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Post-marxism in a French context
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Post-marxism in a French context a
Patrick Murray & Jeanne A. Schuler
a
a
Creighton University Nebraska, USA Published online: 03 Jan 2012.
To cite this article: Patrick Murray & Jeanne A. Schuler (1988) Post-marxism in a French context, History of European Ideas, 9:3, 321-334, DOI: 10.1016/0191-6599(88)90174-X To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0191-6599(88)90174-X
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POST-MARXISM IN A FRENCH CONTEXT
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PATRICK MURRAY* and
JEANNE A.
SCHULER*
In 1972 western Marxism was still described as the 'unknown dimension '1. The subsequent decade and a half has witnessed a surge of articles and books exploring the philosophical roots of the European Marxist tradition, its debt to Hegel, its attention to the interplay between consciousness and history, its involvement in radical politics, its courageous attempts to preserve a humanistic side of Marx in the face of Soviet mechanistic science and authoritarian politics. 2 So recently recognised as a continuous tradition, western Marxism is being abandoned by many of its former proponents. The movement beyond Marx is made on both sides of the Atlantic by eminent intellectuals who have spent decades affiliated with a humanistic brand of Marxism and who, in recent years, have 'gone public' with the insistence that Marx, rather than opening up fruitful critical perspectives on capitalism, is part of the problem. 3 We are familiar with attacks on Marx from conservatives. It is less c o m m o n to find him villified by those steeped in the Marxist tradition who continue to regard themselves as left of social democracy. A leftist today, goes a refrain, must admit to the obsolescence, even danger, latent in Marx's rationalistic theories. We want to explore this current of Post-Marxism by highlighting the work of three figures working in France: Cornelius Castoriadis, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Post-Marxists are noteworthy for several reasons. Their number and consensus indicate that a shift is underway in the critical theory of society. Unlike some ex-Marxists who work out a compromise with the existing state of affairs, many of these critics charge Marx with a failure of nerve and imagination, a lack of commitment to emancipation, creativity, political p r a x i s - - f o r being a closet capitalist! New models of science, theory and language are used to scrutinise Marxian texts. Cultural anthropology is invoked to undermine Marx's generalisations about history. Rather than the old workingclasses, new social movements--anti-war, civil rights, women's, nuclear disarmament, ecology--are taken as potent sources of resistance, while the concept of revolutionary agency is hotly contested. A deep appreciation abides here for traditional liberal values long overshadowed by economic concerns, e.g. 1free speech and public debates, a convivial civil society. Many of the criticisms are old: the absence of revolution in advanced industrial society; the conservatism and high living standard of the working-class; and, above all, the repressiveness of Soviet Communism. The balance of evidence tilts against Marx as the authoritarian drive of communist parties and governments is *Department of Philosophy, Creighton University, Omaha, NE 68178, U.S.A. 321
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rooted in his theory. Totalitarianism is seen to shadow any social theory that presumptously circumscribes the whole. With an ironic twist, the Post-Marxists put Hegel, lately lauded as a source of Marx's humanism, in the role of the protototalitarian, while the badge of 'humanist' sinks into defamation. In presenting the views ofCastoriadis, Baudrillard and Lyotard, we respond in each case to the questions: (1) What are his chief criticisms of Marx? (2) What are his own philosophical and sociological innovations? and (3) What is left to be done politically? We close with a brief inventory and assessment of the more provocative criticisms made by these Post-Marxists.
