[continued from 7a. Norado Defended Against His Devotees]
VI.
Before I bring this long-winded communication to a close…I’ve been thinking for quite some time of jotting down some notes on that spectral presence that it seems to me has haunted these pages. “You say Norado, but you mean Marx” (to allude to another writer's famous quip about Bach and Telemann).
To begin with…What does it mean for an academic quismologist in the 1980’s to call herself a “Marxist”? Given the utter vacuum to be found in the musty, roped off “Marxist” corridor of political life in Reagan’s America, what exactly does one propose by taking upon oneself the burden of such an epithet? What is intended by it (with the full phenomenological rigor implied by “intention”)? And to which “Marx” precisely does it appeal? To any of the following, perhaps?
1. To the Marx of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, who pronounces that, instead of interpreting the world, in the manner of philosophers, the point is to change it? To the Marx, in other words, who encourages thinking people to put their thoughts to practical use and effect positive change in the world? To the Marx who, through an extensive critique of Hegel, argues for a "material" rather than an "ideal" conception of reality?
2. Or to the philosopher who, after “standing Hegel on his head,” develops (in The German Ideology) a conception of history based on a succession of stages or “modes of production” in which human beings organize in successively varying ways the material they find before them in nature and in which they produce and distribute the objects that fulfill their basic needs? To the same Marx who hypothesizes the class struggle as a necessary social concomitant to the succession of modes of production and who identifies in the proletariat the class that at long last will establish, after a series of bitter struggles, an equitable distribution of wealth, based on the principle, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”?
3. Or to the Marx who, suffering banishment with thousands of others from the European continent for the part he has played in the revolutions of 1848, chronicles, in a series of newspaper articles that are later compiled for distribution in tracts and pamphlets, the turbulent events of mid-century - chronicles that are admired as much for their brilliant and unprecedented, micrological style of analysis of a complicated and rapidly shifting socio-political reality as for their sardonic wit and unflagging good humor – a literary reportage matched in the 19th-century perhaps only by the young Dickens?
4. Or to the Marx who, after penning his analyses of 1848, locks himself up in the British Museum for two decades, studies the history of economics and of economic theory in its entirety, and, organizing his research around a paradigm-shifting conception of surplus-value, takes thousands of pages of notes towards a reinterpretation and critique of political economy and the capitalist economic system on which it is based, a pitifully small but fortunate amount of which he is able to masterfully edit into the chef d'oeuvre that has come down to us as Capital, Volume One?
And if not to any of the listed Marxes (or to any combination of them), then could such an individual's professed "Marxism" be in reference perhaps to any of several Marxist parties or political movements, either in the West, the East, or in the Third World – Marxisms that a decade and a half later will be defunct but in the late 1980's still have a pittance of animation left in them? (An unlikelihood, of course, as any Marxism professed from an Ivory Tower pulpit by a reasonably sane individual during Reagan-era America is most certainly of the rarefied, academic variety than of the flesh-and-blood political one.)
But perhaps the Marxism to which the Academarxist (if you’ll permit this awkward coinage) unknowingly adheres is simply the elusive one, in search of which we will refrain from setting ourselves off – namely, that dubious fashion and seemingly timeless style of self-assertion which Marx highlighted for the permanent edification of an unheeding posterity when he wrote in a letter to Engels that “I myself am not a Marxist”…perhaps indicating half-knowingly in advance the commodification of intellectual life that would only come into its own in a Cold War America battening itself many decades later on its successes in saving the European intellectual heritage from Europeans, Europe from itself and Europeans from each other.
I repeat: What does it mean to call oneself a “Marxist” at the tail end of the 20th-century, at a time when dozens of regimes that have long understood themselves as “Marxist” and that uneducated or under-educated Americans (meaning, of course, the lot of us) also have deemed “Marxist” – when dozens of such regimes are crumbling around the world?
I will drop the question for the time being (perhaps, in fact, I will permanently leave it to its own devices, allowing it to fend for itself) and will take up a rather more interesting question. A decade and a half later, when, after 9-11, it has become clear that the only genuine political challenge being put to the global, "late capitalist" system at present is that posed by Islamic fundamentalism, what sort of sense does it make, can it possibly make, for an American poet born in the 1960’s and having spent half of his adult life half-way around the world working for nouveau riches elite in a hyper-capitalist East Asian economy – what kind of sense does it make for such a person (one, moreover, who has read long, hard, and repeatedly in Marx) to call himself a Marxist – specifically, a Marxist poet?
Nah, too big and too personal of a question. I'll rephrase it succinctly: What is Marx’s chief importance for an American poet writing at the outset of the 21st-century?
As an immediate and direct recourse to "Marx himself" – to his life, his example, his texts - seems both fruitless and impossible, we might begin by examining those interpretations of Marx that are most pertinent for contemporary readers. The first of these would be that of Althusser, whose work clearly seems to render defunct qua Marxism many of those thought movements and bodies of work that were considered “Marxist” previously, including all thinkers from Bloch and Lukács to Adorno and Benjamin who more or less comfortably manage to squeeze themselves in under the rubric “Western Marxism” (or “Marxist Humanism”) and who were first introduced to an American university readership by Fredric Jameson in 1971 through his landmark Marxism and Form.
