capitalist mode of production, essentially based on the expropriation of the vast majority from their organic relation to the earth (traditionally mediated through the community), that is, the expropriation of the commons, then the rift can be ‘healed’ (or at least rendered more sustainable), through the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ (formally, the negation of the negation), as Marx puts it, and the reestablishment, at a higher, thematic level, of a collective relation to the earth. Yet, so far, the arguments stemming from the eco-socialist tradition originating in Marx’s idea of the ‘metabolic rift’ that emerges with capitalism, have had a strongly anthropocentric bias. Even if we admit the notion of an unmediated ‘universal metabolism’ of nature, the various planetary thresholds and their crossing or disturbance, through the social metabolism, (resulting in the ‘rift’) is primarily understood as problematic from the perspective of the human species and its interest in its own future survival. From such a perspective, the question of the survival and 47

 Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 2021, p. 486.

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interests of non-human species, along with the preservation and sustenance of the universal metabolism of nature, is of merely secondary importance. It is taken into consideration only insofar as it impinges on the prospects of the survival and self-preservation of the human species. From our discussion so far, both in relation to Marx and the broader currents of thought with which his thinking, despite differences, appears largely continuous, the human perspective, (and social mediation), is irreducible. Yet, does such constitutive, irreducible mediation automatically warrant an anthropocentric position? Are there resources within ‘epistemic’ modernity—the reflective-critical movement of thought that, while recognizing its own constitutive entanglement in the object of ‘knowing’ (and therefore, avoiding naïve positivism), can still make room for a non-anthropocentric perspective concerning nature, just as, I contended, it does in relation to the domain of the socio-political (insofar as it retains some notion of non-relative truth)? With respect to the latter, I discussed the relevance of the notion of a ‘universal in becoming’—the negative movement of thought—and how it can go beyond the conception of the political understood as an interminable series of hegemonic contestations between various ‘identities’—to open up the possibility of emancipatory politics and a truly ‘free’ society. In response to the former question concerning nature, I now briefly turn to Peter Singer’s arguments; not primarily, to endorse its specific conclusions, but to underscore the structural analogy with Marx’s ethical-normative claims, while showing how the argument can be extended beyond the latter’s anthropocentric slant.

8.4 The Extension of Ethical Considerations Beyond the Human: Non-­Anthropocentrism Without the Reduction to Naïve Positivism In the first chapter of his ground-breaking book; Animal Liberation, Singer lays down the basic argument for why we ought to take the ‘interests’ of non-human species into consideration. Not doing so, he claims, amounts to ‘speciesism’—a bias towards our own species, analogous to

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various forms of discrimination, such as racism and sexism, within the human species. It follows that if we accept the ethical arguments against racism, sexism etc., we must, on pain of logical inconsistency, also accept the arguments against speciesism. In other words, as we shall see, the logical extension of the argument to include the interests of non-human animals, relies on the expansion of the scope of the ‘universality’ inherent in the notion of equality. In discriminating against a particular group of people based on the colour of their skin, (or gender, religion etc.), the boundary including those considered ‘equal’ is narrowly drawn, that is, the scope of the ‘universal’ aspect of the principle of equality is confined, for example, to people of a certain race or ethnicity, and the ‘non-conforming’ others are therefore, excluded. Similarly, Singer argues, in discriminating against non-human animals, the boundary, or scope of universality, is narrowly confined to the human species—and there is absolutely no ethical-normative ground for doing so. Singer’s argument for the latter claim is based on showing how all attempts to resist the extension of the principle of equality (thus, equal rights), either within the human species or beyond it to non-human animals, on the grounds of ‘factual’ (mental or physical) differences between them, succumbs to the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. To see how this is the case, and therefore, explicate the continuity and difference, with Marx’s insight concerning the ethical basis for a full-­ fledged socialist society, let us turn to a closer analysis of Singer’s arguments. Singer notes that when Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), her views were “widely regarded as absurd” and soon an anonymous piece, titled, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes’, appeared—intended as a parody of Wollstonecraft’s article. The author, who was later identified as Thomas Taylor, a Cambridge philosopher, tried to show the ‘absurdity’ of Wollstonecraft’s views by carrying it “one stage further”. His argument proceeded via a perceived reductio ad absurdum, claiming that if we admit equal rights for women, then there is no argument that prevents us from having to admit equal rights for ‘brutes’. The reasoning, if sound in relation to the former case, must also be sound in relation to the latter. Yet, since the latter case–of attributing equal rights to animals—is manifestly absurd, it follows that the reasoning leading to such a conclusion must be unsound.

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Thus, if it is unsound in the case of ‘brutes’, it must be unsound in the case of women.48 Singer points out that one, perhaps the most commonsensical, way to defend equality between men and women is to draw a sharp distinction between men and women as members of the human species on the one hand, and non-human animals, on the other, owing to their very different mental/rational capacities. On this basis, one might maintain that while men and woman are similar beings with the same rational capacities, and therefore, “should have similar rights”, humans differ greatly in their abilities from non-human species, and therefore, the latter should not have equal rights. However, such a response is deeply mistaken. While the differences between humans and non-human animals are undeniable, these differences would only determine the specific content of the rights that are to be extended to other, non-human species, not the extension of the principle of equal ‘right’ itself. As Singer puts it, “Recognizing this evident fact [of difference] however, is no barrier to the case of extending the basic principle of equality to non-human animals”.49 Indeed, there are recognizable differences between men and women, and between human beings in general. These differences result in differences in the specific content of the rights attributed to a group or individual, but do not prevent the extension of ‘rights’ as such, thus, the principle of equality, to them. For instance, it would be absurd to claim that because feminists hold that women have a right to abortion, the principle of equality between men and women that they are fighting for, requires that they also support men’s right to have an abortion. The biological difference between men and women entails that it is ‘meaningless to talk of ’ a man’s right to abortion, just as it is ‘meaningless to talk’ of a dog’s right to vote.50 Thus, the extension of the principle of equality to different groups (whether human or non-human) does not entail that we treat those groups as ‘exactly’, that is, factually, the same, or grant ‘exactly’ the same rights—rights with the same specific content. Rather, the principle of  Singer Animal Liberation, 2009, p. 28.  Ibid. p. 29. 50  Ibid. pp. 29–30. 48 49

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equality, as an ethical-normative principle, requires that we extend ‘equal consideration’ to the interests of different groups, and these interests will vary depending on contingent, factual differences between them.51 To understand this irreducibility of the normative basis for equality to any factual criteria, (such as physical difference or mental ability) more clearly, it is important, Singer writes, to analyse exactly “why racism and sexism is wrong”52—what do we mean when we oppose racism or sexism (or other forms of discrimination)? Those who discriminate against a particular group point to the undeniable differences between human beings—indeed, it is undeniable that “humans come in different shapes and sizes, they come with different moral capacities, different intellectual abilities, different amounts of benevolent feeling and sensitivity to the needs of others, […]”.53 “In short”, singer writes, “if the demand for equality were based on the actual equality of human beings, we would have to stop demanding equality”.54 Someone might still be tempted to argue against various forms of discrimination via an appeal to ‘actual equality’ in an aggregate sense, claiming for instance, that while there may be differences between individuals, there is no difference between the races or sexes, since the differences between individuals “cut across the lines of race or sex”. The argument goes something like this: from contingent factors such as a person’s skin colour or sex, we cannot draw any inferences concerning their ‘intellectual of moral capacities’, since, as a matter of fact, we can find individuals in the discriminated group whose capacities in these respects are better developed, or ‘superior’ compared to individuals belonging to the group that is doing the discriminating. However, such an argument against discrimination, based on an appeal to facts, (namely, that variations among individuals are not restricted to any particular group) would prove useless against “a more sophisticated opponent of equality”, who proposes, and consistently applies, a strictly factual criterion, such as IQ, as the basis of unequal treatment. For instance, we can imagine a situation where it is  Cf. Ibid. p. 30.  Ibid. 53  Ibid. pp. 30–31. 54  Ibid. 51 52

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decided that the interests of those with an IQ below 100, should be ‘given less consideration’ compared to the interests of those who score above 100, that therefore, the former should have a lower status in society, and serve the latter as their slaves.55 Insisting on factual criteria as the basis of equal treatment is, therefore, fraught with danger. For instance, it may turn out through ‘scientific investigation’ that there are ‘in fact’ differences between races or the sexes, particularly when ‘averages are taken’. A defender of ‘factual equality’ may still insist that these differences can all be traced to socio-economic factors, rather than any genetic determinants. However, if it turns out that the relevant differences are in fact due to biological factors, then opponents of say, racism or sexism, who base their argument on the presupposition of factual equality, would have no further recourse left, and would be forced to give up their opposition. However, as Singer writes: Fortunately, there is no need to pin the case of equality to one particular outcome of scientific investigation. […] the claim to equality does not depend on intelligence, moral capacity, physical strength or similar matters of fact. Equality is a moral idea, not an assertion of fact. There is no logically compelling reason for assuming that a factual difference in ability between two people justifies any difference in the amount of consideration we give to their needs and interests. The principle of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.56

It is clear that Singer’s basic argument against discrimination among human beings stemming from ‘actual differences’, amounts to a rearticulation of the argument against the ‘naturalist fallacy’. Further, the connection between Singer’s argument concerning the irreducibility of the ethical-normative to the factual, and the ethical underpinnings of Marx’s vision of a fully developed socialist society, encapsulated in the assertion, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’, also begins to emerge more clearly. For, as we saw, Marx also points to the factual differences in the labouring capacity of individuals, (due to  Cf. Ibid. p. 31.  Ibid. p. 33.

55 56

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differences in physical and mental capacities, age, etc.), and thus, concludes that the distribution of the ‘means of consumption’ (as a part of the total social product), insofar as it is determined in proportion to the ‘actual’ labour-time expended by an individual on the total social product, that is, by a merely quantitative conception of ‘equality’ or ‘fairness’ (qua equal exchange), turns out to ‘unequal’ or ‘unfair’, from a moral perspective. Thus, Marx’s critique of the bourgeois conception of ‘equal right’ also applies to early forms of socialist society, ‘still stamped with the birthmarks’ of the capitalist society that immediately preceded it (insofar as it relies on actual-labour-time to determine the distribution of the social means of consumption). To recall what Marx says in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right”.57

While the logical structure of the argument is analogous, Singer’s position differs from Marx’s in one crucial respect. In extending the moral principle of equality (of consideration of interests) to non-human species, Singer goes beyond the primarily anthropocentric approach to nature contained in Marx’s idea of the metabolic rift. In going beyond the ‘human’, without however, attempting to overcome the human perspectival opening unto the ‘world’, thus, social mediation, meaning etc., by reducing it to some form of post-human objectivism, Singer provides part of the blueprint (the remaining part, as we shall see shortly, lies in Adorno’s conception of negative dialectics) for a desacralized, but also non-reified, modernist approach to nature. Even though this approach is fundamentally oriented by the utilitarian tradition (insofar as it makes the ‘capacity to suffer’ as the basic criterion for extending the principle of ‘equality’ or ‘equal consideration’ to other species), it is also simultaneously oriented by the rationalist, universalising movement of thought (in 57

 Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1968, p. 320.

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the Kantian mould), insofar as it depends on the law of non-­contradiction. The constitutively interdependent characters of these two orientations, again points to the dialectic between the particular and the universal, contingency and necessity etc. that would make up the ‘ethical substance’ of a revised non-reified, unalienated relation to nature. To elucidate this point, let us return to where I left off in my explication of Singer’s carefully crafted argumentation. Singer’s analysis so far shows why our arguments against racism and sexism cannot be grounded in a principle of equality derived from (or reducible to) ‘factual equality’. Rather, equality as a moral principle, must assert itself not only ‘despite’ factual inequality/difference, but also, Singer suggests, for the ‘sake of ’ such difference. That is, it ought to hold even more strongly in the latter case as it pertains to say, mentally and physically disabled people, children etc. In other words, the irreducibility of the moral to the factual (the ‘ought’ to the ‘is’), is reflected in our everyday ‘lived’ moral experience— our heightened sense of outrage, our feeling of abhorrence, in cases of the mistreatment and exploitation of the physically or mentally disabled, particularly children etc. Singer claims that it is on the same grounds that “the attitude we may call ‘speciesism’, by analogy with racism, must be condemned”.58 If superior physical or mental ability/capacity cannot morally justify the ill-treatment and exploitation of one group of humans by another, then it cannot morally justify the ill-treatment and exploitation of one species (non-human animals), by another (humans). To make an exception to the necessarily universal, (because moral) principle of equality, is to succumb to ‘speciesism’ (analogous to ‘racism’ or ‘sexism’), that is, “[…] a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of one’s own species and against those of members of other species”.59 Singer remarks that while many thinkers have understood the irreducibly moral grounds for equality, and have therefore, called for the “equal consideration of interests in some form or the other, as a basic moral principle”, most have not “recognized that this principle applies to members of other species as

 Singer,  Animal Liberation, 2009, p. 35.  Ibid.