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CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS The best gloss on Castoriadis appeared in paint sprayed on the walls of Paris in May of 1968: 'All power to the imagination.' He was an early New Left activist, who, from his youthful membership in the Greek Communist Party to his current contempt for Marxism, has always insisted on the creativity of the masses: power belongs to the people, intellectuals do best simply to heed the ideas uncovered during actual political struggles. Whenever left-wing organisations compromised human emancipation, Castoriadis sided with emancipation. When bureaucracy and terror emerged as the face of communism, Castoriadis resigned from membership in the Communist Party; from the Trotskyite Fourth International; and, after sixteen years, from the journal he founded, Socialism or Barbarism. His mistrust of o r t h o d o x y - - b o t h theories and parties-was congenial to the student movement that aligned with workers and professionals during the strikes of M a y 1968. Like Herbert Marcuse, Castoriadis was able to cross from Old Left issues like unions and strikes to New Left movements of feminism, student power and ecology. The event which briefly crystallised Castoriadis's hopes for a free society was the Hungarian Revolution (1956), when the true meaning of socialism--selfm a n a g e m e n t - - w a s glimpsed. Intellectuals like Sartre who were accustomed to defending political bureaucracies, e.g. communist parties, and not spontaneous political expressions of human beings, condemned the Hungarians or were silent when the Russians crushed the revolution. For Castoriadis, self-management forms the heart of socialism. To focus on ownership or distribution is to remain a capitalist at heart. So the Bolsheviks were not simply totalitarian bureaucrats from the first; they were capitalists who accumulated wealth through a bureaucratic apparatus rather than the fragmented market mechanism. Castoriadis classifies capitalism as classical or bureaucratic, fragmented or total. However, what the U.S.S.R. and western nations share is a social imaginary--the dream of 'the unlimited expansion of "rational" m a s t e r y ' ? The bitter realities of the Soviet Union lead Castoriadis to reconsider Marx. ' Capital must be read in light of Russia, not Russia in the light of Capital.'S In that light, Castoriadis situates Marx's theorising squarely within the capitalist social regime and more generally within the confines of~inherited thought', i.e. western rationalism. The party's grip on all aspects of social life in Russia embodies Marx's levelling of life to labour in the theory of value. Against Marx's theory of value Castoriadis mounts several lines of attack.
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Bureaucratic capitalism supersedes market mechanisms and suspends the law of value, but the theory's problems begin earlier. Castoriadis argues that none of the defining features of value: socially necessary labour time, simple labour, abstract labour, are intelligible. The famous laws of the increasing organic composition of capital and the falling rate of profit are rejected as non sequiturs. Only by abstracting from the reality of the class struggle can Marx assert that labour power has any determinate value or use-value. In actuality, both the amount of work done and the wages received are determined politically, through class struggle. Castoriadis further holds that Marx's theory of value cannot accommodate the reality of significant technological change: the value of older machinery would fail to be conserved; the values of capital goods would be indeterminate, not fixed quantities. Not surprisingly, these last criticisms appeal to human creativity; 'economic laws', Marxist or otherwise, preclude human spontaneity. Castoriadis extends this criticism to the doctrine of historical materialism: there is no law, teleology or science governing history. The technological determinism of historical materialism could not be reconciled with a class struggle that involves freedom and imagination. So Marx abandoned class struggle. Regarding the primacy of the mode of production in historical materialism, Castoriadis minces no words. Such productivism 'amounts to judging the entirety of human history on the basis of the crudest and most brutal mentality a capitalist employer could ever have had'. 6 The notion of the mode of production is not discarded, merely subordinated to the more comprehensive 'social regime', which refers to the institution of a society, including its 'social imaginary'. 7 Marx's pseudo-sciences of economics and historical materialism flourish in the soil of the capitalist social imaginary. Its dream of unlimited 'rational' mastery appropriates 'the axiom of the sovereignty of theory, which underlies all of western history', s The suppression of human creativity, presupposed by rationalism's privileging of theory, breeds authoritarianism. Castoriadis allows for ambiguities in Marx's thought but none in Marxism's history. Ironically, 'Marxism has become the transmission belt of capitalist significations into the proletariat'. 9 Marxism turns out to be the ideology of bureaucracy, the flowering of the spirit of capitalism. Castoriadis's anti-authoritarian politics drives his study of capitalism back to a radical critique of western thought. He is impressed by the homology between economics and rationalism. The economy is the domain where the Different is nothing but a form of the identical, where the Other is reduced to the Same. It is here, to a large extent, that the form of equivalence rests and triumphs, that two things become essentially the same to the extent they have the 'same value', where the heterogeneity of objects and of human subjects is therefore reduced to purely quantitative differences.~° 'Reduction', 'identity', 'equivalence', 'purely quantitative' smack of intolerance and domination. Castoriadis shares the revulsion toward the 'clear and distinct' and the converse attraction toward the radically other that typifies today's French thinking. As a lifelong activist, however, he is repelled by the
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post-structuralist tolling the death of the subject. On this count, he belongs more in the company of Fichte, the Young Hegelians, or Existentialism, than a Foucault or Derrida. Politics is the activity of self-constituting a whole social formation. The spontaneity of the process bewilders traditional thought.