The argument that made Althusser famous can be summarized as follows: True knowledge or science takes place via a certain transformation of that which human beings produce in their concrete, everyday activity. What science or knowledge (understood here as synonyms) finds before it "ready-to-hand" (to borrow a not unrelated motif from Heidegger) is merely ideological - ideology defined here as the "immediate" product of human activity insofar as it has not been properly grasped through concepts. Marx (so Althusser argues) was the first to establish political economy on a truly scientific basis. But the scientific theory developed in Capital and in the many thousands of notes out of which that work was extracted was decades in the making, and in the early Marx, whose writings so fascinated the “Western Marxists” in the first half of the 20th-century, we meet a young philosopher still captivated by German Idealism, struggling with the seeds of a "scientific" theory embedded within an essentially “ideological” or pre-scientific framework. Specifically, the ideology that we find in early Marx, common to German Idealism and to the European thinkers who pleaded a return to it decades after Marx’s death, is that of humanism, in which it is “man” who makes history through his essential nature as a free and reasoning being. What Althusser refers to as Marx’s “epistemological break” is the gradual rejection of the entire problem of “human nature” as it was implicit in German Idealism and in the various earlier socialisms (of Fourier, Owen and Saint-Simon) and its replacement with the concepts and categories laid out for all to see in the first volume of Capital.
(In what way, you might ask, can humanism be regarded as pre-scientific and “ideological”? Of course, it is only for those of us on the other side of the "break" for whom the early Marx may be deemed “ideological” – only for those of us, that is, who have read Marx’s works, who concur that something crucial happens during the 1850’s and that, from the standpoint of the later works, the earlier works seem naïve or “pre-scientific” in some way. To someone of the Renaissance, looking back into previous centuries, the epoch-making humanism of More and Erasmus, Rabelais and Montaigne would certainly have appeared “scientific” in the sense of establishing a revolutionary new mode of interpretation of the object (the religious and philosophical texts handed down to us from antiquity, namely) in such a way that earlier interpretations now seemed naïve or inadequate. It might be good to warn each other, therefore, that, if we are to adopt Althusser’s rigorously formulated opposition of “ideological” and “scientific”, we should be wary of branding a specific cultural statement or formation as “merely ideological” before we ourselves are confident that we have at our fingertips or at least are capable of formulating a correspondingly “scientific” conception of that statement or formation or of the object to which it refers. This in passing.)
Althusser’s reading of Marx should be understood within the context of his long attempt to revitalize a theoretical tradition that had been largely divested of its political thrust, due in no small measure, Althusser felt, to the overemphasis that had been placed by readers of Marx in Western Europe on Marx’ early works after their belated publication. One could relish works like The German Ideology and the 1844 Manuscripts for their arresting passages on alienation and objectification and entirely lose track of the critique of political economy they were written to serve, not to mention the class struggle for which that critique was undertaken in the first place. There was a literary element in such works that encouraged the reader to acquiesce in solitary enjoyment and passive or at least depoliticized contemplation. “They say Marx, and they mean Nietzsche,” Althusser might have quipped.
It seems to me, however, after a close re-reading through the greater part of Marx, that, while it is impossible not to concur with Althusser, when one undertakes a chronological reading through the bulk of Marx, that there is a decisive break between “early” and “mature” Marx, there is however some room for discussion in terms of exactly where that break occurs, or even whether there might not be just one but possibly two or even multiple breaks that one might locate (as I have attempted in a preliminary sort of way with my four Marxes listed above - though there is a fifth you'll meet if you keep reading). For instance, Althusser regards The German Ideology and the “Theses on Feuerbach” as transitional works but does not specify what in the former of these works should be regarded as “early” or “ideological” and what “mature” and thus already “scientific.” If our desire is to discuss amongst ourselves what is decisive in Marx for the purposes of anything resembling “politically engaged thought” today, and if we agree with Althusser that the Marx of Capital – the Marx, that is, who dedicated the latter half of his life to one of the most sustained examinations in history of a particular body of thought (the collective works, namely, of the Classical Economists)…an intellectual commitment rivaled only by - whom? Aquinas on St. Paul? Maimonides on Aristotle? Lacan on Freud?…if we agree that this Marx is “the Marx who matters most” in our contemporary quest to launch something like a struggle against the global economic system that threatens to consume us all (along with our forefathers and foremothers, our progeny, the whole kit and kaboodle), then it seems that some consideration is due concerning what precisely we are to take along with us from The German Ideology and what can be left to the bourgeois wolves of literary studies, of Ideengeschichte, and of pseudo-leftist "ideology critique" (if, for a moment, we may be permitted recourse to the outmoded, tragi-comic invective of The Ghost of Marxism Past).