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well as their own”.60 He cites Jeremy Bentham as one of the few who saw that this implication necessarily followed from the universal dimension of the moral principle qua ‘moral’ (and not factual). The passage is worth quoting in full. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?61

Bentham indicates here that the ‘insuperable line’ that is to determine whether the principle of equal consideration of interests ought to be extended to any being, consists in its ‘capacity for suffering’, (and/or pleasure). As Singer underscores, the capacity for suffering or enjoyment is not one factual-biological characteristic among others; rather, it is “the prerequisite for having any interests at all”.62 In an echo of the thought that we have come across in Heidegger’s work, he points out that “a stone kicked along the road by a schoolboy” cannot be said to have an interest in avoiding being kicked, precisely “because it cannot suffer”.63 Whereas, it is in the interest of a mouse, or any sentient creature capable of feeling pain or pleasure, to avoid being casually kicked by the schoolboy, to avoid the suffering that would ensue.  Ibid. pp. 35–36.  Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 17; quoted in, Singer, Animal Liberation, p. 36. 62  Singer, Ibid. p. 37. 63  Ibid. 60 61

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Recall Heidegger’s assertion that a stone, or any inanimate object has no ‘world’, whereas an animal is ‘poor in the world’ (relative to human Dasein, which alone can hold the world as a whole at a distance and therefore consider it as a ‘whole’). For Heidegger, the ‘world’, if it is to have any meaning, necessarily entails a world that is of concern to us— that gets its sense and significance, and thus emerges as ‘our world’, from our concernful dealings with it. But this holds true not only of human Dasein, but any creature capable of sentience, which at its very minimum, is the capacity to feel pain or pleasure. Moreover, such a claim is compatible with admitting degrees of sentience, as Heidegger does. While this line of reasoning brings to light the continuity between Heidegger’s and Singer’s positions, Heidegger’s existential analytic can augment and deepen Singer’s ethical argumentation. For, with the conception of Dasein, with its temporal-existential structure, as ‘being in the world’ qua ‘being always ahead of itself ’, Heidegger shows how the notion of ‘interest’ is not confined to human beings or sentient creatures, understood as ‘apart from’ the ‘world’, but permeates the very world they inhabit. With this broadened notion of ‘interest’, it follows that it is not just ethical considerations in a narrow sense, grounded in the ethical notion of ‘equality’ of the interests of non-human sentient creatures that is at stake, but also the preservation of the larger biosphere that they inhabit, and which supports and sustains the ‘interests’ of all sentient creatures. In turn, Singer’s ethical argumentation against (human) speciesism, while rooted in the seemingly straightforward utilitarian criterion of the ‘interests’ of other species, based on the capacity to experience pleasure or pain (sentience), brings to light the universal dimension of any ethical standpoint—in this case, in the extension of the principle of ‘equality’, in the form of recognizing, (on a roughly equal footing) the suffering, and thus, the interests of other species. In this sense, despite the different moral ontologies at work, it is in line with the Kantian argument, insofar as the scope of ‘universality’, inherent in the moral conception of ‘equality’ is extended beyond the human species, on pain of self-contradiction. Thus, universalizability as a process, and as the mark of self-reflexive reason, plays a role that is as significant as the moral ontology (based on minimal sentience) that subtends it, in Singer’s argument.

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Before turning to the notion of universality in this unreified, processive sense, I need to say something more concerning the notion of ‘moral ontology’ that is irreducibly at play in any ethical stance—including the process of universalizing itself, as representing for instance, our rationality and autonomy. As I mentioned, in his Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor points out that moral ontologies, form an ‘inescapable framework’, in the sense that they are articulations of our deepest moral attitudes and commitments. Thus, on the one hand, these attitudes appear intuitive, and therefore, particularly under the predominance of the modernist disenchanted world-view, are often ‘naturalized’ as instinctive. However, as Taylor (and Strawson64) argues, it is not as if we first articulate a value-neutral ontology (based on some pre-modern, sacralised, or modern, desacralized conception of human ‘essence’, such as being ‘creatures of god, created in his image’, or possessing ‘rational capacity’ etc.), and subsequently take up a ‘morally reactive attitude’ or stance towards it (of say, ‘respect’ for the inherent ‘dignity’ of human beings due to these ‘ontological’/essential characteristics they possess, and other species lack). Rather, for Taylor, these ontological accounts are already articulations of our deepest moral intuitions and commitments—they are “accounts of what it is that commands our respect”65—what it is that we value. Thus, moral values cannot be founded on any value-neutral ontological characteristics—values go ‘all the way down’ and every ontological articulation of value is always already a moral ontology. This line of argument by Taylor is familiar enough, and similar to Singer’s, insofar as the attempt to reduce value to something extra-valuative (including sacralised conceptions of human essence), commits a version of the naturalistic fallacy (in an extended sense). However, this should not tempt us into conceiving—through a reification at the (seemingly) ‘opposite’ pole of the dialectical relation between the “is” and the “ought”—universality as purely processive, and thus, empty of all content. It is clear, for instance, that the Kantian test of ‘universalizability’, and the (various forms of the) categorical imperative that flows from it, despite its formal-rational appearance, is oriented by a certain moral ontology, namely, our capacity 64 65

 See P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, 1962.  Taylor, Sources of the Self, 1989, p. 5.

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for autonomy, which we realize in acting for the sake of the moral law (that is, for the sake of its merely universal form). The capacity for autonomy is nothing but the capacity for transcendence, or what I have also designated, the negative movement of thought—understood here in the minimal sense of a will that is not wholly determinable by empirical conditions, a will that can therefore, in principle act in an unconditioned manner. However, the universal form of the moral law, as an externalization of our unconditioned (rational) autonomy, comes to represent the negativity of the autonomous will in the positive form of the moral law. The representation of negativity in the positivity of the moral law can lead to reification, and thus, come to constitute a mode of moral alienation, where we no longer act for the sake of the law but merely in conformity with it. That is, the law is felt as an external command—for, as Kant puts it, “Where the moral law speaks, there is no longer objectively, a free choice as regards what is to be done […]”.66 Jay Bernstein’s approach in Torture and Dignity (2015) may be interpreted as a critique of precisely this tendency towards reification at the other pole of the “fact/value dichotomy”, namely, the transformation of moral (self ) consciousness into abstract, processive moral laws. Bernstein argues—against the fetishization of the ‘ought’, and the ‘mesmeric force’ it comes to exert on the dominant discourses in moral philosophy—for a morality from the perspective of the victim—the one who actually suffers violence in various forms. It is such ‘victim morality’,67 that is, a morality rooted in our embodied selves and the violence and trauma it is capable of suffering at the hands of others, rather than the concern for upholding some abstract moral principles of justice or right, that captures something of our moral experience—and why morality matters to us.68 Our deeply personal sense of moral outrage then, stems not from the  Kant, Critique of Judgment, 1951.  J. M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury, 2015, p. 1. 68  Here the phenomenon of self-harm, for instance, suicide, would raise a critical challenge to such a position. However, a dialectical account of morals-one which understands (moral) ontology and (universal) laws as mutually, irreducibly co-constitutive, can provide a response to the problematic of self-harm. Kant’s arguments against suicide can be interpreted in this manner—as the irreducibility of a moral ontology (which contains the moment of universality within it) to a ‘factual’ ontology. 66 67

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transgression of some universal moral law delivered from ‘on high’ (a position which in modernity, with the waning of religious consciousness, comes to be occupied by universal non-­substantive, procedural reason), but from the transgression of the embodied self—either our own or someone else’s; and is therefore, firmly anchored in the immediate sense of our own bodily vulnerability, fragility and dependence. As Bernstein writes, “It is not moral rules or principles or commandments that are broken when morally wrongful things happen; it is persons— their flesh, their bones, their sense of inner worth— that get bruised and broken”.69 Taking up two ‘paradigmatic’ cases of moral injury, namely, torture and rape, and tracking the transformations in their historical understanding (particularly of torture), Bernstein shows how such transgressions of our embodied selves undo our relation to others and to our ourselves. It is the traumatic violation of our ‘bodily’ integrity that bring to light, by way of sharp contrast, the true source of our sense of self-worth and dignity. This source lies in the recognition and acknowledgement of our humanity and personhood that others extend to us, and this amounts to a recognition of our embodied self-consciousness and autonomy. It is such recognition that, particularly in our times, is often taken for granted, and its sudden withdrawal through moral injury—the brutalizing, traumatic violation of lived, bodily integrity through torture or rape—strips the victim of their personhood and humanity, and reduces them to their “passive, suffering body”. That is, as Bernstein clarifies, it reduces the “body I have”—the intentional/agential/voluntary body, to the “body I am”—the passive/non-intentional/involuntary body “riveted” to nature.70 In the case of torture and rape, “[…] the effort of the perpetrator is to dispossess the self of its voluntary body, to dispossess the individual of the body she has, and appropriate all bodily agency and will for itself, leaving the victim with only the body she is, her passive, suffering body, the body that rivets her to the natural world, the body that bears the experience of her mortality”.71  Bernstein, Torture and Dignity, 2015, p. 2.  Ibid. p. 15. 71  Ibid. 69 70

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From the perspective of the victim, what is undone and lost with ‘moral injury’—the traumatic violation of our bodily selves—is trust in the other and the world.72 The loss of trust is nothing but the taken for granted (particularly in our historical age) recognition of our lived bodily integrity, personhood, humanity and dignity that the other (and society in general) ordinarily affords us. Our sense of self-worth and standing in the world is intrinsically tied to our lived body and its integrity, and therefore, the violation of bodily integrity is traumatic, indeed ‘devastating’, for the victim. This implies that, Bernstein writes, “[…] the self is a normative construction that is so constituted through its relations to others. Selves are relational beings who are inescapably dependent on others for their standing or status as a human self— as a person.”73 The two perspectives on ‘moral injury’—from the side of the perpetrator and the victim, reveal the inner dialectic between the ‘particular’ and the ‘universal’, in the moral domain, that is, in terms of the dialectic between the “is” and the “ought”, which can no longer therefore, be conceived as completely unrelated, independent moments. The pain and suffering of the victim is never merely particular, or ‘factual’, since they have to count as pain and suffering in a moral sense, and are therefore, tied to a normatively mediated conception of the embodied self (with its dimensions of passivity and activity, ‘natural’ and social functioning etc.). Who counts as an (embodied) self, and therefore, as a ‘person’ possessing humanity, dignity etc., that is, how narrowly or widely the ‘boundary’ is drawn, has varied through time, as the long, sordid history of colonialism and slavery make evident. It follows that moral injury, insofar as it counts as ‘moral’, is tied to the interpersonal relations of recognition, which in turn are enmeshed in the larger nexus of “political, economic, social and cultural forces” that shape the emergence (and scope) of a “new conception of the bodily self ”.74 In the context of Bernstein’s discussion, it is the historical emergence of this new ethical-normative conception of the bodily self, in the

 Ibid. p. 13.  Ibid. 74  Ibid. p. 9. 72 73

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“shifting ethical landscape of late eighteenth century Europe”75 that leads to the long-standing practice of penal torture becoming problematic. Bernstein locates the articulation of this shift (in the second half of the eighteenth century), in the writings of Cesare Beccaria (On Crimes and Punishments, 1764), and Voltaire, among others (without attributing the shift to ‘ideas’ alone), and underscores its influence on Jeremy Bentham (who becomes an “apostle” of Beccaria).76 In doing so, he indicates how the sense of moral injury—in ‘taking into consideration’ the pain and suffering caused by penal torture, both informs the birth of Utilitarianism and is inevitably distorted and reified within it. For, in “its obliviousness to the intrinsic worth of persons, its bland willingness to quantify, to make no life worth anything if it stands on the wrong side of the maximizing happiness, minimizing pain tally, and thus, ironically, its inability to make suffering and, above all, loss meaningful,”77 Utilitarianism succumbs, on the one hand, to a ‘crude, quantifying decision procedure’, and, on the other, to an externalised ‘law-centered’ approach characteristic of modern, secularized ethical discourse. Yet, these tendencies towards reification in the ‘universal moral law’, which in Utilitarianism assumes quantified expression, should not prevent us from seeing the non-reified basis for the ‘universality’ of the moral law, in the (historically shaped) moral-ontological articulation it represents (an articulation visible even in the apparent procedural formalism of Kant’s categorical imperative), and the historical process of (initial) misrecognition and (eventual) recognition, it sets in motion. This entails that an ‘ethics of recognition’ amounts to a negative ethical movement, that starts from ‘below’—from the side of the (un-recognized) ‘victim’. Thus, the ‘universality’ implicit in this historical process, (or ‘experience’), that tends towards ethical recognition/acknowledgment, can only be a negative universality—a universality in becoming. As Bernstein writes, “But if morals can advance through experience, if structures of wrong can be righted, and if patterns of moral harm prevented through the elaboration of new moral ideals and codes, then the historical privileging of the  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 26. 77  Ibid. p. 5. 75 76