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To think the institution such as it is--as social-historical creation--requires the smashing of the framework of inherited logic-ontology. To propose another institution of society raises the issue of a political project and a goal, which can certainly be discussed and argued, but cannot be grounded in some kind of Nature or Reason. ~ According to Castoriadis, the prospects for revolution--creating an autonomous society--are largely what we make them to be. The proletariat, which took vital historical action over the past couple of centuries, no longer exists as a class. ~2 Given the extent to which the working-class absorbed the productivist imaginary of capitalism via liberalism, social democracy and Marxism, however, the dissolution of the proletariat and the upsurge of youth, women, minorities and others who question the system count as hopeful signs. The dubious side of Castoriadis's trust in the primacy of lived experience is the belief that Marx's text--or any other--is given its definitive reading by history. Castoriadis states that Marxism can no more be judged apart from the history of Marxism than Christianity can be judged apart from its institutions and traditions. ~3 He always identified Marx first as a revolutionary, and revolutionaries are measured by their fruits. This is a peculiar hermeneutic: to read a text through the behaviour of its interpreters. Though the motivations of Castoriadis are admirable, we find little to agree with in the criticisms themselves. A close reading of Marx suggests that he had no theory of history--'historical materialism' is a paper tiger of dogmatic Marxism. Marx's concept of theory or science with regard to capitalism is not the hackneyed deterministic one Castoriadis comes up with. Marx's theory of value parodies Hegel and puts forward a socio-epistemological critique of Hegel. And the claim that Marx (half the time) invokes value as a historical universal rests on a fundamental misreading of Capital. For a man so open to the creative dimensions of human activity, to settle for such an unsympathetic reading of Marx is out of character. Why is Castoriadis able to find insight in Aristotelian texts, despite their defence of slavery and hierarchy, when Marx presumably must be sacrificed to history--some atonement for the brutalities committed in his name?
JEAN BAUDRILLARD Marx indicts capitalism for turning all products into commodities and for exploiting workers. Baudrillard finds this assessment obsolete. By passing from the sphere of production to the superstructure--culture, family, ideology-commodification not merely intensifies capitalism but marks out new social relations. To understand these new relations, Baudrillard goes beyond the
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commodity form to the more general object form and sign form. These forms streamline our entire existence and destroy all symbolic, inherited meanings. All of life is now exposed to the hard glare of Enlightenment. Examples of this trend abound. The symbolically mediated, home-cooked supper is replaced with the TV dinner or a trip out for fast food; sex is picked up in bars and fitness clubs; wombs are contracted out for baby-making; media churches market spirituality; houses are no longer homes. By comparison, the code of exchange-value only partly realised the logic of abstraction and fungibility now pervasive. For Baudrillard, Marx's critique does not reach far enough. He rightly reveals the classical categories of exchange-value and value to be socially specific but treats use-value, needs, labour and production as universally applicable. Hence he falls victim to a bourgeois anthropology. Treated as properties of the species, use-value, need, and labour become fetishes which shrink the scope of radical politics. Use-value, equated by Baudrillard with utility, emerges from the destruction of the symbolic modes of relationship prominent in traditional societies. It is not a neutral category. Utility subjects all objects to abstract equivalence and functionality; this encoding is called the object form. 'For the object is not a thing, nor even a category; it is a status of meaning and a form. Before the logical advent of this object form, nothing is an object, not even the everyday utensils--thereafter, everything is, the building as well as the coffee spoon or the entire city. '14 Utility belongs to Enlightenment, to a disenchanted world. Needs, for Baudrillard, are the specific, subjective correlate of utility --desire honed down and designated. It is necessary to grasp that what produces the commodity system in its general form is the concept of need itself, as constitutive of the very structure of the individual--that is, the historical concept of a social being who, in the rupture of symbolic exchange, autonomizes himself and rationalizes his desire, his relation to others and to objects, in terms of needs, utility, satisfaction and use value) 5 As the storeclerk says, 'you'll find all your needs up on the shelves'. Marx contrasts socially specific abstract labour that creates exchange-value with the general notion of useful labour. Baudrillard, however, situates useful labour within the confines of capitalism 'as what disinvests the body and social exchange of all ambivalent and symbolic qualities, reducing them to a rational, positive, unilateral investment'. 