What this entails, of course, is a close reading of certain passages from Marx and of certain passages from Althusser on Marx. While I'm not quite up at the moment for ensnaring myself in such a painful and painstaking hermeneutics, it might be useful to jot down the following notes that could one day serve one of us as an impetus for such a salutary project. My premise in what follows is that there are two directions in which it is possible to proceed with Marx at the moment, both of them conditioned by Althusser's landmark oeuvre, after which, as mentioned above, it has become apparent that much of what has passed for "Marxism" in Western Europe since Lukács is of doubtful status qua Marxism - this would include many aspects of Adorno, and of course the desire that propels my extended investigation into Althusser is to come to a working hypothesis as to what in Adorno is truly "Marxist", or even as to whether he can be considered "Marxist" at all after the Althusserian reading. The first direction of the two that I believe we as students of Marx have to choose from is that of Jameson, whose major work as a Marxist (i.e. and not as a historian/interpreter of Marxism (Marxism and Form) or as a theorist of postmodernism), as far as I can tell, is The Political Unconscious of 1980. The other, of course, is the Herculean and ever-expanding oeuvre of Žižek.
VII.
Thus, in the carefully numbered paragraphs that I have adapted from the young Wittgenstein for those projects in which I assume (or attempt to assume, at any rate) the role, habit and custom of the classical scholar:
1 We begin again at the beginning (in case you weren't paying attention the first time through - and this time we'll assume the scholar's old-fashioned first-person plural) with Althusser's now classic notion of the "epistemological shift" that takes place in Marx, in which Marx gradually abandons theoretical positions that Althusser designates as "humanist" in his struggle to come to the "scientific" understanding of political economy and of the capitalist system that emerges in the four volumes (or three-plus-one, depending on how you regard Theories of Surplus Value) of Capital. As readers of Marx, we accept Althusser's path-breaking hypothesis concerning the periodization of Marx's works. We reiterate, however, that a lot depends on exactly where the shift is located, which Althusser doesn't make entirely clear. If, for instance, The German Ideology is a "transitional" work, what in that work belongs to "ideology" (i.e. to humanism) and what to science/knowledge? Again, Althusser doesn't tell us precisely. If we accept Althusser's basic premise that there is a big difference between early and mature Marx (which we believe on the basis of our own reading that any honest reader of Marx has no choice BUT to accept), a lot hinges on how we read certain passages in The German Ideology (and in other works) that don't immediately have to do with the critique of political economy.
1.1 A case in point, in fact, would be the very notion of "ideology". It can be argued that Marx's decisive formulations concerning ideology are themselves "ideological" (meaning "pre-scientific") from the point of view of the proto-structuralist system worked out in the thousands of pages that constitute Capital (in Volume One the notion of ideology is almost entirely absent, as it is from the rest of the stuff edited by Engels or published posthumously). Althusser himself develops a conception of "ideology" which in many respects is removed from that put forth by the young Marx and sets it at a seeming distance from the base/superstructure dichotomy, in which ideology is assigned unambiguously to (or even directly identified with) the superstructure. Again, a lot depends on our investigation into the exact status of this very influential notion of ideology with respect to the "Marx that matters most" - assuming that we agree with Althusser that there IS an "epistemological break" and that the critique of political economy undertaken through two decades of research at the British Museum is indeed the "Marx that matters most."
1.2 There is a whole slew of issues revolving around the classic conception of ideology (as laid out in The German Ideology) and Althusser's revised conception, which is perhaps indebted more to Lévi-Strauss and to structuralism than to early Marx. Here, we will merely note the great ambiguity in Althusser concerning the status of art and aesthetics. How, that is, is art to be understood in terms of ideology? Althusser's comments on art are elusive, ambiguous, and seemingly non-committal, but filled with intrigue and subversion. His own essays on literature in For Marx are both breathtaking as critical prose and thoroughly unclear with respect to their status qua Marxism. His most famous remarks concerning art and literature are found in his "Letter on Art" of 1966, in which he states emphatically that art is not an ideology. This statement is at clear countervariance with the Marx of The German Ideology and suggests that, for Althusser, the view espoused by most of the "Western Marxists" (including, at first glance, Benjamin and Adorno) that art and literature are ideological structures is itself evidence of an "ideological" appropriation of Marx, as it takes up ostensibly "humanist" conceptions characteristic of Marx before the "break." (Indeed, it would seem that the "Letter" casts light on the impetus behind Althusser's seminal essay on "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in which Althusser is evidently at pains to rescue the notion of ideology by retrieving it from the "pre-scientific" framework in which it made its first appearance in The German Ideology.) But if art is not an ideological structure, then what is it? Althusser's remarks are frustratingly cursory, but his premise is clear enough: Art is situated at a similar distance from ideology as science/knowledge. Whereas the latter allows us to conceive ideology (through concepts), art allows us to perceive it (through sight, hearing, etc.). In relation to ideology, though, it is by no means subservient with respect to science.
1.3 Althusser's conception of the fundamentally non-ideological status of art seems not unrelated to the famous dictum attributed to Stalin that "language is not a superstructure" - a saying that was made famous in French circles in part by Lacan's endorsement of it. Ostensibly, Lacan's later interest in the material dimension of language owes much to the idea expressed in this phrase that language is not reducible to the determinations of production in the manner of true "superstructural" edifices (the state, the legal apparatus, religion, etc.), and this irreducibility of language to a material base (even in the "last instance") is due precisely to its own very materiality (though we should keep in mind that "Stalin" - or the ghost or ghosts responsible for his ideas, at any rate - did not say that language was of the "base" either).