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victim is inevitable; it is just what learning through experience amounts to in this domain”.78 I have already traced the account of the historically mediated movement towards recognition (in the outline of a post-capitalist society) starting from a position of misrecognition (or a distorted reified form of ‘recognition’) under capitalism, at the socio-political-economic level in the writings of Marx—an account that also privileges the ‘victim’, rather than reified moral laws. Moreover, I interpreted Singer’s argument such that it brings to light the manner in which moral ontology and moral recognition can be extended to non-human species. This extension of the process of recognition beyond the ‘human’, and thus ‘processive universality’ itself, remains at least in part, anchored in the negative movement of human thought, its capacity for reflexive self-distancing (the other part being the excluded, misrecognized ‘victims’, that can come to ‘haunt’ it and force its realization/expansion) which also instigates the critical rationality of enlightenment modernity. It now remains to say something concerning this negative, ‘processive universalizability’ inherent in the self-critical, rational movement of thought that provided the original impetus to enlightenment modernity. I have discussed, in and through the work of various thinkers, how this negative movement of reason is both the highest expression of modernity, and also came to be distorted in its own reified self-figuration, in the form of capitalist society on the one hand and disenchanted ‘nature’, available for human mastery and exploitation, on the other. Against this background, my attempt has been to reopen the possibility of non-reified reason (or at least a mode of reason where its inevitable tendency towards reification is reflectively recognized, acknowledged, and thereby its effects rendered ‘harmless’) at the heart of modernity, in both, its interrelated aspects, that is, in relation to society and nature. I will first readdress the ‘determinate negation’ constitutive of the movement of reason culminating in reified modernity, by turning to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s, Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), before examining Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (2003), to rearticulate the conception of un-reified, properly universal reason, as the pure negativity of thought, that is, a negation without a further negation—an ‘indeterminate’ negation.  Ibid. p. 10.

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8.5 The Emancipatory Promise of Enlightened Modernity and Its Distortion in a ‘Determinate Negation’ The Dialectic of Enlightenment, opens on an ominous note—while enlightenment rationality has always understood itself “as liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters”; today, “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity”.79 How did things come to such a pass? How did the original critical-rational impetus of the Enlightenment, with its governing ideal of emancipating human beings from fear and superstition and ‘installing them as masters’—of their inner and outer ‘natures’, turn into its opposite—resulting in a world “radiant with triumphant calamity”? I have tried to trace the movement of this dialectic of Enlightenment rationality—the movement of the ‘negation of the negation’—through a variety of thinkers, and in its various facets—from the social, including its historical, political-­ economic and ethical facets, to the refracted meaning of ‘nature’ that emerges from them. My aim however, has been to not only underscore the movement of determinate negation (or reification) characteristic of Enlightenment rationality, and the impasses (leading to “triumphant calamity”) it generates, but also, to point to the genuine emancipatory potential that enlightenment modernity still holds. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the authors are primarily concerned with the first set of issues, whereas in Negative Dialectics, Adorno also addresses the second set. Thus, in the former work, the authors bring to light, in a manner abstractly analogous to Husserl’s analysis in the Crisis, (but also continuous with thinker such as Heidegger and Marx, while remaining quite distinct in its content and treatment), the immanent unfolding of enlightenment modernity, leading to the ‘inner dissolution’ of its animating ideal (a theme Husserl approaches through the ‘crisis’ of scientific rationality, and thus, of meaning, that plagues modern consciousness), in its reified distortion into its opposite.

79

 Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2002, p. 1.

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In relation to Husserl in particular, the distinction lies in the philosophical concerns that orient Horkheimer and Adorno, and the differences in treatment that shape their analyses. The latter are more explicitly conscious of, and oriented by, the hegemonic dimension of enlightenment rationality, stemming from social relations of power, and the capitalist form it acquires in modernity. One of the points that Adorno and Horkheimer emphasize (elaborating a strain of thought already present in Marx), is that the disenchantment of nature—in part precipitated through the modern techno-scientific revolution—is not merely a necessary condition for the emergence of capitalism (as our discussion in previous chapters also might suggest); rather, these spheres of human activity share a common processive principle—that of abstraction, and the emergence of infinite fungibility. To elucidate this point, it is necessary to see the (dialectical-structural) differences and continuities between enlightened modernist consciousness and pre-modern consciousness. Thus, on the one hand, the spirit of enlightenment has always understood itself in opposition to pre-modern mythical projections. It has sought to construct a disenchanted world, free from the animism that governs the imagination of traditional societies. In the supernatural spirits and demons of ancient cultures, critical rationality sees only the human subject and its anthropomorphic projections, engendered by the fear of the forces of nature. Enlightenment aims at overcoming this fear, which means, overcoming the specificity and heteronomy of entities in nature, and nature itself, through its appropriation and mastery for the ends of man. Yet, on the other hand, in these aims, enlightenment rationality also manifests a certain continuity with the pre-modern cultures it opposes and understands itself against. To see their ‘common ancestry’, and thus, the dialectic in operation throughout history, requires a genealogical approach that traces the inherent tendencies of enlightenment modernity to the pre-modern understanding against which it takes its stand. The universe of traditional cultures, with their personified understanding of natural phenomena, is characterized by a proliferation of supernatural entities. The shaman or spirit seer would attempt to influence and control nature by appeasing or frightening spirits and demons through direct identification with each of those powers—by impersonating the forces of

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“good” and “evil” in turn. With the advance in the negative, abstractive movement of thought, the proliferation of ‘natural spirits’ gives way to unified concepts and principles of greater generality. Xenophanes had already “mocked the multiplicity of Gods”, since they reflected their human creators and their foibles so closely.80 The movement of abstraction, and the transformed orientation towards nature it implies, is pre-­ figured in the cosmologies of the ‘Pre-Socratics’. Water, air, earth and fire, as animating principles, invoke forces that are perceptible to human beings, forces at work in their practical surrounding world. At the same time, the Greek gods are no longer immediately identified with these elements but come to represent them, as their animating essence; until, with the advance of abstract thinking, the divinities cease to be personifications and are transformed into, for instance, the Platonic forms or the Aristotelian prime mover. With this “‘God’ of the philosophers”, the proliferating multiplicity of demons and spirits are assimilated and unified under a singular ‘God’ that becomes indistinguishable from the concept or principle, ‘God’, that is, a ‘God’ that retreats from the world, is bereft of specific qualities, and is increasingly understood functionally. For the authors, once the diremption within being, between logos and beings, instigated through the process of abstraction, that is already at work in cosmological explanations and philosophies of the ancients, takes hold, there is no turning back. Enlightened reason only takes this abstractive, negative movement of thought further; thus, it recognizes the old ‘mythologies’, stemming from the same fears, in the Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysical logos. Enlightened modernity aims to do away with all such remnants of mythological consciousness. As I discussed, the fundamental transformation wrought by modern natural science consists in getting rid of any kind of inherent teleology in nature, on the grounds that it begs the question. As the authors put it, “From now on, matter was finally to be controlled without illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties”,81 such that ‘nature’ itself emerges as ‘blind’ matter bereft of meaning. It is clear how such an understanding of nature in modernity turns the Aristotelian world-view on its head. 80 81

 Cf. Ibid. p. 2.  Ibid. p. 3.

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For enlightened rationality, the world, devoid of meaning, emerges as a collection of mere things and animals, controlled by an increasingly abstract and unified logos. Human beings, in their affinity to the logos become the privileged animal—constituted in the “image of God”, they give themselves dominion over nature in the name of God. “In their mastery of nature, creative God and the ordering mind are alike. Man’s likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command.”82 If through this process, “objective nature” becomes the domain of mere matter and animals, then the knowledge of nature becomes the power to manipulate them. We saw that magical practices and rituals were also attempts to ‘control’ natural phenomena, but the difference, with respect to the modern scientific understanding, is that magic worked through direct identification. The shaman or sorcerer puts on different masks, impersonating various spirits and demons, making ritualized gestures to placate or frighten them. As the authors write, “Magic is bloody untruth, but in it, domination is not yet disclaimed by transforming itself into pure truth underlying the world that it enslaves”.83 In contrast, the modern subject, formed in the “image of an invisible power”, stands apart and above nature in the exercise of its domination. “Only when made in such an image does man attain the identity of the self which cannot be lost in identification with the other but takes possession of itself once and for all as an impenetrable mask.”84 The emergence of the identical (alienated) “subject” and of “nature” reduced, in its essence, to ‘matter’ devoid of any specific qualities, whose ontological status is determined through its quantifiability and manipulability based on an ‘abstract logos’, go hand in hand. Here Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s line of thinking clearly touches upon Heidegger’s approach in his essay on technology. The fundamental reorientation towards nature, despite its long and complex history, is, I noted in my discussion of Heidegger’s essay, adumbrated in the shift from the poiesis of ‘nature’ to the poiesis of technē, as the principle of nature’s articulation—a shift in the understanding of what constitutes the very arche  Ibid. p. 6.  Ibid. 84  Ibid. 82 83

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of ‘logos’. If the aporetic character of nature, which forces this shift, is acknowledged in Plato, if it is seen as both necessary, yet problematic, its aporetic sense is covered over in modernity. For Horkheimer and Adorno (just as for Heidegger), the instrument by which this forgetfulness is affected is “universal equivalence”—the reduction of all particularity, alterity and resistance, to the “same” of quantification, in the unity of mathematized nature. The ideal of mathesis universalis that comes to govern the conception of nature, consigns everything that escapes quantification to the merely subjective and contingent. The efficacy of magic also lay in setting up equivalences, but these were dependent on ‘direct’, and thus, specific representation. The objects of worship or sacrifice, the fur and claws of animals, the image of an enemy, were thought to embody the very properties of the things of which they were likenesses. To be in possession of these objects was to possess their powers, and thus, power over what they depicted. According to the authors, nothing essentially changes when organized religion comes to exert its power over the lives of human beings. If organized religion takes a step further in abstract thought, in the sense that an abstract, unified and formless God implies a greater distance between the image and what it depicts, and thus, presupposes a consciousness of the image as indirect representation, then this increased distance is still bridged through idol-­worship, which constitutes a form of fetishized equivalence. Even the proscription of images by Plato, and by Judaism and Islam alike, which manifests this consciousness of distance between the sign and the signified—the recognition of the inevitability of ‘mediation’—is ultimately motivated by the impossible desire for immediacy, whether through reason, or through faith.85 In modernity, however, representation detaches itself from the object, and the limited substitutability and equivalence of the objects of magic and ritual, of the qualitatively specific, meaningful objects of nature,  For the authors, there is a basic commonality between magic and art on the one hand and science and religion on the other that marks their separation even as it underscores their larger affinity, within the dialectic of enlightenment reason. 85

Both reason and religion outlaw the principle of magic. Even in its resigned detachment from nature, as art it remains dishonorable; […] Art has in common with magic the postulation of a special self-contained sphere removed from the context of profane existence. (Ibid. pp. 13–14).

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gives way to universal equivalence (for physics all ‘matter’ is the same, qua collection of fundamental particles describable in terms of quantified quantum states) and exchangeability. “Nature is no longer to be influenced by likeness but mastered through work.”86 Yet, if natural science and the commodity-form are analogous insofar as both, qua abstract quantification, leave all particularity behind, then in the idea of the mathematical logos of nature and in the money-commodity, equivalence itself is reconstituted in determinate representation. “Earlier Fetishes had been subject to the law of equivalence. Now equivalence itself becomes a fetish”.87 In the inevitability of this disavowal of the aporetic, heteronymous sense of nature—in the apparent ‘overcoming’ of its always already dirempted and mediated status for us in the “sameness” of fetishized equivalence, as we saw, the dialectic between the “particular” and the “universal”, the “real” and the “ideal”, inevitably reconstitutes itself, and the (negative) movement of the logos again finds itself on the path to a “crisis” of meaning and belief. Historically, the moments of crisis, which are always crises arising from reification, have prescribed a “fated” course, (a ‘fate’, however, that can only appear as fate in retrospect). If the diremption that leads to crisis (dialectical one-sidedness) is always already at work—for, as I emphasized, to ‘have’ a world is to be necessarily dirempted from it—nevertheless, its unfolding takes on an accelerated rhythm in enlightened modernity, which appears on the scene as the problematic expression of this “fate”. The enlightenment has always been implicitly aware of its own dirempted status. If, in the Platonic universals it detects the old myths and the fears underlying them, then in seeking to overcome them in absolute universality, it also “[…] recognizes itself in those myths”88 In its “will to truth” it recognizes the old fears, leading to the disavowed “will to error”, in the desire to attain the absolute “in-itself ”, it feels nostalgia for a lost “nature”, with which it thinks it was once immediately united.

