Social Determination of Method (Introduction)

If I did not seem quite as eager to write part 2 of my critique of Badiou as I was with part 1, there's a simple reason: I wasn't as eager. In good measure, it's because, having started reading the first volume of Mészáros's Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, "The Social Determination of Method," it now seems to me that much of the work has already been done. (Though Badiou is not an explicit target of Mészáros's polemics.)

Before I get too glowing in my praise of Mészáros, it is only fair to inform the reader that I approached this book predisposed against it. We are told not to judge a book by its cover, but when the largest featured back-cover blurb cites Hugo Chávez, enemy of the working class, praising the author as "the pathfinder of socialism," I must be skeptical.

Alternately, before I get too harsh in my criticisms of this book, it is only fair to inform the reader that I approach the author predisposed to take him seriously. His scholarship in the early 1970s did a great deal to bring attention back to the work of his former teacher, György Lukács, and was quite insightful. If, forty years later, those insights do not seem terribly fresh, it is only because their validity has been taken for granted by most who have written about Lukács since.

Even though I've already made it through several chapters, I will break my comments up in a more piecemeal fashion. For now, I confine myself to the Introduction, which does a good job of laying out the structure of the work. This volume is devoted to describing and connecting to "the need to articulate and defend determinate social interests" (14) "the methodological characteristics of the various systems of though, which emerge within the historical framework and in support of capital's formation." (13) The first seven chapters of the book are each devoted to a methodological characteristic identified by Mészáros as one of "the most important," which he described as follows:

1. "Programmatic orientation towards science and the key methodological/theoretical as well as practical role assigned to natural science."
2. "General tendency to formalism."
3. The standpoint of isolated individuality and its enduring methodological equivalent, capital's "standpoint of political economy...."
4. "Negative determination of philosophy and social theory."
5. "...suppression of historical temporality."
6. "The imposition of a dualistic and dichotomous categorial matrix on philosophy and social theory...."
7. "The abstract postulates of "unity" and "universality" as the wishful transcendence of the persistent dichotomies--in place of real mediations--and the purely speculative supersession of the major social cotnradictions without altering in the slightest their causal foundations in the actually existing world."

Attentive readers will likely guess that I was most dubious of #1. Indeed I was, and the chapter devoted to it is the weakest of the chapters I have read thus far. I will also have a few things to say about #4. It is worth noting that #2-7 can all be related rather directly to Badiou's work with minimal effort. If one accepts Mészáros's basic contention that such methodologies furnish the consistent, interlocking means through which thinkers "not only adopt but actively and ... consciously shape--both when they originally articulate and when they subsequently renew--the position corresponding to the vital interests of the capitalist system," (16) then a rejection of Badiou would be a comparatively trivial step.

The final, and longest, chapter of the volume is devoted to "method in a historical epoch of transition." That would be an apt way of summing up what I'm on about, even if I end up disagreeing significantly with his formulations. In that section, presumably, is where we will find what Mészáros considers to be "those elements of the theories in question which must be and can only be "aufgehoben"; that is, dialectically superseded/preserved by being raised to a historically more advanced level, so as to be put to a socially positive use." (23)

Nonetheless, he puts a rhetorical foot wrong early on, when he claims that "the methodological parameters of the various theories which coherently articulate the fundamental interests of this class basis, notwithstanding the difference of the particular thinkers ... are set for the epoch [of capital] in its entirety...." (12, emphasis added) This can lead even an attentive reader to mistakenly draw the conclusion that Mészáros is arguing that the core features of capitalist thought are basically invariant. Yet further on, he contrasts Descartes insistence "on the importance of making knowledge practical and useful" to Husserl's "rigid opposition between 'the theoretical attitude' and 'the practical'" (21) as an example of a "most revealing" "contrast between the views of the great thinkers of the more remote past and some twentieth century conceptualizations of the same problem." (20) The implication, which ought for political reasons to be made more explicit, being that there are clear differences that can be demarcated with the capitalist epoch, between the period of transition to the rule of capital, the period of its apogee, and the period of its senescence. And when he goes on to praise Descartes for being "fully conscious of the importance of carrying on the work of intellectual creation as a genuine collective enterprise," stating that "Only by reviving such ethos, and meaningfully enhancing it in accordance with the urgent requirements of our own time, can we really face up to the issues we must confront," (21) I can only say, "Hear, hear!" (Yet I must then ask: Why not make explicit what is only implied, that the proletariat can learn from the ethos of the bourgeoisie in the period of its rise? And is that ethos of collective effort quite as dead as the word "reviving" would make it seem?)