1.4 This, precisely, is where our train of thought winds back into Adorno and his interest in questions concerning the relationship of art to language. If art is not ideology (Althusser) and language is not superstructure ("Stalin"/Lacan), and if we can risk an equation of art with language (via Adorno), then we can suggest that art, by virtue of the materiality it shares with language, is not susceptible to "ideology critique" in the "Humanist-Marxist" or "pre-scientific" sense of ideology common to the various formulations of "Western Marxism." This further provides us with the means for locating and separating the ideological/humanist elements in Adorno from what might be designated as the original, radical kernel in Adorno - those passages or aspects, for instance, that bear directly on questions concerning art in its material, linguistic dimension. In other words, Adorno is most certainly to be ranked with the "materialist" thinkers (as opposed to the idealists, the positivists, the humanist/existentialists, etc.). Yet once we come to the view that "ideology critique" is based on conceptions that are at bottom pre-Marxist and pre-materialist, and once we have isolated this "ideological" strand in Adorno's writings, we are in a better position to assess the exact nature of Adorno's singular and original materialism, and to examine whether this materialism might not converge in some respect with "Marx proper" (the mature Marx of the critique of political economy, that is), and, if we find that it does not, to suggest comparisons with Schelling, with contemporary, revitalized interpretations of Hegel, and with Freud/Lacan - these being, as Žižek has convincingly demonstrated, the only viable alternative materialisms to that of Marx that have been proffered in Western thought.
1.5 As a conclusion to our questions concerning ideology and ideology critique, we offer Marx’s famous quote from the Grundrisse, certainly his most famous single pronouncement on art and literature among the scanty few that he made: “In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organization…It is even recognized…that certain significant forms within the realm of the arts are possible only at an undeveloped stage of artistic development…But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.”
1.51 Nicely put, Karl. No one will deny it. A beautiful formulation of a timeless sentiment to which every true reader is prone who first takes up a volume of Homer or Sappho or Plato or Sophocles and, like young Keats, feels that he or she is standing with Cortez and his men atop an Andean summit, all of them looking around at each other “with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien” (we won’t spoil this idyllic scene by pointing out that Cortez and his men are filthy, lice-ridden, wildly superstitious, bent on rape and pillage, and drunk half of the time). But is this the foundation of the “Western Marxist” critique of art and literature? Merely this? For what does Karl give us besides this question configured as a statement – one that remains unanswered, so far as we know, through the next two decades of Marx’s mature production (although there have been rumors from time to time of some notebooks on art and literature still awaiting a patient and able editor)?
1.52 And why does the question posed in Grundrisse remain unaddressed? Simply because Marx never lived to complete his work (as Engels might have suggested if any of us had been around in the 1890’s to ask him)? Not dissimilar to the question that Lacan raised in the early 1950’s apropos of Freud - namely, why didn’t Freud give us a theory of the signifier that would more fully substantiate his theory of the unconscious? “Geneva 1910 and Petrograd 1920 suffice to explain why Freud did not have this particular instrument at his disposal.” Lacan is referring, of course, to Saussure and to Roman Jakobson respectively. Adding Vienna 1900 to this list, we will allow Karl himself to answer our question, just as in those fun little comic book introductions to the great thinkers: “Because I didn’t have at my disposal a theory of the unconscious - one replete with a homuncular theory of the signifier embedded within it at the helm - that might have allowed me to arrive at a properly materialist theory of art and literature to supplement my revolutionary theory of capitalism.” (Vienna 1900 is the year in which Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published, for those of you who failed to catch the attempted quip.)
2 Moving on to Jameson. We must confess that we find The Political Unconscious and the philosophy it represents to be one of the most magnificent intellectual productions of the American academy - one of those few works by an American theorist that one can legitimately mention in the same breath with Of Grammatology, Les Mots et les Choses, Negative Dialectics, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, etc. To us, the project it suggests is distinctly American. We might define it as a heroic attempt to save a unified Marxist theory in the wake of Althusser's re-reading and would compare it with Charles Ives' attempt to save the sonata form in the wake of modernist harmony and the depredations it forced on traditional form, Terry Gilliam's attempt to save for authentic film art the filmic fairy tale in the wake of narrative fragmentation ala Fellini and French New Wave, which threatened to consign story-line to the assembly-line Hollywood blockbuster, Pynchon's attempt to save the single-protagonist novel in the wake of the 10-page Borgesian fiction, and finally James Merrill’s attempt to save the blank verse epic poem in the wake of poetic modernism. Jameson accepts Althusser's proposal in its entirety, yet somehow comes up with a way of re-incorporating Althusser's structuralist re-write of Marx into a format in which The German Ideology and its sweeping, "totalizing" vision of history is improbably allowed to subsume the mature critique of political economy. This paradoxically requires Jameson to retain the classic Western Marxist conception of "ideology critique" while admitting that the conception, together with the operation of "mediation" that serves as its primary technical apparatus, can only be retained if room is made for Althusser's version, which contrasts a "naive" theoretical standpoint with a properly "scientific" one and in which a uniform and homogeneous time-space is taken for granted in advance of the appropriately theoretical distinction between synchrony and diachrony and the multiplicity of temporalities that such a distinction entertains (in a very brief and inadequate summary that will most likely merely perplex readers unfamiliar with Jameson's book, for which we apologize).