 Ibid. p. 13.  Ibid. p. 12. 88  Ibid. p. 3. 86 87

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“Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step, enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology.”89 If myth and ritual represented the first form of abstractive thought— the first ‘explanations’ of natural phenomena stemming from the fear of the unknown, by which human beings sought to attain some measure of control over nature, and over their own ‘fates’, then, for the authors, this abstractive/negative movement of thought inherent in mythologizing consciousness (along with the ‘fear’ that instigates it) is qualitatively continuous with enlightenment rationality. Yet, insofar as this negative-­ abstractive movement attempts to arrive at the ‘positivity’ of an ‘absolute ground’, the final resting point of the “in-itself ”, or a ‘pure outside’ independent of thought, it attempts to overcome its own mediated relation with nature. All mediation therefore, appears merely provisional, and cognition is understood as merely an ‘instrument’ for grasping reality. However, as I have been emphasizing throughout, since mediation (representation in the image, sign, language, commodity-form etc.) is inevitable, in this very attempt to overcome mediation by directly grasping its object, it ends up reducing the heteronomous and aporetic character of nature to its own immanent sphere. In the words of the authors; The Gods cannot take away fear from human beings, the petrified cries of whom they bear as their names. Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization, of enlightenment which equates the living with the nonliving as myth had equated the nonliving with the living. Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo. Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the “outside” is the real source of fear.90

Adorno and Horkheimer, rehearsing an oft-repeated charge, take Hegel to be also guilty of this reduction of the ‘outside’ to the immanence of thought. For them, Hegel becomes one of the last figures of mythologizing enlightenment consciousness. However, there is a crucial 89 90

 Ibid. p. 8.  Ibid. p. 11.

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distinction between the naivety of enlightenment rationality, culminating in positivism,91 and Hegel’s notion of ‘absolute knowing’, which he understands as the necessary result of the dialectical movement of reason that he articulates. The former is self-dissimulating with respect to its own reduction of the ‘outside’ to the ‘purely’ immanent sphere of thought and therefore, unthematically enacts the dialectic, whereas the latter is explicitly aware of this “reduction”, since it takes it to be dialectically necessary, that is, it is explicitly aware of (what I have, in relation to Marx’s thought, referred to as) the inevitability of reification (dialectical one-sidedness). As I suggested in the discussion of the section on Force and Understanding, the reflective-thematic awareness of this movement qua movement, prevents the complete assimilation of the ‘independent’ moment or dialectical pole, within consciousness (since another ‘outside’ must be necessarily posited). Thus, Hegel’s ‘absolute knowing’, cannot be straightforwardly understood as being yet another limited, reified form of consciousness. In contrast, it is the self-dissimulating character of enlightenment consciousness, or its unthematized, reified dialectical ‘one-sidedness’ that, for Hegel, constitutes the history of the Enlightenment as the history of the failure to reconcile its own moments of transcendence and immanence. Caught between its negative/abstractive and metaphysical impulses, enlightenment reason constantly moves back and forth. Every resistance it encounters becomes grist for its mill—every determinate theoretical formation is negated as mere belief in relation to the impossible criteria of absolute truth it sets for itself. In this process enlightened thought only does ‘violence to itself ’; its negativity annihilates not only  The authors acknowledge this distinction when they write:

91

Unlike rigourism, determinate negation does not simply reject imperfect representations of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea they are unable to match. Rather dialectic discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth. Language thereby becomes more than a mere system of signs. With the concepts of determinate negation Hegel gave prominence to an element which distinguishes enlightenment from the positivist decay to which he consigned it. However, by finally postulating the known result of the whole process of negation, totality in the system of history, as the absolute, he violated the prohibition and finally succumbed to mythology (Ibid. p. 18).

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its past formations, but its own positive content. In nihilistic self-contradiction enlightenment rationality gives voice to its own particular ‘crisis’. And if through its historical becoming, it wins for itself a certain retrospective recognition of that of which it has always been a symptom, and learns to live with it, then, we know, such recognition proves fragile; and its representation, whether at the epistemic-conceptual or social-institutional level, threatens to obliterate it once more. The inevitability of mediation, of representation, also implies the inevitability of reification. The process of reification that tends (once again) to collapse the distance between the ‘image’ and what it depicts, the sign and the signified—obliterating it from consciousness—cannot be seen apart from the establishment and continuance of domination, with its regimes of discipline and habituation in the division of labour constitutive of society. For the authors, reified representation and the operation of power through the division of labour, are two sides of the same coin. This process of habituation and submission has a long and violent history, going back to the pre-history of mankind. As they write, “How much violence preceded” even the simplest division of labour—hunting and gathering—in the first nomadic societies “is unknown”.92 The modality of domination, the exercise of power, in and through the division of labour, however, has undergone a process of abstraction, unification and specialization continuous with that of representation. Where the operation of power was diffused in the collective in early tribal, nomadic societies, such that its members could still directly practice the magical rituals that ‘defined the limits of their world’, and thereby, attempt to exert direct influence by setting up a specific equivalence through representation and impersonation of the spirit-world, subsequently “[…] the intercourse with spirits and the subjection were assigned to different classes of humanity: power on one side, obedience on the other”.93 For Horkheimer and Adorno, the “ontological” division of the world into the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ and the social division of labour into those with ‘privileged access’ and those who ‘obey’, mirror each other,

92 93

 Ibid. p. 15.  Ibid.

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engendered by the operation of power, which has its source in the reified and fetishized symbol—whether ‘material’ or human. When language first entered history, its masters were already priests and sorcerers. Anyone who affronted the symbols fell prey in the name of the unearthly powers to the earthly ones, represented by these appointed organs of society. […] Soon the sorcerers had populated every place with its emanations and coordinated the multiplicities of sacred realms with that of sacred rites. With the spirit-world and its peculiarities they extended their esoteric knowledge and power. The sacred essence was transferred to the sorcerers who managed it.94

When, with advancing abstraction, fixed, fetishized images give way to general concepts devoid of pictorial content, the latter do not cease to be fetishistic embodiments of power. Power now resides in the universal, and the individual encounters it as the “reason that informs reality”.95 The universal becomes the expression of the ‘social whole’ and individuals come to see themselves as part of the whole. The logic of the whole and its part, of the universal and its particular,96 exercises its power in the social division of labour (in the ‘instrumental reason’ governing production under capitalism, for instance). However, precisely because this abstract universality, the whole (the ‘nation’ is another such abstract ‘whole’), is abstract or devoid of content, it is necessarily ‘filled out’ through its specific representation, by particular groups that usurp it “[…]as a means of enforcing the[ir] particular interest”.97 Echoing the logic of hegemony that I discussed in relation to the debate between Butler, Laclau and Žižek, Horkheimer and Adorno underscore that it is always in the name of the many, of the abstract collective (for instance in the invocation of “the American people”) and the abstract universal (“the American way of life” or the “immutable” “laws of the market”) that

 Ibid.  Ibid. p. 16. 96  It is clear that here the particular as the particular “falling under” a universal cannot be understood merely extensionally, but intensionally, and therefore, is analogous to the part-whole relation. 97  Ibid. 94 95

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particular classes and their interests acquire hegemony and exercise their power. The invisibility of power (of the contingent nature of social ‘reality’, or the hegemony of ‘ideology’, in the language of Gramsci and Laclau)—its (self ) dissimulation as the universal—either in the mode of ‘bad faith’ or that of ‘false consciousness’ (in the sense in which, for instance, equivalence itself comes to be reified and fetishized in capitalist modernity, in its representation in the money commodity), is nothing but the ‘determinate negation’ by which the abstractive/negative movement of reason reconsolidates itself, and presents itself as ‘universal law’ that governs ‘objective reality’. For Adorno and Horkheimer, in keeping with the Hegelian (and Marxist) understanding, ‘determinate negation’ implies both the advance of abstraction through which the self-deception of consciousness in dialectical ‘one-sidedness’—in the reified immediacy and power of the fetishized image—is ‘overcome’ at one level, and its reconfiguration in a higher, more abstract level of representation. If the ‘Aufhebung’ constitutive of determinate negation signals the advance of enlightened thought over mythologizing consciousness, its regression to mythology lies in the “[…] self-satisfaction of knowing in advance, and the transfiguration of negativity into redemption […]”.98 For the authors, Hegel’s ‘absolute knowledge’ (or Marx’s classless society, at one with itself in transparent reflective self-coincidence) is no different in its form to the earlier modes of religious abstraction in Judaism or Buddhism (or Hinduism). In the proscription of any imagistic representation of ‘God’, in the “indiscriminate denial of anything positive”, the understanding of the world as ­nothingness, ‘maya’ etc., these religions place all their faith in the “denunciation of illusion”. Their hope for ‘salvation’ lies precisely in the knowledge of unbridgeable distance between the finite and the infinite. Such ‘knowledge’—the awareness of illusion, which in advance promises a path to salvation, transfiguring “negation into redemption”, is a false mode of resistance to deception, since it merely reconstitutes deception (the hope for salvation, for escape from the karmic cycle, for undifferentiated unity with Brahman etc.). As such it is a sublimated form of mythologizing consciousness. 98

 Ibid. p. 18.

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Unlike rigourism, determinate negation does not simply reject imperfect representations of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea they are unable to match. Rather dialectic discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth. Language thereby becomes more than a system of signs. With the concept of determinate negation Hegel gave prominence to an element which distinguishes the enlightenment from the positivist decay to which he consigned it. However, by finally postulating the known result of the whole process of negation, totality in the system and in history, as the absolute, he violated the prohibition, and himself succumbed to mythology.99

For the authors, the common element that reduces Hegel’s philosophy to enlightenment thought (and to the abstract religious forms continuous with it)—as yet another instance, perhaps the most nuanced, of the mythologizing consciousness of the Enlightenment, is his positing of an ultimate, explicitly self-conscious ‘determinate negation’, which encompasses in advance all dialectical possibilities, and therefore, all possible historical becoming in an ‘absolute knowing’. Thus, for the authors, ‘determinate negation’, which despite its own mythologized self-conception (as positivism), Hegel identifies with the very abstractive movement of enlightened reason, is ultimately ‘totalitarian’. Enlightenment itself is therefore ‘totalitarian’, since it involves the infinitization of thought through the process of abstraction, which manifests itself in the mathematization of nature. Adorno and Horkheimer, citing Husserl’s Crisis, stress that starting with Galileo, nature conceived along the lines of the ‘new mathematics’, becomes increasingly understood as an ideally closed infinity—a mathematical manifold. Within this closed infinity, the ‘unknown’ is merely the unknown value of a variable in a mathematical equation, and therefore, precisely what is known a priori in its ideal form. For, the latter circumscribes in advance, the types of value/entities that may be substituted for the variable.100 Nature qua  Ibid.  It is in his earlier work, Formal and Transcendental Logic, that Husserl elaborates in much greater detail, the inner continuity between logic and mathematics, and the manner in which it sets up a ‘formal ontology’ constitutive of the modern scientific conception of nature. Cf. E. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns, The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969. 99

100

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mathematical manifold, is no longer encountered piecemeal, through the empirical cognition of particular objects, and the knowledge of nature does not advance through accidental discoveries. Rather, the conception of nature as a mathematical manifold implies a ‘formal ontology’ (to use Husserl’s term in Formal and Transcendental Logic), such that any possible object of nature (“any object whatsoever”, and thus, the unified whole of nature itself ) is ‘given’ in advance through a “[…] systematically unified method, which finally apprehends each object—in an infinite progression—fully as its own in-itself […]”.101 The true intellectual source of the alienation inherent in enlightened modernity lies in the alienation of human consciousness from itself. And the source of this self-alienation may be traced to the emergence of this conception of nature as an infinitely open, but ideally closed, mathematical manifold that becomes indistinguishable from the systematic, a priori, unified method through which it is apprehended. The latter involves the evacuation of the human ‘subject’, in its various mediated modalities, from (formal) thought. The activity of thinking itself, is evacuated from thought—thinking ceases to be intrinsic to thought (or reason) and becomes understood, in positivistic fashion, as its secondary, ‘psychological’ instantiation. The disappearance of ‘thinking’ is accompanied by the disappearance of the social, political, and historical dimension of ‘meaning’ through which thinking is always mediated. “Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced.”102 Elaborating the sense of this most fundamental form of alienation, the authors write: The reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus condemns the world to be its own measure. What appears as the triumph of subjectivity, the subjection of all existing things to logical formalism, is bought with the obedient subordination of reason to what is immediately at hand. To grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatio-temporal relationships by which they can be seized, but on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical and human meaning—this whole aspi101 102

 Cf. Husserl, Crisis p. 22, quoted in, Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 19.  Horkheimer and Adorno, Ibid.