16 Labour produces utility to satisfy needs of autonomous, rational subjects. This interpretation of labour undercuts the supposedly universal categories of historical materialism, such as mode of production and relations of production. For Baudrillard, the theory of historical materialism is circumscribed by capitalism. It is not merely a bust as a theory, but it signifies an ethnocentric and capitalistic imposition on history. Under the influence of Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes, Baudrillard adds the sign form to the object form in order to analyse capitalism. Just as Marx unmasked the presuppositions of classical political economy and denaturalised the commodity form, Baudrillard locates the basic presuppositions of structural linguistics and semiotics (signifier, signified, code, message, denotation) within a
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peculiar social construction, thereby denaturalising the sign form. Sign-value rationalises social power and gauges status. It is governed by a code distinct, from though not unrelated to, those of exchange- and use-values. Consider the relative sign-values of a Cadillac versus a Plymouth, a Rolex versus a Timex, a Heineken versus a H a m m s , Marriot versus Motel 6. In paying for a label or a name we convert money (exchange-value) into prestige (sign-value). In joining the object and the sign forms to Marx's concept of the commodity form, Baudrillard projects a generalised political economy which would be a theory of value in all its forms. 1+ The logic of value underlying its three forms (exchange, use, sign) is identity, equivalence, discreteness, reduction, abstraction, system, code. In the shadow of this pervasive logic is the non-valued: ambivalence, concreteness, irreplaceability, the unsaturated, reciprocity. Here Baudrillard offers his own deconstruction of western metaphysics with 'ambivalence' evoking Derrida's 'diff~rance'. TM Rationalism, idealism, humanism, empiricism--all the epithets of post-structuralist t h o u g h t - - a r e gathered by Baudrillard under the rubric of value. A distinctive and almost hyper-Marxian quality of his deconstruction is the claim that western rationalism is the metaphysics of political economy. To overthrow the system of political economy, then, would be to open up radically new horizons for thought, as well as for relating to persons and nature. This triple coding of value--exchange, use, sign--allows for a more differentiated analysis of the contemporary world than the Marxist preoccupation with exchange-value. Baudrillard makes it clear that the three codings of value have their different histories. The commodity form takes hold first; the functional aesthetic of the Bauhaus early in this century inaugurates the object form, while the penetration of consumer consciousness by the mass media announces the upsurge of the sign form. In a fascinating chapter, Baudrillard suggests that postmodernism arises from the crisis of functionalism, t9 As the utilitarian code of design loses its bearings, the kitschy code of sign-value supplants it and propagates fashion; witness the Swatch watch, designer cigarettes, TV politics. Social contradictions have shifted from production to consumption. Economic restructuring in the wake of the Depression solved the crisis of production and developed extensive controls over marketing and desire. Under this new social regime, the traditional Marxist aims of redistributing income and ownership become a dead weight for progressive politics. The truly radical movements today question the compulsive performance principle and the commodity code of prestige. The challenges are coming from those denigrated or shunned by the code: women, racial minorities, youth, the aged, the unemployed. Of our present society Baudrillard writes that its chief deficit is not economic or political but the inability to reproduce itself symbolically. As symbolic exchanges become endangered, human personality suffers ever more dissociations. New contradictions arise: consumers experience a 'falling rate of enjoyment "2° as our pleasures are crimped by the code. It is the frustrating search for satisfaction, not class struggle, which sparks political consciousness today. As an interpreter of Marx, Baudrillard appreciates what is most brilliant in the work: his attentiveness to the social, political and philosophical content of categories, notably those of classical political economy. Like Lukfics, Adorno,