2.1 The very impossibility of the mammoth task that Jameson sets before himself and his readers in The Political Unconscious shows through in the relentless argumentation of Jameson's prose, which scarcely ever "comes up for air," as it were, and the reader senses that it could take years to follow up on all the footnote references before one could fully grasp Jameson's "system" in all of its richness and sophistication or even be competent to endorse it as a system rather than a theoretical bricolage or patchwork. It would seem that Jameson takes a step back from the demand to focus on the Marx of Das Kapital and poses the following question/challenge to Althusser: "Alright, I must agree. The Marx of Das Kapital is the "Marx who matters most," and the early works have been emphasized at the expense of the critique of capitalism that should be the primary focus for those who profess to be followers of Marx. But, having admitted this, is it really necessary to part with everything written prior to the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach? Can't we still have a Marxism that reflects its founder's output in its chronological entirety?"
2.2 Speaking for ourselves, we have come to Capital late, and as young readers the Marx who mattered most to us was the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, the Marx of The German Ideology, and the Marx of the Manifesto. We believe on the basis of our own experience that there are far more people who have the first volume of Capital sitting on their shelves (probably the Penguin edition) than have actually read it. Capital, Vol. I is a rewarding month's effort of reading, but when there are so many summaries of Marx available and when there is so much else to read, how many today will be ready to make the commitment? Besides, we all know the main points - the points about the proletariat as the revolutionary class, use-value and exchange-value, the labor theory of value, etc. Why bore ourselves with all the detail? Having read numerous summaries of "mature Marx," we have had the impression for years that everything that was said in Capital had already been said with less verbiage in Marx's works of the 1840's and that in Capital Marx's earlier passion and fire has settled into bloodless system and dogma. Upon finally reading Capital, however, we realize how mistaken we have been. The work we encounter is unexpectedly readable and strangely modern, in comparison with the Manifesto, the critique of Hegel, etc. - much closer indeed in tone and in style to the Foucault of The Order of Things or to Lévi-Strauss than to early Marx. Subsequently, we have read through Althusser's arguments and have found ourselves in full agreement that there is a very definite break in the years between the Manifesto and the first volume of Capital.
2.3 Yet the earlier Marx has become so much a part of us that we find it hard even now to shake it off, having read it in our intellectual youth and it having come (along with Nietzsche) to form the basis of our own perhaps lazy and derivative but minimally functional overall conception of the shape of history (or European history, at any rate). Do we really need to choose between the comprehensive sweep of The German Ideology and the systematic rigor of Capital? This seems to be the sort of question that Jameson would have us ask.
3 On, finally, to Žižek, who seems, through his many affectionate references to Jameson, to play son to the latter's father, who reciprocates the gesture. Yet their "Marxisms" differ radically. The interim of a decade between The Political Unconscious and the beginning of Žižek's publishing career with The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) accounts for this in great measure. One can only read Žižek's first two books with envy: An individual with a prodigious reading background who grew up in East Bloc Yugoslavia, had the fortune to travel to France as a young man and become part of Lacan's inner circle just prior to the Master’s death - such a one finds himself posed at a "world-historical" moment as an eyewitness into the feverish complexity of events as they unfold in Eastern Europe during the last decade of the 20th-century. Equipped with the broadest philosophical understanding and sensitivity and with cutting-edge psychoanalytic training, he provides, in one book after another, a portrait of regimes and the ideology that accompanied them in demise - all the while maintaining an unwavering Marxist position, steering clear of the Scylla of liberal-democratic complacency and self-satisfaction and the equally treacherous Charybdis of nostalgia for the fallen Communist regimes.
3.1 We suggest that Žižek's distance from Jameson can be narrowed down to the increasing impossibility of laying claim to a "total Marx" that would allow for a "humanist" Marx to snuggle up to and nurture the "structuralist" one, as urged by Jameson. And this impossibility is occasioned by two factors: a) the breakdown of Communism in Eastern Europe and the forfeiture on the part of Western civilization of its only semi-credible challenge/alternative to global capitalism, and b) the ascendancy of the Lacanian Freud, only so much of which was available to Jameson as he was composing The Political Unconscious in the 1970's, and which offers prospects for a "materialist" interpretation of culture and of cultural objects that in certain respects may be said to supercede "Western Marxist" conceptions.
3.2 Žižek seems to accept Althusser's call for a reinvigorated investigation into Marx, but his emphasis is somewhat different. His endorsement of Althusser's critique of "Marxist Humanism" is not always obvious, as the target of his more polemically tinged criticism tends to be deconstruction (and, to a lesser extent, Foucault and Deleuze or rather the baleful influence on the Anglo-American intellectual climate of certain of their theories that have been watered down through importation into the intellectual branch of the culture industry in Great Britain and the U.S.A.). Yet his acceptance of Althusser's critique is implicit in the fact that his own filmic and literary criticism is far more ostensibly Lacanian in orientation than ideology-critical (in the standard Frankfurt School sense).