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ration of knowledge is abandoned. Knowledge does not consist in mere perception, classification, and calculation but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand. Instead of such negation, mathematical formalism, whose medium, number, is the most abstract form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy. […] Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape.103

In this judgment the authors bring to light the basic dialectic of enlightened reason, as it manifests itself in the intellectual history of modernity. This dialectic is both reflectively revealed, but at various points also (and perhaps inevitably), merely enacted in different manners, in the writings of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl and Heidegger. However, as I have discussed, these thinkers make explicit the ‘outside’ as the constitutive condition for the “closure” of reason (including dialectical reason), and not merely as its secondary realization or instantiation. This making explicit of the constitutive ‘outside’, or inherent non-closure of reason, whether in terms of the spontaneity (activity) of thinking itself, as constitutive of formal thought (‘ideal objectivity’ qua a priori possibility), as with Kant and Husserl, or through the emphasis on contingency, via ‘death’, ‘autopoiesis (of phusis)’, ‘materiality’ etc. as with Hegel, Marx and Heidegger, is what prevents enlightenment modernity from understanding itself as wholly ‘closed’, or self-contained, and brings to light the emancipatory potential it still contains. Thus, unlike Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s rather pessimistic assessment concerning the dialectic of the Enlightenment, and intertwined with it, the intellectual history of its unfolding, we find an openness or non-­ closure inherent in the negative moment of enlightenment reason. Correspondingly, we find that some of the ‘thinkers’ that I have discussed as representative of this history, cannot be said to succumb, in an uncritical sense, to the myth of ‘immediacy’ that constitutes the naïve, positivist self-conception of enlightenment reason, in its reified form. More precisely, against the charge of the reflective appropriation of infinite distance, difference etc. within the ideally closed, immanent sphere of reason (‘infinity’ qua ideal, a priori possibility), I have tried to show that  Ibid. p. 20.

103

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there is a necessary oscillation between absolute and relative difference, negativity etc. from within this immanent sphere. This implies that the ‘knowledge’ or awareness of illusion, does not, ‘in advance promise a path to salvation’, transfiguring “negation into redemption”; instead, the awareness of illusion is fragile, and under constant threat of being transformed into its reified representation. Thus, this awareness must be constantly ‘kept alive’, and renewed, from within the immanence of reason. In tracing the intellectual history of this dialectic, albeit in a very limited sense, my purpose has been not only to draw attention to the problematic of determinate negation and its reification in ‘immediacy’, but to prepare the ground for Adorno’s idea of a ‘negative dialectics’. Yet unlike Adorno, I do not conceive of negative dialectics as wholly opposed to the traditional dialectic based on determinate negation. This follows from my claim concerning the inevitability of mediation through representation, thus, determinacy and reification, owing to the temporal discursivity of thought and ‘action’ (labouring activity). As a result, what I have termed absolute difference, negativity etc. (as opposed to relative difference or negativity), can show itself only from within the immanent field. Thus, a ‘negative dialectics’, which consistently maintains itself in the moment of negativity, without reconfiguring it into the positivity of a determinate negation, is to be sought in the interstices of this ‘closed’ field (of concernful meaning, equivalent exchange etc.).

8.6 Negative Dialectics as the Problem of Maintaining ‘Determinacy Without Affirmation’: The Form/Content of Freedom in Noncoercive Identity/ Equality In the opening lines of the preface to Negative Dialectics, we find a clear and precise (though obviously programmatic) statement expressing the sense of the phrase.

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Negative dialectics is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of a “negation of a negation” later became the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy.104

The possibility of dialectical ‘determinacy without affirmation’—the crux of the problem—requires thinking anew, the conception of dialectics. Historically, the emergence of a dialectical understanding represents a certain maturing, a ‘fullness’ of enlightened thought, where philosophy, as its most direct expression, uncovers the logic of its own inner movement. For Adorno, with the miscarriage of the Hegelian dialectic, which represents the “[…] unsuccessful attempt to use philosophical concepts for coping with all that is heterogeneous to those concepts […]”,105 the task of an ‘accounting’ of dialectics assumes greater urgency. Such an ‘accounting’ amounts to asking after the very possibility of philosophy itself.106 The first step towards this rearticulation of dialectics consists in breaking with the overwhelming preponderance of identity and identification in thought. For Adorno, ‘dialectics’, in the first instance, is simply the recognition that “[…] objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder […]”107; that the ‘object’ comes to contradict the criterion of adequacy that the concept sets in advance for it. ‘Contradiction’ here does not amount to merely formal contradiction, rather the latter in turn stems from the heterogeneity at the heart of conceptual identification. Thus, ‘contradiction’, in its most fundamental (perhaps ‘material’) sense, indicates the “[…] untruth of identity, the fact that concepts do not exhaust the thing conceived”.108 This understanding of contradiction represents a dialectical ‘inversion’ of the primacy of identity.109  Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, New York, London: Continuum International Publishing Inc., 2003, p. XIX. 105  Ibid. p. 4. 106  Cf. Ibid. 107  Ibid. p. 5. 108  Ibid. 109  This basic idea, we saw, informs Ernesto Laclau’s work. 104

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However, Adorno emphasizes, the essence of all (conceptual) thought consists in identification. “To think is to identify.”110 Since there can be no recourse to an ‘absolute outside’ of conceptual thought—since “the trans-conceptual in-itself ” is wholly indefinite, (as Kant maintains in his defense of ‘limits’, and Hegel puts to use, in his critique of Kant, seemingly in an attempt to overcome and assimilate all conceptual ‘limits’ within thought), ‘semblance and truth’, ‘thought’ and ‘being’ become one, and conceptual thought sets up an immanent totality. At the same time, thought is also intrinsically aware (as Kant shows in the Antinomies), that this immanent conceptual totality is ‘appearance’, and thus points beyond its own (en)closure. However, since the conceptual totality is governed by logic, which is structured by logical non-contradiction—the ‘law of the excluded middle’—whatever does not conform to this principle, whatever is qualitatively distinct and cannot be positively conceptually determined or identified, comes across as contradictory. For Adorno, “Contradiction is non-identity under the aspect of identity”.111 To put dialectics on a ‘new footing’ then, or perhaps, to bring it back to its proper sense—the original insight determining its movement—is to bring to light the primacy of non-identity over identity. Moreover, if dialectics is nothing but this “consistent sense of non-identity”, then uncovering the primacy of this sense must not, in turn, presuppose an identical standpoint, rather, “[…] my thought is driven to it by its own inevitable insufficiency […]”.112 Yet, since it is always under the aspect of identity—the striving for unity and totality that structures our consciousness—that the non-identical, qualitatively heterogeneous makes itself felt, it is misrecognized as merely (logically) contradictory, instead of being seen as the productive source of all conceptual determinacy/unity. I have traced this misrecognition with respect to the ‘post-Marxist’ interpretation of Marx’s thought (in Laclau and Lefort), and suggested the possibility of a similar interpretation vis-à-vis the Hegelian dialectic. However, for Adorno, the Hegelian dialectic represents the standard ‘idealist dialectic’, which assimilates everything heterogeneous into the  Ibid.  Ibid. 112  Ibid. 110 111

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concept, and thus achieves reconciliation, precisely by retracing the logical path of such assimilations/reductions, as partial reconciliations. ‘Reconciliation’ permits ‘substantive’ thought, that is, thought with ‘content’ (in contrast to the empty cognitive forms of consciousness that are supposed to latch on to mind-independent reality), but only at the expense of reducing the world to thought. Consequently, it remains as ‘empty’ as the dualistic conception it replaces. On Adorno’s assessment; The fundament and result of Hegel’s substantive philosophizing was the primacy of the subject, or […] ‘the identity of identity and non-identity”. He held the definite particular to be definable by the mind because its immanent definition was to be nothing but the mind. Without this presupposition, according to Hegel, philosophy would be incapable of knowing anything substantive or essential. Unless the idealistically acquired concept of dialectics harbors experiences contrary to the Hegelian emphasis, experiences independent of the idealistic machinery, philosophy must inevitably do without substantive insight, confine itself to the methodology of science, call that philosophy, and virtually cross itself out [my italics].113

In contrast, ‘reconciliation’ for a negative, or ‘non-idealistic’ dialectics, amounts to making the non-identical explicit, releasing it from its subservience to the identical/universal/totality etc. of the traditional idealistic conception, such that differentiation, heterogeneity, multiplicity are no longer considered hindrances to rational thought, but its very ‘conditions of possibility’.114 For Adorno, both Bergson and Husserl are ultimately unsuccessful in their respective attempts to break out of idealism in order to restore ‘substance’ to thought. For both, the emphasis on the ‘immediately given’ to consciousness (qua intuition or the ‘pure intuition’ of essences) remains within immanent subjectivity and thus threatens to collapse into a ‘timeless metaphysical positivism’. The latter however, as Hegel had already shown with his analysis of the supposed ‘immediacy’ of the ‘here’ and ‘now’, is indistinguishable from abstract conceptual determination, insofar as ‘immediacy’, precisely at the moment of its concretion, reveals itself as conceptual through and through.  Ibid. p. 7.  Cf. Ibid. p. 6.

113 114

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Adorno’s critique highlights a fundamental paradox that repeatedly manifests itself in the history of thought; including his own—which Derrida later terms the ‘double bind’. Philosophy necessarily deals with concepts—yet, it simultaneously seeks to transcend the concept, hence itself, in the attempt to reach the non-conceptual. Is this also not the task that negative dialectics sets itself—that of ‘uttering the unutterable’, of ‘transcending the concept through the concept’; and thus, does it not exhibit the same naivety, the same uncritical disregard for its own ‘conditions of possibility’ that afflicts traditional metaphysics? Adorno himself raises this objection, and in response, maintains that the task of a critical philosophy is to not only make this paradox explicit but to ‘unravel’ it.115 Negative dialectics sets about unraveling the paradox by acknowledging its own ‘condition of possibility’ (namely, conceptuality—the condition of possibility of all philosophy), while recognizing that all concepts, however abstract, “mean beyond themselves”. To not fall into the naivety of (non-conceptual/non-idealistic or conceptual/idealistic) ‘immediacy’ would be “[…] to use concepts to unseal the non-conceptual with concepts, without making them their equal”.116 This is precisely what I have attempted to do in this study, though not in complete opposition to the modernist tradition of thought, but by finding a ‘negative dialectic’, in its ‘interstices’ (or as its differential ‘limit’). At the same time, however, the very inescapability of conceptual thought that I have repeatedly underscored in different contexts of modernist discourse, casts doubt on the possibility of this undertaking, and for Adorno, inevitably “anticipates an idealistic decision”, in a ‘Hegelian fashion’. Yet, I have also shown how it is concepts themselves that provide the possibility of breaking with their reified and fetishized immediacy—a movement that Adorno recognizes when he writes, “[…] in truth all concepts, even the philosophical ones, refer to non-conceptualities, for concepts on their part are moment of the reality that requires their formation […]”.117 If, with certain philosophical concepts such as ‘Being’ (for Hegel and Heidegger), this “meaning beyond themselves”, the “dissatisfaction with  Cf. Ibid. p.9.  Ibid. p. 10. 117  Ibid. p. 11 115 116

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their own conceptuality” is intrinsic to their meaning, then the nature of the ‘double bind’ sets up the possibility of its own ‘unraveling’. What a negative dialectics aims at then, is not the disenchantment of nature, which was accomplished by an eventually naïve dialectics of Enlightenment, but the ‘disenchantment of the reified and fetishized concept,’118 which replaces ‘nature’ as the ‘original’ source of meaning (for instance, as mathematics). As Adorno writes: A philosophy that […] extinguishes the autarky of concepts, strips the blindfold from our eyes. That the concept is a concept, even when dealing with things in being, does not change the fact that on its part, it is entwined with a non-conceptual whole. Its only insulation from the whole is its reification—that which establishes it as a concept. The concept is an element of dialectical logic, like any other. What survives in it is the fact that non-­ conceptuality has conveyed it by way of its meaning, which in turn establishes its conceptuality. To refer to non-conceptualities […] is characteristic of the concept, and so is the contrary: that as the abstract unit of the noumena subsumed there-under it will depart from the noumenal. To change the direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn towards non-identity is the hinge of negative dialectics. Insight into the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept would end the compulsive identification which the concept brings […]. Reflection upon its own meaning is the way out of the concept’s seeming being-in-itself as a unit of meaning (my italics).119

Thus, ‘negative dialectics’, is simply this modality of (self )reflection already implicit in conceptual meaning and identity that, in and through such self-reflection, recognizes and indicates its non-conceptual ‘conditions of possibility’, meant in it. In this way, negative dialectics reorients the movement of conceptuality, from “identity to non-identity”. This is of course, also the aim that animated Kant’s transcendental turn. However, for Adorno, what differentiates the reorientation towards non-­ identity, non-conceptuality via a negative dialectics, is that unlike Kant’s transcendental philosophy, it does not imply a return to what Adorno calls ‘peephole metaphysics’. The latter, according to Adorno, is  Ibid.  Ibid. p. 12.