Where Mészáros's thought appears to be most provocative, and where I suspect any disagreements would acquire the greatest political force, therefore, is on the topic of "historical necessity". (There's that phrase again!) "Historical necessity is truly historical not simply because it emerges with undeniable firmness from highly complex dialectical determinations in the course of its unfolding, but also because it becomes in due course a "disappearing necessity" ... in Marx's words. Voluntaristically ignoring this vital aspect of historical necessity can produce devastating socioeconomic and political consequences, as we had to learn it in the twentieth century from the tragic failure of some major strategies pursued in the socialist movement." (20) The emphasis both on the reality of historical necessity and on its complex, fleeting character is welcome. The talk of a single "socialist movement" suffering tragedy due only to the failure of one or another "strategy," as if the problems with Stalin or Mao could be summed up in terms of their being too "voluntaristic," is rather more dubious.

Anti-Badiou, Part 2

If I had been in an organization large enough to admit of extensive specialization, rather than one in which specializations were necessarily multiple, relative and contingent (and thus hardly specializations at all), it's at least probable that I would have had to track developments in Marxist philosophy, and with that the extensive literary output of István Mészáros over the last 16 years. Instead, I'm catching up by working backwards, beginning with the two volumes (to date) of his Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness. Critical notes thereon will be forthcoming, and frankly, more interesting than anything that can be said about Badiou. In fact, much of what remains to be said about Badiou has already been said by Mészáros about more interesting thinkers (e.g. Sartre).

Ideas without History

Having elided a conjecture, misnamed as a hypothesis, into the hoary Platonism of the Idea, it remains for Badiou to articulate what he means by "Idea"--since despite the acknowledged debt to Plato the underlying metaphysics are plainly not identical--what he means by "communism," and what these have to do with one another. On page 235, we finally find a definition of "Idea," and even though it is incomprehensible without the full text of the six pages preceding (and barely comprehensible with), I will give it to you anyway:

"A formal definition of the Idea can immediately be given: an Idea is the subjectivation of an interplay between the singularity of a truth procedure and a representation of history.

"In the case that concerns us here, we will say that an Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process ... is also, in a certain way, a historical decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, as an element of the new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History."

Now, I could unpack that for you by referring to his earlier definitions of "Subject", "subjectivation", and "truth procedure", or I could sum it up by giving a humorous example of exactly the kind of paradox this embodies:

"I'm not," indeed. For like the reluctant false prophet Brian, Badiou takes the grounding assumption of bourgeois ideology, the primacy of the individual, and projects it into a natural (or, more true to his rhetoric, ontological) law. On the preceding page, he provides a very revealing parenthesis. In describing the decision "to become ... a militant of this truth," he states, "This is the moment when an individual declares that he or she can go beyond the bounds (of selfishness, competition, finitude...) set by individualism (or animality - they're one and the same thing)."

To presume that individuality and animality are one and the same is to immediately give ground to the capitalist presumption that the way things are is grounded in the very nature of the human being as a sentient animal. From such an individualist standpoint, the Pythons satirize the very possibility of political militancy, under cover of a rationalist critique of religion. (Case in point: Splitter!) Badiou, from the same starting point, retreats to the Christian view of an ascetic overcoming of the sinful, animal, material shell of the human body in this world to join as spirit in the transcendent Subject with a capital-S.

(Yes, I keep making Monty Python references throughout this post. No one who refers, without detectable irony, to "my friend Slavoj Žižek" [237] could have a good faith objection to a philosophical argument that uses vulgar jokes from silly movies to make its points.)

Part of what makes The Life of Brian funny, funnier perhaps than its creators even realized, is its recurrent anachronism, and the same anachronism takes on a much graver mien in Badiou's work. The very notion of universal individualism would have been impossible to conceive in a society based on slavery and tax farming. The hermeneutic attempts of Protestant theologians to read it backward into the Gospels are themselves a comic-apologetic instance of the anachronism that in Python is reduced to a purely comic residue. The notion that the decision of an "individual" to join with an (unspecified) historical Subject is something of metaphysical significance dehistoricizes individuality. It can more truthfully be said that there were collective historical subjects before the individual, as a substance that could be abstracted from the determinations of gender, family, property and the state, ever existed. If one takes individualism as one's starting point, one never arrives at a collective historical subject, or does so only by way of paradox. That such a paradox describes the normative, meteoric trajectory of many a middle-class intellectual into and out of proletarian movements over the last 150 years of history makes it no less of a paradox.

How can I fairly say that Badiou dehistoricizes? After all, has he not said that the individual "realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History"? But Badiou says it himself, or rather, he tells us that "History does not exist". "What does exist, however, under the real condition of organized political action, is the communist Idea, an operation tied to intellectual subjectivation and that integrates the real, the symbolic and the ideological at the level of the individual." (241)

So how does one belong to the movement of something that does not exist? One belongs to it as a "representation", in which one integrates reality into a symbolic order coherent with an ideology that one avows individually. Put another way, "Only the true Messiah denies his divinity." And He never really comes: "I should know, I've followed a few."

I had hoped to get to Truth without Facts, but I'll save it for a week or so later. I'll try to post some comments on Mészáros in the interim.