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Marcus and Sohn-Rethel, Baudrillard continues this radical social critique of forms (the object form, the sign form). Distinguishing the sign and object forms (utility, needs, the autonomous subject, and labour) from exchange-value is most perceptive. Some of the specific criticisms of Marx, however, are poorly founded. The identification of use-value with utility and useful labour with instrumental action misreads the text in an Enlightenment direction. Moreover this reading misses two key features of the placement and status of the categories of use-value and useful labour at the beginning of Capital. These categories are general abstractions which apply to all societies, but do not fully characterise any particular product or labour. In any context, use-value and useful labour will be further determined, in ways that could include symbolic exchange. More to the point, Marx does not leave the categories of use-value and useful labour in static opposition to those of exchange-value and abstract (valueproducing) labour. They interact under the rubric of the 'real subsumption' of labour by capital, whereby the actual process of labour as well as the way in which labour is conceived are transformed by the logic of value. It is this real subsumption which resonates with Baudrillard's notions of utility and labour (as instrumental action). The potential of Marx's rubric of real subsumption has been largely unexplored. Baudrillard's investigations into evolving capitalist forms should be brought under this rubric. He is less Post-Marxist than he recognises.
JEAN-FRANCOIS LYOTARD Lyotard writes in a spirit of celebration31 We are moving into a postmodern age, fortunately. This optimism is fueled by what others fear as the breakdown of social networks. He sees in the fluid, shifting patterns of human life, a possibly healthy non-normalisation. Lyotard is one of the few outside Madison Avenue who is upbeat about the prospect of institutions, relationships, emotions and politics in which 'nothing lasts'. The temporary contract which pervades society is a welcome, if ambiguous, development. 22 Modernism legitimates science and social norms by appealing to an allencompassing narrative. Since the Enlightenment, human emancipation (associated with English and French revolutionary politics and Kant's philosophy) and the unification of science and praxis (associated with the founding of the University of Berlin and the philosophy of Hegel) have been the grand narratives. They govern our lives no longer. Discourse is now regional and diverse, like styles of art. Even to long for one common explanation betrays a dangerous bent of mind. This condition of disbelief is defined by Lyotard as postmodernism. One explanation of postmodernism is socio-economic. Once measured in factory inventory, wealth and power are now housed in computers. Knowledge has become the leading force of production in 'postindustrial society'. Not those who own, but those who manage information, control our lives. The objectification of knowledge into saleable 'bits', the inversion of knowledge
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from the loftiest goal to a means for accumulating money and power subvert the grand narratives. Lyotard also provides an internal, intellectual account of postmodernism's genesis. Under critical scrutiny, both the speculative and the emancipatory narratives prove unstable and decompose. Nietzsche deflates the speculative narrative by pressing for its legitimation. 23 Lyotard offers the following scenario regarding emancipation's distinction between the descriptive and the prescriptive: 'the effect.., is to attack the legitimacy of the discourse of science... indirectly, by revealing that it is a language game with its own r u l e s . . , and that it has no special calling to supervise the game of praxis (nor the game of aesthetics, for that matter). The game of science is thus put on a par with the others. '24 A further account of performativity is found in Lyotard's discussion of the fate of the two modern models of society; society as a functional whole (structural) performativity. 25 This power discourse comes out of the industrialisation of science. 