118 119

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characteristic of the Western metaphysical tradition in general.120 Once ‘immediacy’ in the naïve sense, that is, naïve realism, gives way to the critical-reflective insight—in more and more nuanced forms—concerning the mediated modes of givenness of the “real” (from empiricism to subjective idealism, to ‘objective’ idealism), the non-conceptual to which the concept necessarily refers as part of its ‘sense’, is transformed into the wholly abstract ‘something’. This noumenally posited ‘something’, the ‘transcendental object X’ for Kant, is the “cogitatively indispensable substrate of any concept”, that is, the ‘place marker’ for what is irreducible to thinking, “[…] an abstraction not to be abolished by any further thought process”,121 but without which no determinate thought, even in its formal determination in modern logic, would be possible.122 Thus, unlike the metaphysical tradition, and even the critical metaphysical tradition inaugurated by Kant, once dialectics in this negative sense, as the irreducible, although intrinsic, relation between conceptuality and non-conceptuality, is recognized as inescapable, it cannot maintain the negative ‘ontological’ or ‘transcendental’ moment as an invariant structure. As Adorno puts it: In criticizing ontology, we do not aim at another ontology, not even at one of being non-ontological. If that were our purpose, we would be merely positing another downright “first”—not absolute identity this time, not the concept, not being, but non-identity, facticity, entity. We would be hypostatizing the concept of non-conceptuality and thus acting counter to its meaning.123

 Cf. pp.138–140.  Ibid. p. 135. 122  The necessity of this ‘noumenal’ positing is detectable, in a transfigured sense, in the central insight of Husserl’s phenomenology—the intentional directedness of consciousness towards an ‘object’. It is the intentionality of consciousness—its intrinsic relation to an ‘object’ insofar as the object is for consciousness that prevents Husserl from falling into the paradox of the self-­membership of a set (Russell’s paradox) to which Frege succumbed owing to his attempt to maintain a strict demarcation between, ‘sense’ and ‘reference’ (or intension and extension), in order to prevent “anything intuitive from entering” into logic. And yet, the problematic status of the noumenal in Kant is reflected in Husserl’s own attempts to clarify the notion of ‘object’ through the various senses of ‘noema’. 123  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 2003, p. 136. 120 121

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It is in the phrase “concept of non-conceptuality” that the double bind that is intrinsic to negative dialectics is manifest. And for Adorno, it is the non-recognition of the inevitability of this oscillatory movement, due to the ‘non-conceptual’ being always already mediated through conceptuality, without thereby being reducible or assimilated to it that leaves a metaphysical residue, even in the most ‘critical’ philosophies within the tradition, characterized by what he calls ‘peephole metaphysics’.124 The critical-reflective recognition, within the modernist tradition, of the inescapability of conceptual mediation results in the presumed primacy of the ‘subject’ (including, with Kant’s critical transcendental turn, the transcendental ‘subject’/consciousness). For Adorno, this primacy imprisons the subject within itself and reduced the objective world to nothing but the subject’s ‘shadow’—its own reified self-formation. The latter realization would again compel a ‘subjective philosophy’ to fight its own modes of reification in a relentless dialectical performance. Yet, as Adorno puts it, “There is no peeping out”. Once the primacy of the subject, as that which is ‘first’ and is immediately given in reflective self-coincidence, is abandoned, the insight that the objective domain is necessarily mediated by the subjective one, entails that the claim that in and through such mediation we nonetheless somehow catch a glimpse of the ‘in-itself ’, must also be abandoned. What would lie ‘beyond’, makes its appearance only in the materials and categories ‘within’ the field of meaning.125  A critical philosophy, such as Kant’s, which is at pains to underscore the conceptually constituted mediated givenness of the “objective” realm in effect ends up (despite maintaining the distinction between concept and existent thing, sensation and form etc., thus, underscoring the finitude of thought, its restriction to possible experience), asserting the primacy of the subject. It maintains this primacy in a way where both the subject and the object are emptied of content, impoverished to their bare abstract function (concept), as the pure ‘something’ (transcendental object X) or the transcendental unity of apperception, which therefore tend towards coincidence, as each “becomes a moment of its own opposite” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 139) (and both may be understood as modes of the transcendental unity of time and space, which the subject synthesizes). This tendency is then carried to its ‘logical’ conclusion in post-Kantian idealistic philosophy, which contends that Kant did not go far enough. 125  For Adorno, this is where the ‘truth and the untruth of the Kantian philosophy divide’. ‘It is true in destroying the illusion of an immediate knowledge of the Absolute; it is untrue in describing this Absolute by a model that would correspond to an immediate consciousness, even if that consciousness were an intellectus archetypus. To demonstrate this untruth is the truth of post-Kantian idealism; yet this, in turn, is untrue in its equation of subjectively mediated truth with the subject-in-itself—as if the pure concept of the subject were the same as Being’ (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 140). 124

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However, given the “double bind” inherent in all thinking, what constitutes the ‘negativity’ of a dialectical understanding? In the first instance, for Adorno, negative dialectics “reflects its own motion”126 qua motion, that is, it remains in the dialectical movement of immanence and transcendence without reconciling it in a totalizing subjectivity (absolute spirit), like Hegelian dialectics. “Its logic is one of disintegration”127 of all identities, including the ‘identity of identity and non-identity’. Yet, the inescapability of the double bind inevitably tends to transform the contradiction sensed in the identical concept and what is heterogeneous to it, to a contradiction immanent to thought itself (opening up the possibility of its ‘reconciliation’ in ‘Hegelian fashion’, qua “identity of identity and non-identity”). The “reciprocal criticism of the universal and particular”—the particular as a determinate concept and the concept as a determinate particular, therefore, becomes “[…] the medium of thinking about the non-identity of the particular and the concept”.128 This irreducibility, and indeed, necessity, of identity/conceptuality through which even non-identity/non-conceptuality is assimilated, entails that the critique of identity that a negative dialectics aims at, cannot simply end up reiterating the qualitatively non-identical or the non-­ conceptual, in mere opposition to the identical/conceptual. Adorno, in keeping with Marx’s insights, emphasizes that the abstraction from all qualitative, concrete labour, leading to the recognition of the equivalence of all kinds of labour in the universal exchange of commodities, either through direct or indirect barter, seems to mark a step towards (human) ‘equality’, at least on the ‘surface’, insofar as “it imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical […]”. Such ‘equality’, grounded in equivalent exchange is however, mere appearance, since it dissimulates its own ‘condition of possibility’—the non-identity, non-equivalence that makes equivalent exchange possible. Yet, the crucial point Adorno makes here, (and one that I have also been stressing in the discussion of Marx) is that the all-encompassing (totalizing) tendency towards abstraction, thus, ‘identity’, or ‘equality’ cannot, in turn, be denied in an abstract  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 2003, p. 141.  Ibid. p. 145. 128  Ibid. p. 146. 126 127

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manner, by positing the irreducibly qualitative, concrete etc. as its polar opposite. For to do so, would be, in principle, indistinguishable from pre-modern hierarchical, and deeply unequal, unjust social order. […] it is through barter that non-identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical. The spread of the principle imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total. But if we denied the principle abstractly—if we proclaimed, to the greater glory of the irreducibly qualitative, that parity should no longer be the ideal rule—we would be creating excuses for recidivism into ancient injustice.129

The ancient order was constituted precisely in a manner where the inequality of exchange—the appropriation of the surplus-value generated by labour, was directly social (as opposed to being mediated through the exchange of commodities) and thus, explicitly normalized—through various coercive methods and institutions (such as slavery and serfdom), which were usually justified (through its ‘normalization’ and ‘naturalization’) in the name of a transcendent order. The critique of ‘identity’ qua equivalent exchange under capitalism therefore, does not aim at abolishing that equivalence as a ‘matter of fact’. For, not only is form/identity inescapable in principle, but a return to earlier ‘forms’ of non-equivalence/non-identity would reinstate the injustice inherent in those earlier societies. Rather, as Adorno asserts, it aims at making the “inequality within equality” visible, and thus, “aims at equality too”. When we criticize the barter principle as the identifying principle of thought, we want to realize the ideal of free and just barter. To date, this ideal is only a pretext. Its realization alone would transcend barter. Once critical theory has shown it up for what it is—an exchange of things that are equal yet unequal—our critique of inequality within equality aims at equality too […]. If no man had part of his labour withheld from him anymore rational identity would be a fact, and society would have transcended the identifying mode of thinking.130  Ibid. p. 146.  Ibid. p. 147.

129 130

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I have already discussed, in greater detail than Adorno provides here, Marx’s position concerning the main contours of a post-capitalist, socialist society based on collective ownership of the means of production. More precisely, I have discussed the difference between the manner in which “part of his labour […] is withheld” from the worker under capitalist relations of production (which is what Adorno has in mind here), and under socialist relations of production. Yet, the basic principle of negative dialectics, including the “double bind” inherent in it, that Adorno indicates, holds for post-capitalist society. The difference, in relation to capitalism, as I have underscored, lies in reflective thematization of this necessary intertwinement and movement between identity and non-identity. In other words, ‘inequality’/non-identity becomes discernible only from within the seeming ‘totality’/‘closure’ of ‘equality’, of equivalent exchange; and yet, the critique that uncovers ‘inequality within equality’ also ‘aims at equality’—in the sense that the recognition of inequality cannot remain in the negative moment of critique, but must take the ‘positive form’ of the realization of equality as a “matter of fact”. This, Adorno writes, “comes close enough to Hegel”, and seems to open itself to all the dangers of a coercive totalitarianism that became the fate of state communism in various countries. The difference with respect to Hegel lies in the direction of ‘intent’ of negative dialectics. The latter does not, theoretically or in practice, maintain the primacy of identity— claim that identity is ‘ultimate’ or ‘absolute’ in a final reconciliation (of identity and difference, universality and particularity etc.) that constitutes the telos of the dialectical unfolding of reason. Rather, for negative dialectics, “[…] identity is the universal coercive mechanism, which we, too, finally need, to free ourselves from universal coercion, just as freedom can come to be real only through coercive civilization, not by way of any “Back to nature””.131 In this study my endeavor also has been to open up the space of non-­ identity within identity, in order to (re)imagine a different world, a world where freedom (in noncoercive identity/equality) becomes a “matter of fact”.

131

 Ibid.

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Index1

A

Accumulation capitalist, 296, 444 primary, 71, 295, 296 primitive, 17, 37, 71, 72, 291, 295–297, 307, 308, 365, 393, 435, 444, 459, 463 Actant-network theory, 100n12, 116, 117 Adorno, Theodor W., 21n32, 28, 35, 48, 100, 103n16, 123, 126, 142, 145, 178, 284, 367, 368n9, 456, 469, 478–480, 482, 483, 485, 487–490, 492–503, 500n125 Alētheia, 100, 119, 249, 253, 254, 261

Alienation ecological, 458, 459 socio-economic, 458 thesis, 100, 100n12 Amin, Samir, 8 Anderson, Benedict, 2, 3, 3n2, 3n5, 5, 8, 10, 27, 31–34, 48–68, 59n47, 63n56, 70, 72–77, 79, 87, 88, 197 Anthropocene, 268, 360 Anthropocentric, 55, 105, 110, 111, 132, 133, 137, 140, 203, 205, 206, 246, 252, 268, 269, 269n142, 461, 463, 464, 469 Anthropocentrism, 110n25, 141, 142, 269

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Patnaik, Modernity and its Futures Past, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32107-8

511

512 Index

Apperception analytic unity of, 173, 371 synthetic unity of, 173, 370, 371 A priori, 115, 154, 169–171, 173–175, 174n40, 175n41, 177n45, 185, 208–210, 214, 215, 218, 219, 231, 232, 239, 264, 371n17, 490–492 Augustine, St., 181 Authenticity, 122n42, 216, 219n23, 220, 224, 227, 228, 230, 234, 243, 267 Ayer, A. J., 235, 235n70 B

Becoming dialectical-structural movement of, 69 historical, 10, 11, 23, 68, 115, 119, 123, 124, 128, 142, 153, 178, 186, 191–194, 198n71, 201, 202, 283–308, 329, 363, 487, 490 temporal, 193, 194 Being, 6, 32, 94, 148, 206, 282, 359, 438 in the world, 120n40, 121, 122, 208, 210, 213, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222, 225, 227, 233, 236, 240, 266, 282, 472 Bentham, Jeremy, 110n25, 471, 477 Bergson, Henri-Louis, 496

Bernstein, Jay, 456, 474–477 Bilgrami, Akeel, 34, 91, 93–98, 101, 103–109, 111, 111n26, 112, 114, 116, 119, 121, 123–131, 127n45, 134–136, 138–140, 147, 149, 179, 251, 397, 413, 449, 454 Biocentrism, 269, 282 Boltanski, Luc, 21–23, 21n30, 21n31, 23n33 Burkett, Paul, 360 Butler, Judith, 7, 35, 48, 126, 142, 361, 361n2, 384, 386, 387, 394, 395, 398, 412, 416, 418, 426, 427, 429, 430, 488 C