3.3 Žižek does not seem to follow Althusser in the emphasis placed on "mature Marx" to the exclusion of the early works and tends to draw as much on The German Ideology as he does on Capital (indeed, he quotes the intermediary Grundrisse perhaps more than any other single work by Marx). Rather, he highlights elements throughout Marx's oeuvre that have received little attention and relates them both to Lacan and to Hegel. (See, for instance, his extensive discussion in Tarrying with the Negative and elsewhere of surplus-value vis-a-vis the Lacanian notion of surplus-enjoyment (jouissance) for which Lacan acknowledged his debt to Marx, as well as his elaboration of the compelling motif in Grundrisse of "positing the presuppositions," which Marx derived from Hegel's Lesser Logic.)
3.4 What separates Žižek most tellingly from both Althusser and Jameson is that he rigorously criticizes the utopianism implicit in Marx's conception of the proletariat as the revolutionary class, perhaps offering the most convincing (leftist) critique to date of the "teleological" Marx who prophesized the eventual collapse of capitalism, the future "dictatorship of the proletariat," etc. His standpoint, however, is that we must not allow this significant weakness in the Marxian theoretical edifice to detract from Marx's endurability and permanent greatness, which lies, not in the Utopianism he inherited from Owen, Saint-Simon and Fourier, but in his revolutionary critique of political economy. Žižek 's wager, which he repeats again and again, is that, as leftist intellectuals, we may jettison everything in Marx that we wish - the humanist aspects, the Hegelianism, the Utopianism, "ideology critique," even perhaps the overall contour of Capital, Vol. I or specific details within its thousand-page spread. What we must not reject, however, is the fundamental, negative gesture at the core of the critique of political economy which is already fully present in Marx's early works. This is what we must make every effort to revivify and repeat in our struggles today - the gesture, that is, of placing in giant question marks the ability of human beings to continue, within the "capitalist mode of production," to sustain life on Planet Earth as we know it in the long term (to put our current situation in mundane but far more dire terms than Marx himself would ever have had occasion to think of 150 years ago).
3.5 In his most recent books, Žižek has added a new twist to his plea that Anglo-American leftists shift their attention away from "identity politics" and repoliticize the economy (much as Lacan worked at shifting the attention of Freud's readers away from the ego and back to the unconscious). In his recent writings on Lenin and on the October Revolution, he suggests that there can be no "Marxism proper" without repeating the gesture of "intervention" introduced into the history of Marxism by Lenin. Basing his interpretation of Lenin on Badiou's analysis of St. Paul, he suggests that Lenin bears the same relation to Marx as Paul to Christ. Without Paul, Christ would have faded into the musty annals of antiquity as just one troubled apocalyptic freak among the many that haunted the decadent Roman Empire. Similarly, without Lenin, Marx would have faded into the not-so-distant elder cousin and somewhat lesser contemporary of Nietzsche, who patched together, first, an impassioned though in certain respects threadbare philosophy of history out of a rather clumsy bricolage of humanism, socialist utopianism, and Young Hegelianism, and later, during a bitter exile in London, spent decades compiling dozens of notebooks of largely indecipherable notes apparently attempting to establish earlier conceptions of socialism on a more "scientific" footing. In short, Lenin's intervention and the triumph of the Bolsheviks over the Mensheviks put an end to all notions (common to Social Democrats in the West and to Stalinism in the East) that true socialism would arise through the objective laws of history decreeing an eventual and ineluctable transition from capitalism to socialism via a (peaceful or violent) interim dictatorship of a revolutionary class. To put it succinctly, there may have been a Marx (or several Marxes, for that matter), but without Lenin's intervention, Marxism would have died out with the last gasps taken by the century in which it was born as that century receded into the one which bore us. (Perhaps this is what Marx meant in his remark to Engels about himself not being a Marxist...that he wasn't willing as a solitary individual to bear the responsibility of the collective for any future failure of his theory.)
4 Returning one last time to Jameson...It would seem that Žižek's point is that there can be no question of the sort of "total Marxism" Jameson calls for as there can in fact be no question of Marxism at all if we fail to emphasize the only thing in Marx that really matters in the end - the critique of political economy - and if we are unwilling to step outside of "Marx himself" and theorize a dimension in which a true political intervention into the global economy might be launched. This sentiment is summed up in Žižek's rejoinder to Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, "It's the (political) economy, stupid!"
4.1 What is Žižek's ultimate point if not that "the big Other (Marxism) does not exist"? Let's put to one side, for the time being, the entire Marxist experience as it unfolded in Eastern Europe in the early decades of this century - the Leninist intervention and its subsequent betrayal by Stalinism and by the degeneration of a revolution into monolithic, repressive state bureaucracies. Let's pretend for a moment that we are ignorant of all the history that went on in Marx's name. And let's pretend that everything written prior to Capital was lost and forgotten. Who is this shadowy German émigré who locked himself up in a metropolitan library for two decades? In addition to a novel and compelling analysis of European economics as it existed in the middle of the 19th-century that was published in 1864, a German ex-patriot living in London named Karl Marx left behind thousands of pages of notes that he had hoped to eventually edit into a continuation of the theory presented in that volume (Capital, Vol. I). His collaborator, a man named Engels, managed to edit a certain amount of this into a pair of subsequent volumes, but these latter productions are almost entirely unreadable and consist of little more than half-explained formulae and quotations from earlier economists. For the lay reader (i.e. the non-economist), it is impossible to judge either the value of this bulky Nachlass or its status with respect to the magnificent first volume.
