technical images and linear text

So this consistently fantastic blog ‘larvalsubjects’ has recently sparked some discussion with a post entitled ‘Where’s Marx?‘ in which the poster wondered where the classic Marxist materialism might be found in the modern academy. Have we discarded altogether that essential tenet of his historical materialism, that is, the belief that ‘civil society’ is merely a superstructure whose character depends entirely on its ‘material’ conditions of production?

I started writing a comment in response to this lively discussion, but it got a bit out of hand, so I decided to make it into a post-response on my own blog, both to the above post and the excellent response to same at notebookeleven.

I know close to nothing ‘in depth’ about either Zizek or Badiou, and yet I am inclined to agree on the surface with the assessments by the author of larvalsubjects (and also others) that they (specifically Z. the supposed ‘marxist’) each constitute a “perfect example of an idealist thinker or a bourgeois thinker insofar as he seems to hold that it is ideas that drive history, not production that drives ideas.” Thinkers tied to philosophy, the humanities or to psychoanalysis in a disciplined way have to think in this broadly ‘idealist’ way: if it’s only material production that shapes ideas, why study ‘ideas’ and not production? Why not be an engineer or an economist? (But I’m getting ahead of myself.) Not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with an idealist approach per se, but in order to escape these disciplinary confines we require a seriously ‘nomadic’ thinker like Deleuze, willing to screw their predecessors in the ass a bit. Zizek in particular has always struck me as having perhaps too much ‘respect’ – in a perverse way – for the discipline of psychoanalysis. But this is somewhat beside my own points.

In any case, I would like to prolong this little discussion maybe a bit further by positing that Marx is all over the academy, but in a fragmented, ’spectral’ fashion. Thus ‘commodity fetishism,’ that beautifully-written and nearly-psychoanalytic passage, is all over the humanities, but almost as a ’standalone’ text of sorts. Marx the author has been drawn and quartered by the academy. The influence of the passage (from Preface to the Contributions…) cited in the original post is perhaps most viscerally ‘present’ not in the humanities or any other artsy-feeling department, but in the strictest and most ‘agency-denying’ Economics departments.

When we set aside the obvious love for capitalism implied by neoclassical economics, what could be more Marxist – in the base-superstructure sense – than a rigorous theory of economic interaction that purports to reduce individual agents to pseudorational little machines of desire and satisfaction? Economists try to explain social phenomena with reference *only* to the ‘material’ conditions of production and consumption. Nothing else matters – what’s more Marxist than that? Not to say that economists are somehow the ‘most orthodox’ Marxists, which would be absurd, but simply that we can easily see in Economics this Marxist tendency to view subjective interaction in terms of material economic conditions. Once again Marx is drawn and quartered: economic theory has taken Marxist materialism to heart, and entirely discarded those parts of Marx which gesture beyond capital to a Zion-like promised land of Communist fulfillment. Of course, we could just as easily say that economic theory has developed in an unbroken chain from Smith through Ricardo and onto Keynes and Mises: no Marxist ‘break’ whatsoever. But Marx himself is a part of this chain, even if a radical one. If we are looking for the specific vestiges of the base-superstructure orientation of historical materialism, I think we need look no further than contemporary economics.

This leads to a second clue in the whole ‘where’s Marx?’ quest. The entire question of the ‘material conditions’ of production has been turned on its head in contemporary capitalism. What are the ‘material’ conditions of production for a Microsoft or a Google? Certainly not the same as those of Marx’s ’steam-mill’ capitalists. It’s hard to see any ‘material’ whatsoever in their form of production. The tension within Marx-the-author between his critical, materialist theory and his desire for change is tied to a fundamental tension between form and material (see V. Flusser, ‘the Shape of Things’ for probably the best essay ever written on this distinction). Since – like everyone else – I’m not as close a reader of Marx as I ought to be, I don’t know how exactly he would account for the ‘problem of agency.’ But it is clear, from the hostility to conventional economics in the conventional humanities, that people with ‘big’ ideas don’t like to be treated as functions within a materially-determined superstructure. In the humanities, we are thinkers of form and of Ideas (in the Platonic sense), whereas in the pseudoscientific field of economics, they remain theorists of material – however ‘immaterial’ the processes of capital may become. Capital is pure material, even if we are only really familiar with money, capital of the most purely ‘formal’ sort. Those theorists who propose that change flows only from conscious subjects to ‘in-form’ the material conditions of their reality are no more foolish than economic theorists who propose that those material conditions are the ‘only’ true reality. However we choose to frame the issue, it must be recognized that subjectivity is formed in reciprocal interaction with the ‘material’ processes of capital. The flows of capital decide the conditions of possibility for the constitution of individual (‘larval’) subjects, while those (at least apparently) fully constituted subjects then decide the conditions of possibility for flows of capital. On this conception, it seems that we can see our way clear to sewing Marx back together again, a sort of Frankenstein assemblage of humanities and economics: the economy determines the genesis of actually existing subjects, while those subjects then selectively insert themselves into the flows of capital in order to de- and in-form them according to their own subjective agenda.

Where and what, then, is agency? Certainly not the bourgeois notion of the workman carving the material of society according to an ideal form, but perhaps something more like a stone in a river, a passive agency which reforms the flowing material conditions of its reality. And a stone in a river isn’t much on its own. But the river would be nothing without a riverbed, and enough stones stuck together: well, that’s a dam.