Capital deterritorializing tendency of, 7 globalization of, 4, 18n27 supra-national tendency of, 5 Capitalism fascism, 10 global, 6, 382, 392, 424n124 globalized, 4, 4n6, 8–10, 14, 24, 42, 299, 393, 425 industrial, 71, 108, 290, 296 link with xenophobic nationalism, 10 neo-liberal, 10, 14, 16, 17, 362, 425 welfare, 4, 16 Carson, Rachel, 133 Causality

 Index 

ancient conception of, 253 final, 252 formal, 252 modern conception of, 252, 253 teleological, 252 telic, 253 Cause efficient, 252 material, 252 Chandrashekhar, C. P., 448 Chatterjee, Partha, 34, 49, 64, 65, 68, 73, 75–82, 86, 88, 89, 93, 97, 197 Chiapello, Eve, 21–23, 21n30, 21n31, 23n33 Colonialism, 33, 49, 66, 68, 70–72, 79, 291, 293, 294, 296–298, 300, 307, 308, 320, 322, 365, 416, 426, 459, 463, 476 Commodity fetishism, 138, 300, 330, 333, 339–350, 366, 418n109, 435, 437, 438, 443 Commons, 27, 50, 67, 72, 94, 99n11, 102, 103, 106–110, 107n17, 122–124, 126, 135, 144, 154, 157, 171, 193, 266, 270, 285, 288, 293, 299n27, 303, 308, 314, 315, 323, 324, 329, 335, 340n131, 351, 356, 370, 383, 385, 438–440, 446, 451, 459, 461, 463, 480, 483n85, 490 Communism, 40n14, 107, 503 Community cultural-linguistic, 45, 46, 50

513

harmonious, 89 human, 90, 125 imagined, 3, 27, 33, 48–76, 399 modern, 91 political, 49, 76 pre-modern, 3, 32, 90, 93, 97, 307 religious, 54, 55, 57, 58, 81, 401 sacred, 57, 58, 60 traditional, 34, 51 Comparative advantage, 12, 13 Condition of possibility, 8, 120, 120n40, 122, 125, 212, 223, 239, 242, 251, 390, 396, 415, 497, 501 Consciousness bourgeoisie, 300, 362, 365, 366, 377, 379, 380 class, 360, 362–384 empirical, 381 false, 48, 300, 357, 361, 377, 378, 381, 384, 489 first-person, 207 historical, 86, 363 historical becoming of, 155 historicity of, 144 human, 52, 360, 378, 491 intentional structures of, 198 modernist, 480 mythological, 481 nationalist, 31–35, 44, 45, 49, 50, 59, 67–70, 72, 75, 76, 78, 82, 85, 87–89, 123, 197 negative movement of, 156, 161 perceptual, 155, 157–159 pre-modern, 480 processive, 176 proletarian class, 360, 362–384

514 Index

Consciousness (cont.) psychological modes of, 381 rational, 173 religious, 53, 58, 90, 103n16, 132, 179n46, 181, 367, 475 self-, 84, 103, 143, 155, 378–381, 383 social, 286, 287 structural self-consciousness, 143 techno-scientifically mediated, 99 transcendental, 173 unhappy, 82 universal, 366 universal political, 363 universal proletarian, 363, 366 Critical Theory, 101, 102, 123, 144n64, 256n117, 395, 502 D

Dasein, 120n40, 121, 122, 207–234, 236, 237, 241–248, 266–268, 269n142, 270, 275, 472 Deep ecology, 133, 269n142 movement, 101, 106 Descartes, René, 181, 181n48, 190, 192, 239 Determinism, 113, 382, 463 historical, 113, 126, 127n45, 143, 258 Dialectic dialectical conception, 28, 47, 49, 81, 125, 283, 287, 378, 396 dialectical logic of contradictions, 20 dialectical movement, 19, 25, 38, 48, 69, 85, 148n1, 149,

156, 167, 190, 283, 320, 350, 368n9, 374, 376, 378, 382, 383, 388, 427, 462, 501 dialectical one-sidedness, 6, 26, 55, 190, 288, 320n81, 355, 364, 367, 378, 484, 486, 489 dialectical sense, 21n32, 22, 41, 129, 142 dialectical understanding, 34, 45, 317, 494, 501 of enlightenment, 368n9, 479, 483n85, 492, 498 historical, 98, 190, 201 Kant’s transcendental, 23, 123, 129n48, 148, 498 master-slave, 41, 82, 152n4, 380, 419n114, 428 movement of becoming, 69 negative, 28, 35, 48, 70, 75, 123, 284, 386, 406, 433–503 structural, 34, 190 tension with concept of hegemony, 19 Dialectical conception of nationalism, 49 movement, 19, 25, 38, 69, 85, 148n1, 149, 156, 167, 190, 283, 320, 350, 368n9, 374, 376, 378, 382, 383, 388, 427, 462, 501 movement of reason, 149, 150, 486 negative movement, 48 perspective, 320 Disenchantment, 59, 89, 93–145, 256n117, 281, 455, 456, 480, 498

 Index 

Division of labour, 36–38, 41–43, 290, 328, 336, 336n121, 342, 369, 374, 375, 449, 487, 488 Dodd, James, 194, 199 Dordi, Dadabhoy Naoroji, 79 E

East India Company, 62, 66, 68, 294 Ellul, Jacques, 100, 117 Empire, 4–6, 10, 14, 61–63, 323, 392, 393 dynastic, 62 Enframing technological, 260, 265, 269 techno-scientific, 121, 258 Engels, Friedrich, 40n14, 95, 299n27, 355n169, 461–463 English revolution, 66, 461 Enlightenment, 53–55, 74, 76, 88–90, 96, 97, 101, 105, 113, 114, 121, 132, 169, 179, 246, 359, 368n9, 386, 398, 399, 426, 479, 480, 483n85, 484–487, 486n91, 490, 492, 498 reified conception of, 55, 89, 293 Epoché, 137, 138, 171, 174n40, 177, 182, 192 methodological, 138, 192 Essence, 32n2, 58, 100, 100n12, 110n25, 118–120, 120n40, 122, 124, 144, 157, 158, 162, 164–166, 187, 197, 203, 205, 209, 222, 238, 242, 247, 248, 250–252,

515

254–261, 267, 271, 274–276, 370, 453, 473, 481, 482, 488, 495, 496 of technology, 100, 100n12, 118–120, 120n40, 122, 124, 144, 203, 205, 250–252, 254–258, 260, 267, 274 Essentialism, 300n29, 395, 403, 405, 406, 421 structural, 414 Eurocentrism, 196–198 Existence authentic, 120n40, 216–220, 224, 227, 228, 230 imagined, 3 inauthentic, 211, 216, 217, 219, 224, 226–228, 242 territorial, 3 Extraction of surplus, 70, 296, 393 F

Factical, 224–226, 230 Facticity, 211, 215, 225, 233, 499 Factuality, 211 Fanon, Frantz, 69, 69n60 Finance capital, 4, 9, 17n26, 18, 19, 25, 285, 392, 393 and globalization, 10 Foltz, Bruce V., 275 Foster, John Bellamy, 360, 456–462 Fraser, Nancy, 85n84, 459 Freedom genuine, 83 objective, 83 rational, 185–187

516 Index G

Galilei, Galileo, 131, 190, 192, 490 Geist, 39 Gellner, Ernest, 31–34, 32n2, 36–51, 55, 60, 79 Globalization, 1, 4, 10, 18n27, 392, 421 Gramsci, Antonio, 77n76, 128n46, 365, 390, 391, 489 Gramscian, 8, 128n46, 414 H

Habib, Irfan, 70–73, 77, 89, 294–296, 323, 325–328 Hardt, Micheal, 2, 4–6, 8, 10, 14–16, 34, 392, 425 Harvey, David, 14, 14n23 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 11, 28, 32, 36, 41, 60, 81–85, 82n83, 87, 87n85, 97, 101, 142, 144, 145, 148n1, 150–162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 171, 178, 181, 190, 191, 203, 243–245, 263, 323, 324, 380, 395, 401, 417, 419n114, 424, 426–429, 446, 456, 485, 486, 486n91, 489, 490, 492, 495–497, 503 Hegelian, 32, 34, 84, 90, 123, 128, 129n48, 143, 145, 147, 152n4, 154, 191, 201, 244, 245, 283, 323, 349n157, 378, 395, 398, 401, 417, 489, 494, 495, 497, 501 Hegemony, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13n20, 18–20, 19n28, 22–26, 33,

49, 57, 77n76, 94, 96, 113–116, 121, 124, 126, 127n45, 298, 299, 307, 361n2, 364, 365, 385–431, 488, 489 democracy, 25 Heidegger, Martin, 28, 99–103, 100n12, 117–126, 120n40, 122n42, 128, 140n61, 144, 144n63, 145, 147, 183, 184, 191, 201, 203, 205–278, 282, 456, 471, 472, 479, 482, 483, 492, 497 Hermeneutic, 219 Hill, Christopher, 66 Historical becoming, 10, 11, 23, 68, 115, 123, 124, 128, 142, 153, 155, 178, 182, 186, 191–194, 198n71, 201, 202, 283–308, 300n29, 329, 363, 487, 490 materialism, 382, 463 Historicity of reason, 187, 191, 202 of thought, 168, 178 History in the empirical sense, 334 evolutionary, 285–308, 321–329 repetitive, 285–308, 322, 329 Hobsbawm, Eric, 3 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 260, 264, 270, 271, 282 Hudis, Peter, 434, 436, 440–442, 446, 447, 447n23 Hussain, Iqbal, 294 Husserl, Edmund, 28, 91, 131, 132n52, 133, 137, 138,

 Index 

144, 145, 167–179, 179n46, 181–187, 181n48, 186n57, 190–203, 236, 237, 243, 268, 277, 382, 430, 456, 479, 480, 490–492, 490n100, 496, 499n122 I

Identity cultural, 27, 45, 78, 126, 291n9 cultural-linguistic, 46 ethnic, 3, 126 historical, 126, 291n9 hybrid, 10, 15 linguistic, 45 modern, 3 national, 80 religious, 3, 27, 126 Ihde, Don, 100n12, 117n35, 148 Imperialism neo-imperialism, 10, 19, 393 territorial, 393 traditional, 10, 12 Inauthenticity, 216, 218, 219, 225, 227, 228 Income deflation, 13, 14, 19, 355n169 Industrialization, 15, 32n2, 33n4, 39, 45, 49, 51 Industrial society, 31, 32n2, 33, 36–43, 46–48, 79, 112, 123 Intentionality, 137, 138, 138n59, 170, 175n42, 193, 249, 499n122 Internationalism, 4, 35, 456

517

J

Jaspers, Karl, 100, 117 K

Kant, Immanuel, 23, 87, 87n85, 123, 129n48, 133, 135n55, 144, 145, 148–156, 163n28, 167–178, 181, 184–186, 186n57, 188, 190, 192, 203, 219n23, 245, 284n1, 369–371, 374, 381, 398, 409, 414, 415, 427n130, 474, 474n68, 477, 492, 495, 498–500, 499n122, 500n124 Transcendental Dialectic, 23, 129n48, 148, 284n1 Kedourie, Elie, 44 Keynesian, 4, 16 Kuhn, Thomas, 96 L

Labour-power, 302, 314, 330, 333n111, 335, 337, 338, 350–353, 350n160, 352n164, 354–355n169, 368, 374, 419, 423, 435, 437, 438, 441, 442, 444, 445, 450, 458, 459 Labour theory of value, 330, 350, 354 Lacan, Jacques, 356, 383n46 Laclau, Ernesto, 21n32, 25, 48, 77n76, 126, 128n46, 142, 361, 361n2, 364–366, 368, 384, 386–397, 389n54, 400–402, 405–410,

518 Index

412–425, 429, 488, 489, 494n109, 495 Latour, Bruno, 100n12, 116, 117, 148 Lefort, Claude, 27, 38, 44, 90, 128n46, 142, 283, 288, 289, 291, 293, 296–298, 300–305, 307–309, 312–321, 320n81, 323, 324, 329, 333, 336, 359, 364, 376, 388, 393, 396, 397, 399, 400, 402, 421, 495 Lukács, György, 21n32, 143, 361, 361n2, 362, 364–384, 403, 421n119, 423, 440 M

Macaulayism, 62, 72 Magdoff, Harry, 12n16 Marcuse, Herbert, 100 Marxist ideas, 3, 129n48, 278, 360 movements, 3, 376 revolutionary struggle, 3 Marx, Karl, 11, 21–23, 28, 32, 34, 37, 38, 40n14, 71, 72, 82, 84, 87, 91, 94–96, 98–104, 117, 123, 127–130, 128n46, 129n48, 137, 139, 142, 143, 178, 201, 283–286, 288–321, 289n5, 294n17, 320n81, 323–332, 328n105, 333n110, 334, 335, 336n119, 337, 339n130, 340, 340n131, 341, 341n135, 344n143, 347–357, 348n154,