4.2 Since Marx's day there has sprung up an entire social science with its institutions, schools, factions, and gurus that acknowledges its debt to Marx but views him as the last and perhaps greatest of the Classical Economists, though largely irrelevant from the standpoint of modern economic theory. As readers with no specialist training in economics who have sat down with much good will to Capital, Volumes 2 and 3 and to the 1700-page Theories of Surplus Value, we confess that we are at an entire loss as to how to evaluate any of it, lacking the requisite background to do anything more than throw our hands up in despair for this intellectual titan who was unable to finish what he considered his major work, and we find that we have no alternative but to acquiesce in the better informed opinion of the "bourgeois economists” that "Marx has little to offer for a current understanding of the way that the contemporary world works economically." Unable as we are to converse intelligibly with the economists, what are we left with of the "mature Marx" besides the labor theory of value, a fascinating, proto-structuralist model of capitalism based on the four categories of production, distribution/exchange, circulation, and consumption, some hints as to how periodic crises form that will someday spell the downfall of the capitalist mode of production, and a few other odds and ends that are but the tip of a projected conceptual iceberg that never took shape (and it is this spectral iceberg that is missing from our list of Marxes we began with above – the Fifth Marx…an unborn twin, perhaps, to the one that sank that famous luxury liner twenty-nine years after Marx’s death)?
4.3 What we are getting at, finally, is that Jameson's "total Marx" is impossible because Marx never got around to shaping his theory into that totality of which he assured Engels in the mid-1860's that "he had it all in his head." Which Marx, specifically, is missing from the "holistic" Marxism that Jameson valiantly and virtuosically attempts to resuscitate? Precisely this one – our Fifth Marx, who you can imagine dodging our trail through the same Parisian Arcades described by Walter Benjamin like Orson Welles fleeing Joseph Cotton and the police in the Viennese sewers in The Third Man – precisely this Fifth Marx who scatters off into the thousands and thousands of pages of unedited notes that are the slough of a system that died in the brain of its author in 1883. And this, perhaps, is why Žižek is forced to whittle Marx down to the singular gesture of placing the political economy into question - because the "critique of political economy" that Althusser sought so strenuously to place once more at the center of Marxist endeavor is merely a phantom! A system that may or may not have come to complete fruition in Marx' self-understanding, but that in any event did not survive its author. And if the critique of political economy doesn't exist (as anything more, that is, than an impressive fragment in the form of a proto-structuralist isolation and examination of a few salient aspects of 19th-century capitalism), then Marxism does not exist either. Prior to the Leninist intervention, that is.
4.4 If the reader concedes our point that "there is no Marxism" (because Marx's "critique of political economy" is fatally and fatefully "not-all," to make an ironic reference to the late Lacan), then we might be inclined to put forth the further proposition that Marx's potential readership can be divided into three broadly defined groups: a) readers with a general interest in Marx (the largest group), b) economists who wish to gain an understanding into Marx's views on particular technical or conceptual/theoretical issues, and c) a dwindling number of disciples world-wide who refer to themselves as "Marxist economists." We can surmise the following about each of the three groups: a) Those included among Marx's general readership will most likely come to Marx with a background in the humanities (and possibly in the social sciences). One can imagine that their orientation will be either literary, philosophical, or culture-critical, and that in general they will have little interest in probing into the thorny Nachlass to which one must ostensibly gain access if one wishes to come to a full understanding of Marx's unfinished major project. This group includes even the most knowledgeable and committed of readers - figures, that is, such as Althusser, Jameson, and Žižek, none of whom have demonstrated that they have ventured any further into the projected critique than the completed Volume One (a book that was written for the economic lay person and whose style of argumentation is entirely transparent to any patient reader coming to the book with no more than the most rudimentary knowledge of economic concepts and principles) and the few odd pages from the posthumously edited Volume Three and from Theories of Surplus Value that are routinely anthologized (the bits about crises and machine automation from Theories, and the famous quote about freedom from the concluding paragraphs of Volume Three). From our postlapsarian perspective, this amounts to a veritable swindle that has been perpetuated since Engels and on behalf of which the entire history of opinion on Marx, both positive and negative, has been conducted - the idea, that is, that these five thousand pages of edited material somehow comprise a theoretical unity and that the four thousand pages beyond the thousand to which Volume One prints out are more than a compilation of notes that made only slightly greater sense to the aging and exasperated Engels than to the rest of us. b) Those ostensibly equipped for a just and frank appraisal of this vast mess that Marx left behind - the economists, that is - will almost surely have even less interest in "doing the time" with those pagey volumes than Marx's general readers. Yet assuming that there are one or two who can piece it all together and have the time and interest to do as much, they will surely do so on their own terms as practitioners of a modern social science who are not interested in changing the world, or even in merely understanding it (as with the Young Hegelians at whom that famous eleventh thesis was directed), but are interested merely in describing it and