'The State a n d / o r company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power. '26 We shall see that there is more to the pragmatics of science than this dependency on costly technology. A further account of performativity is found in Lyotard's discussion of the fate of the two modern models of society: society as a functional whole (structural) functionalism and systems theory--Parsons and Luhmann) and society as divided and conflictual (Marxism). In Marx, Lyotard notes a struggle between the influences of Kant (emancipation) and Hegel (speculation), with the latter prevailing. Hence Marx lacks skepticism about the claims of theory to capture the truth. Science supposedly reflects reality; truth is univocal. Theorising, perhaps history, is expected to stop with the completion of a thorough explanation. Marx didn't realise how theories inevitably generate differing perspectives which 'make our lives new' by undermining received views. He is throughly under the sway of Hegel with new actors performing old roles: the proletariat as Spirit, the political party as the university, socialism as absolute knowledge. 27 The web which takes us from Hegelian totality through Marx to Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot is nearly seamless. In Lyotard's view, the Frankfurt School's battles against one-dimensionality or the eclipse of reason, 28 along with the politics of the Socialism or Barbarism group, represented the dying gasps of Marxist theory. With the demise of the master narratives on which it was based, more particularly, with the demise of the revolutionary proletariat, Marxism drops out as an alternative to systems theory. 2~ Lyotard's postmodern alternative sidesteps the choice between systems or conflict theory. The language game provides a better model of society than the gestalt of structural functionalism or Marxist classes. From Wittgenstein, he takes the cue that language cannot be formalised but is concerned with human practices, struggles and decisions over rules. Persons are united in shifting alliances governed by language, interests and competition. Diversity is an irremediable fact since there is no metadiscourse encapsulating the multitude of
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language games. Even the consensus sought by Jiirgen Habermas expresses longing for identity and aversion to differences, thus taking a step toward the elimination of dissent. 3° 'Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate differences and save the honor of the name TM urges Lyotard. The account of postmodern science bolsters this notion of society as a mix of incommensurable language games and thereby undermines the claims of system theorists to legitimate social norms. Performativity as an ideal of systems theory presumes that the 'one best answer' to any problem can be computed, given sufficient information. But postmodern science, with its fractais, catastrophes and pragmatic paradoxes, views determined solutions as rarities. 32 Moreover, postmodern science itself is not governed by the goal ofperformativity. Pushing the avant-garde views of Kuhn and Feyerabend to the hilt, Lyotard maintains that paralogy (pressing against the limits of the intolerable in a language game) is the product prized by postmodern science. Science labours to generate, not to restrict, ideas. 'Having ideas is the scientist's highest accomplishment' says P.B.Medawar? 3 However, Lyotard wants to do more with science than dispatch the pretensions of systems theory. Paralogy, not performativity, models social life as well as science. This conclusion is, however, ironic. The alternative to positivism and the totally administered society of systems theory rests not with Marx's proletariat. Adorno's micrological excavations, 34 nor Jfirgen H a b e r m a s ' s communicative community, but in the thought of a man for whom philosophy leaves things just as they are, Ludwig Wittgenstein. 35 Freedom, then, is not hinged to some future society. It is immanent in the unruly situation of our language, which refuses simply to say one thing or conform to one purpose. More than economic, freedom is aesthetic: the production of the new. 36 Uncontrolled, unintended allusions can never be driven away from words. Equivocity is cause for celebration, not for a linguistic cleanup. Lyotard argues that justice, respect for the irreducible plurality of perspectives, is the central political virtue. I am no more reducible to my classconciousness than the world is reducible to one meaning. With Seyla Benhabib we wonder if Lyotard is capable of justifying his own commitment to justice. 37 If all language has provisional value only, if it moves and shifts with our interests and needs, why insist on justice above all? Is there really any social theory left? Does only a spattering of political views remain? Lyotard's extension of paralogy from philosophy of science to social life is questionable. Where is all the newness he speaks of?. Do teachers, professionals, ordinary citizens share the experience of novelty found in the art galleries, bookshops and research institutes? Lyotard defends diversity as a bulwark against exploitation; is he rather catering to the needs of a voracious market that also continually promises the new. 38
CONCLUSION With Castoriadis the focus is creative political action; with Baudrillard,