349n158, 359, 360, 364, 365, 367, 368, 370, 375, 383n46, 387, 389–392, 395, 402, 411, 417, 417n109, 419–425, 434–441, 440n11, 441n12, 443, 444, 444n18, 446–448, 447n23, 450–453, 456–459, 461–464, 468, 469, 478–480, 492, 501 Marxism, 20, 54, 320n81, 391, 402, 403, 405 Marxist, 3, 20–23, 21n31, 32, 107, 129n48, 144n64, 201, 256n117, 320n81, 360, 361, 361n2, 363, 364, 376, 384, 387, 395, 401–403, 405, 413, 414, 421, 422, 440, 489 Maurer, George Ludwig von, 325 Measure of value, 329, 341, 341n136 Metabolic rift, 360, 361, 446, 457–460, 463, 469 Metabolism social, 457, 458, 460, 462, 463 universal, 458, 460, 463, 464 Metaphysics of presence, 28, 35, 125, 127n45, 129n48, 249, 264, 288, 383, 384, 391, 405, 410, 421 Modality of community, 308 intentional, 138n59, 381, 383 Mode of production capitalist, 32, 100n12, 228, 256n117, 285, 292, 296,

 Index 

304, 306, 331, 354, 446, 457, 458, 463 communal, 315 Mode of revealing, 118–122, 124, 184, 247, 251, 254–261, 256n117, 268 Modernity alternative, 29, 34, 79, 88–91, 94, 101, 103–105, 107, 113, 116, 121, 127n45, 128, 130, 269, 283 capitalist, 2, 6, 32–34, 37, 38, 47, 79, 80, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 107, 109, 114, 121, 124, 127, 128, 130, 284, 301, 313, 314, 369, 383, 489 coexistence with pre-modern forms, 32 colonial, 78, 81, 94, 102, 127, 197 contemporary, 2, 5, 29, 105, 249 disenchanted, 28, 113, 131 enlightenment, 2, 27, 32, 52, 89–91, 101, 103n16, 113, 119, 121–124, 141, 142, 169, 177, 179, 197, 199, 266, 267, 293, 385, 399, 478–480, 492 liberal, 95, 96, 112 non-reified conception of, 2, 29 reified conception of, 6, 89, 123, 293 reified hegemonic form of, 105, 115 scientific, 101, 183, 482 techno-scientific, 94, 99, 100, 105, 109, 113, 121, 144,

519

203, 205, 206, 211, 212, 250, 269 unalienated, 28, 34, 93–145, 169, 205 Modular conception, 65, 70, 78, 81 conception of nationalism, 70 explanation, 67 form, 34, 49, 69, 70, 76, 77 Modularity model, 61, 65, 87 static conception of, 73, 87 thesis, 49, 64, 65, 75, 77, 197 Mouffe, Chantal, 21n32, 394, 402, 425 Multiculturalism, 55 anthropological, 55 N

Næss, Arne, 133 Nationalist consciousness, 31–35, 44, 45, 49, 50, 59, 67–70, 72, 75, 76, 78, 82, 85, 87–89, 123, 197 rhetoric, 18 Nation/nationalism anti-colonial, 49, 77, 78 dynastic, 61, 63, 66, 67 European, 49, 64, 195, 293 modular form, 49 neo-liberal, 4, 18, 360 official, 61–64, 74 popular, 38, 61, 139 post-colonial, 15, 49, 76 trans-national, 56 xenophobic, 1, 7, 10, 17, 27, 35, 299, 360, 400, 406

520 Index

Nation-state as facilitator of globalized capitalism, 8 link between capitalist modernity and rise of, 33 Naturalistic fallacy, 453, 465, 473 Negation determinate, 38, 44, 48, 53, 81, 101, 103, 125, 142, 152n4, 156, 159, 161, 245, 307, 339, 351, 367, 393, 397, 399, 400, 417, 446, 478–493 indeterminate, 478 Negative dialectic, 28, 35, 48, 70, 75, 123, 284, 386, 406, 433–503 ethical movement, 477 movement, 28, 48, 101, 125, 150, 156, 161, 166, 167, 236, 269n142, 359, 474, 478, 484, 489 movement of thought, 101, 122, 125, 147, 150, 154, 167, 168, 191, 202, 203, 398, 464, 481, 485 nothingness, 248 unity, 311, 312 universality, 27, 477 Negativity absolute, 145, 172, 177, 178, 185, 215, 223–225, 266, 278, 282 of consciousness, 82n83, 142, 156, 161, 167, 172, 489 empty, 25, 82n83, 161, 162 ontological conception of, 223 relative, 144, 215, 217, 266, 282 structural movement of, 145

of thought, 150, 167–169, 177, 184, 185, 203, 478 Negri, Antonio, 2, 4–6, 8, 10, 14–16, 34, 392, 425 Nelson, Eric, 197 Neo-liberalism neo-liberal capitalism, 14, 16, 17, 425 neo-liberal economic policies, 4, 4n6, 6, 8, 9, 12, 18 Nihilism modern technological, 259 relative, 247, 250, 251, 255 techno-scientific, 247, 248, 250, 255, 259 Nihilitive behavior, 243 experience, 241 O

Objectivity transcendent, 138, 188 transcendental, 138 transcendental-ideal, 169 Ontology desacralized, 114 dualist, 123 factual, 474n68 formal, 177n45, 490n100, 491 moral, 20n29, 133, 134, 135n55, 456, 472, 473, 474n68, 478 natural, 86, 456 value-neutral, 473 P

Pal, Bipin Chandra, 62 Parochialism, 1, 26, 86, 399

 Index 

Patnaik, Prabhat, 12n16 Patnaik, Utsa, 12n16 Phenomenological, 28, 94, 96, 97, 102, 103, 116, 120n40, 133, 137, 147, 173, 174n40, 185, 191, 198, 277 transcendental, 117 Poiesis, 252n109, 253, 254, 258, 261, 264–266, 270, 271, 482 Post-modernism, 406 Praxis, 2, 20, 120n40, 363, 382–384 political, 21, 382, 383, 408, 415 Presence at hand, 209–212, 214, 215, 217, 220–224, 229, 233 Presencing, 248, 252–254, 260, 269 Primitive accumulation of capital, 71, 291, 307, 459 Proletariat, 10, 15, 28, 41, 84, 129, 292, 300, 300n29, 359, 362, 366, 375, 377, 378, 380–383, 387–389, 391, 403, 408, 421, 422, 425, 431, 461, 463 R

Rational autonomy, 135n55, 143, 186, 474 rationalism, 190, 191, 369 critical, 54 rationality critical, 55, 56, 141, 478, 480 enlightenment, 54, 97, 105, 132, 179, 246, 359, 368n9, 479, 480, 485–487

521

instrumental, 130, 252, 261, 264, 270–272 means-end, 251, 266 non-reified conception of, 55, 104 phenomenological, 191 positivistic configuration of, 179 scientific, 168, 182, 185, 479 techno-scientific, 249 reason apodictic, 178 cognitive, 147 critical-reflective, 184 dialectical, 363, 492 ideas of, 129n48, 148–150, 186 instrumental, 147, 488 movement of, 102, 105, 113, 125, 149, 150, 178, 182, 189, 190, 359, 478, 486 natural dialectical movement of, 150 natural dialectic of, 149 negative movement of, 150, 478, 489 negative potential of, 113 objective, 147 positivistic restriction of, 184n55, 185 practical, 149n2, 415 procedural, 475 temporal-discursive structure of, 359 theoretical, 149, 149n2 transcending movement of, 181, 184 universal, 177, 180, 183, 197–202, 478

522 Index

Rational (cont.) universal dialectical-­ historical, 366 subject, 80, 123 will, 332 Reduction eidetic, 137 phenomenological, 137, 173, 174n40 positivistic, 102, 168, 179 transcendental reduction, 137, 174n40 Reification, 2, 20–23, 26, 28, 35, 40, 40n14, 48, 55, 60, 81, 90, 91, 96, 122, 125, 129n48, 138, 140, 143, 167, 168, 181, 181n48, 186–188, 190, 196, 203, 283, 284, 299, 300, 306, 313, 320, 320n81, 330, 332, 333, 338, 342, 345, 354, 355n169, 356, 357, 359–362, 365–384, 391, 424, 424n124, 429–431, 433–436, 438, 439, 443, 447, 448, 450, 473, 474, 477–479, 484, 486, 487, 493, 500 reified hegemonic status, 25 Relativism, 55 cultural, 55 Ricardo, David, 12 Rights collective, 95 individual, 80, 93, 95, 454 to self-determination, 60

S

Sartre, Jean Paul, 26 Schematism, 163n28, 172, 371 Sepoy uprising, 66, 67 beyond mere mutiny, 67 Sheehan, Thomas, 247–250, 268n140, 269, 269n142 Singer, Peter, 110n25, 133n53, 454, 456, 464–473, 478 Social contract theory, 80, 107, 108, 135n55, 307n52 Socialism, 3, 440n11, 441n12 supranational character, 3 Socialist countries, 2 society, 447n23, 449–452, 454, 455, 465, 468, 469, 503 Society of perpetual growth, 36–49 Sovereignty deterritorialized, 4–6, 8 territorial, 5 traditional, 5 Speciesism, 110n25, 133n53, 464, 465, 470, 472 Strawson, Peter F., 473 Suijaningrat, Suwardi, 73 Surplus in man, 102 T

Tagore, Rabindranath, 102–104, 117 Taylor, Charles, 20n29, 133, 134, 135n55, 473 Taylor, Thomas, 465 Technē, 252–254, 258, 261, 482

 Index 

Techno-science, 100, 117, 118, 121, 147 Time chronological, 257 essential, 257 linear, 118, 257 messianic, 58, 60 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 50 Totalitarianism, 127n45, 384, 391, 436, 447, 503 Transcendence creative, 271 in immanence, 138 processive, 236, 244 Transcendental deduction, 155n6, 170–173, 219n23 dialectic, 23, 129n48, 148, 284n1 ideality, 169 illusion, 81, 150, 381 phenomenology, 182, 191, 192 subjectivity, 172 unity of apperception, 173, 500n124 U

Unalienated mode of existence (life), 2 unalienated relation to nature and to one, 111, 456, 457, 470 Universal in becoming, 28, 35, 36, 70, 87, 278, 284, 398, 429, 464 concrete, 22, 75, 397, 398

523

history, 75, 80, 81, 126, 127n45, 278, 287, 300n29, 308, 313, 364 humanism, 4 normative, 23, 425 structural, 20 universality, 2, 7, 8, 10, 19, 20, 20n29, 22–28, 33–35, 45–48, 52, 53, 55, 69, 73–75, 81, 86, 87n85, 89, 91, 125, 127n45, 143, 144, 148, 148n1, 156, 157, 159–164, 179n46, 181, 182, 192, 196–198, 201, 278, 281, 283, 284, 361n2, 364, 366, 377, 384–431, 465, 472, 473, 474n68, 477, 478, 484, 488, 503 Universalism objective, 179 Universality in becoming, 182, 284, 430, 477 concrete, 25, 27, 48, 400, 401, 416, 426 contingent, 390, 394, 410, 413 determinate, 55, 69, 163–164, 385, 400 differential, 424, 425 empty, 25, 46, 48, 69, 87n85, 160, 162, 163, 402, 426, 427 enlightenment, 426 false, 385 hegemonic, 391, 413 pure, 157, 389, 394, 430 temporal conception of, 429 unmediated, 28, 389, 421 Untouchability, 88

524 Index

417n109, 420, 445, 459, 502 use, 138, 304, 327, 330, 332–338, 341–348, 352, 353, 365, 367, 381, 423, 424, 435–439, 458

V

Value ethical-normative, 139 exchange, 12n18, 37, 138, 139, 292, 302, 306, 327, 329–336, 333n111, 336n121, 338–343, 346, 348, 352, 353, 356, 365, 367, 371, 383n46, 403, 404, 418n109, 434–438, 441, 445, 450 intrinsic, 111n26, 114, 133, 133n53, 137, 139, 269n142, 334 normative, 140 objective, 105 subjective, 137 surplus, 11, 40, 153, 285, 303, 330–332, 347–350, 349n158, 352, 354, 354–355n169, 356, 365, 371, 372, 374, 381, 393,

W

Walwyn, William, 106, 107 Weber, Max, 36, 39 Winstanley, Gerrard, 106, 107 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 465 Z

Žižek, Salvoj, 48, 96, 126, 142, 307, 356, 361, 361n2, 383n46, 384, 386, 391, 394–397, 397n68, 400–410, 412–418, 420–422, 425, 426, 429, 430, 488