perhaps in making some minor and piecemeal suggestions for improvements to corporate boards or government administrators. In brief, they are not likely to share our more global concerns - the concerns that brought us to read Marx in the first place. c) There is a certain sub-species of economists, of course, who may in some sense profess to share our concerns - the so-called Marxist economists, that is. There are still a handful of these guys around. We are not referring to the nameless dead or dying former upholders and maintainers of the Marxian edifice in Eastern Europe, but rather those mostly British figures who devoted their lives to studying Marx's later economic thought in its entirety and the problematic texts with which we are at present concerned. We mention the three of them with whom we are familiar - Saytan Helotfinder (the editor of the three Aardvark volumes of Capital), Rudolph Ignomine (the translator of the Aardvark Grundrisse), and Quinbus Jericho (the maintainer of the excellent Marx-Engels website, which places at ready and free availability decent translations of every extant work of both authors as well as their voluminous correspondence). In order to become a "Marxist economist" and fully grasp that daunting Nachlass, one apparently has to have made some sort of Faustian pact that will ensure the gradual erosion of one's ability to think clearly about anything else outside of the Nachlass itself. Both Helotfinder and Ignomine, in lengthy prefaces to the Aardvark translations for which they are respectively responsible and in which is exhibited their apparently unfeigned mastery of late Marx, conclude by assuring their readers that the final stage of the proletariat revolution is just around the corner and that Marx's answers to the questions that the Classical Economists failed to pose will before long be made plain to every individual on this stubborn globe that we believe is round and that we have been told for centuries that we inhabit. And Jericho provides on-line quizzes at the end of each section of the major works in which readers are invited to test their comprehension of what they have read by cutting their teeth on issues such as "the current situation in which the proletariat of your own country finds itself," etc., which the reader may complete and e-mail to Jericho for his learned opinion. For our part, we propose that some talented Browning out there write a dialogue in blank verse between an economics professor at an American university and a Fab Four-accented "Marxist economist" - a meeting that might remind one of a conversation between Lavoisier and a late adept and practitioner in the superseded business of alchemy that managed to survive through to the latter days of the Enlightenment in which the great chemist lived.
5 Let's put a full-stop to this lengthy inquiry with a final return to Jameson. Why, again, is the "total Marx" proffered by Jameson out of the question? Simply because the Marx to which Jameson refers us is incomplete ("not-all") with respect to that "Marx that matters most" - the Marx, that is, who did more than suggest (as early as the 1844 Manuscripts and the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right) that it was time for a full-scale critique of political economy and who actually, as far as we can tell, carried out that critique but failed to transmit it in readable form to a potential posterity before his death. And this incompleteness that we confront as we wonder in which direction to turn with Marx at the outset of the 21st-century is reflected in the incompleteness of his readership, of which it can be said that those who are interested in the "big picture" have not the means to comprehend that which is most important (the missing critique of political economy, that is), and those who claim to understand that missing critique are apparently not left with the sense or sobriety adequate to edify the rest of us who would like to know about it.
5.1 The sentiment with which we wish to conclude here is related to the motif from the late Lacan that "the Other is missing" - meaning that modern America has been defined by the forced and enforced exclusion of Marx from "the discourse of the Other" and that for an American writer in 2003 there is simply no possibility of embracing anything proximate to what was once embraced in other intellectual climates as "Marxism." For us, who come to Marx late (perhaps too late), there can be no Marxism beyond that to which we may yet attain if, following Žižek, that inimitable Slav, we are willing to "posit the presuppositions" (one of which, simply, is that there is rhyme and reason somewhere in that hirsute German's fearful Nachlass) and repeat Lenin's immortal gesture of intervention into a theory that had forgotten that the point had been to change the world. Evidently, it would seem, we're not there yet.
VIII.
And as I have no choice but to admit that I have no way of telling if there is indeed a first-person plural, by addressing myself to whom I might not place into question my own sense and sobriety, I'll instead speak for myself, drop the pretense that I know who I am addressing, and simply say: "Evidently, I'm not there yet. But if I am to go on hoping that I might one day get there, it would seem that the smart thing to do as a literate American would be to make at least some small effort to convince my educated and (rather more likely) half-educated compatriots back at home - including those self-fashioned Marxists ensconced within the universities who have never actually read Marx (and there are presumably more than the few with whom I was acquainted as a grad student) - that Marx is well worth the read." Look me up and I'll tell you how to get started.
Reading men and reading women of all backgrounds and persuasions!!
There is no document produced for consumption on our current intellectual market that is not at the same time a document of our rapid and progressive de-intellectualization.
The bureaucrademies and their ideologues have idiotized ideology – ideology and its venerable critique. We cannot allow Marx - OUR Marx - to be similarly co-opted and travestied by politically correct opportunists and half-educated careerist goons!
LITERATE DROPOUTS OF THE ANGLO-SAXON COUNTRIES,
UNITE!!!