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symbolic exchange; with Lyotard, heterogeneous language games. However, advocating the incommensurable preoccupies all three authors. Each reacts to the dominance of instrumental rationality (labelled variously as the object form, functionalism, rational mastery, bureaucracy, performativity) in present societies, a dominance joined in their minds with terror. On this fundamental level, the three agree that Marx is a rationalist--part of the problem, not the solution. Closely associated with the charge of rationalism is the claim that Marx was a Hegelian, in particular, that he adopted Hegel's conceptions of totality and speculative science. For the Post-Marxists, the epistemological use of 'totality' actually invites some Party to reserve for itself the standpoint of the Absolute, take the reins of society, and direct it according to its 'scientific' vision. This way Marx's Hegelianism becomes his original sin, not his salvation. For Castoriadis and Baudrillard, Marx's rationalism merges with his economism. Despite his critique, Marx shared the capitalist vision of the human as hama ecanamicus, of labour and productivity as the fundamental way of being in the world. So, the problem with capitalism is that it obstructs technological and economic progress. C o m m u n i s m would be well-oiled capitalism with Marx its unwitting prophet. Historical materialism, for these authors, involves the ethnocentric blanketing of history with the capitalist ethos (or social imaginary as Castoriadis would put it). Masquerading as a science, historical materialism suppresses respect for symbolic exchange, appreciation of real political or technological creativity, recognition of the heterogeneity of the language games played out in society. And the protagonist in Marx's grand historical narrative, the proletariat, is quite a disappointment. The theoretical centrepiece of Capital, the labour theory of value, does not fare well with Post-Marxists. It is either objectionable from its inception or obsolete. For Castoriadis the basic notions of socially necessary, simple and abstract labour are all incoherent, and the 'law' of value abstracts from the spontaneity found in class struggle and technological innovation. Baudrillard diagnoses the categories of use-value and useful labour as of capitalistic vintage. And all three are impressed by the destructive consequences for the theory following from the bureaucratisation of capitalism and the enormous role of technology and science in production. Since Marx pinned his political hopes on the proletariat, its dissolution leaves his thought without much practical punch. Conversely, the new social movements in which Post-Marxism takes heart, find no mandate from Marx. Of course, the Soviet experience is the most devastating of all commentaries on Marxist politics. Castoriadis, Baudrillard and Lyotard are each precursors and veterans of the events of May 1968 in France. Their work represents an important site where remnants of the New Left think through their relation to the Marxist tradition. Though their politics as well as their criticisms of Marxism are often compelling, we find them misguided with respect to Marx's own thought. Marx does not conform to the cramped Hegelian mold depicted here. If textual subtleties are respected. Marx continues to be a major resource for understanding this postmodern world. 39 Nonetheless, the Post-Marxists pose the difficult question
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that a n y i n t e r p r e t a t i o n must face. Does Marx have a critical theory of r a t i o n a l i s a t i o n or is he a n o t h e r apologist for the basic logic of capitalism? 4° Patrick M u r r a y J e a n n e A. Schuler
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NOTES 1. The phrase was used by Dick Howard and Karl Klare in the book they edited, The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism since Lenin (New York, 1972). 2. General accounts of western Marxism include Dick Howard's The Marxian Legacy (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), Russell Jacoby's Dialectic of Defeat: Contours o f Western Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Martin Jay's Marxism and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See also the review essay on Jacoby's book, Patrick Murray and Jeanne A. Schuler, 'Western Marxism's dialectic of defeat', Philosophy of the Social Sciences 16 (September 1986), 375-82. 3. Post-Marxism seems to be most widespread in France, where many other authors could be added to the three we consider. Representatives of Post-Marxism in the United States include Alvin Gouldner, along with several persons associated with the journal Telos. While Jfirgen Habermas in West Germany has made many deep criticisms of Marx, he prefers to think of his research programme as a reconstruction of Marxism. 4. Cornelius Castoriadis, 'The social regime in Russia', trans. David J. Parent, Telos, No. 38 (Winter 1978-9), 46. 5. Ibid., p. 39. 6. Cornelius Castoriadis, 'An interview with C. Castoriadis', trans. Bart Grahl and David Pugh, Telos, No. 23 (Spring 1975), 149. 7. For Castoriadis, the social imaginary is what is at the heart of every socio-historical formation: the complex of imaginary social significations in and by which it organizes itself and its world. That is, socio-historical formations constitute themselves in the first place by establishing a complex of terms and referents (significations), which are imaginary inasmuch as there is no real or rational basis for them and which are social inasmuch as they are valid for all members of the formation. Cornelius Castoriadis, 'On the history of the workers' movement', trans. Brian Singer, Telos, No. 30 (Winter 1976-7), 7. See his 'Interview', p. 154 for a particularly Hegelian sounding version of this thought. 8. Ibid., p. 4. 9. Ibid., p. 40. Castoriadis elaborates: The solemn theorization of the primacy of production and economics, the consecration of the technique and organization of capitalist production as inevitable, the justification of wage differences, scientism, rationalism, the blind obeisance in the face of bureaucracy, the adoration and importation into the workers' movement of models of capitalist organization and efficiency-these are only a few of the themes that firmly anchor Marxism in the capitalist
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universe, that specify the disastrous influence it has exercised on the workers movement, and that show how it was predestined to become the natural ideology of the bureaucracy. I0. Cornelius Castoriadis, ' F r o m Marx to Aristotle, from Aristotle to us', Social Research 45 (Winter 1978), 685. 11. Ibid., pp. 736-7. This passage suggests that while Castoriadis would agree with rejecting what Lyotard will identify as the modern master social narratives, which do appeal to Nature and Reason, he does not share Lyotard's principled rejection of grand social narratives. On the contrary, a society without a grand narrative is scarcely intelligible according to Castoriadis. 12. See 'Interview', p. 150. 13. See ibid., p. 149. 14. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), p. 185. 15. Ibid., p. 136. 16. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975), p. 46. Cf. Mirror, p. 45. 17. The Parker Brothers' board game Life, in which money (exchange-value), happiness (utility), and fame (prestige, status) function as components in a winning strategy of maximising life 'values', catches the gist of Baudrillard's general theory of value. 18. See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 1-27. 19. Baudrillard, 'Design and environment or how political economy escalates into cyberblitz', in For a Critique, pp. 185-203. 20. Baudrillard, For a Critique, p. 207. 21. Jean-Francois Lyotard was a member of Socialism or Barbarism and, like Castoriadis, retired from the group for more philosophical studies. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'Presentations', in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 128-9, on his break with Socialism or Barbarism. He is now professor of philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes. 22. The temporary contract is in practice supplanting permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family, and international domains, as well as in political affairs. This evolution is of course ambiguous: the temporary contract is favored by the system due to its greater flexibility, lower cost, and the creative turmoil of its accompanying motivations--all of these factors contribute to increased operativity . . . . We should be happy that the tendency toward the temporary contract is ambiguous: it is not totally subordinated to the goal of the system, yet the system tolerates it. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 66. 23. Lyotard associates the consequent perspectivism of Nietzsche with Wittgenstein's notion of language games. See Postmodern Condition, p. 39. 24. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, p. 40. 25. This is reminiscent of the 'technological veil' thesis of Marcuse, as discussed by Jtirgen Habermas in his essay 'Science and technology as "ideology", in Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 81-122. It is noteworthy that both Marcuse and Habermas suppose that modern science shares in modern technology's logic of performativity (or instrumentality), while, as we shall see, the key to Lyotard's argument in the Postmodern Condition turns on sharply distinguishing the logic (or 'pragmatics') of science from technology. Paralogy, not
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performativity, is the basis of legitimation for postmodern science. 26. Ibid., p. 46. 27. Lyotard provides two, somewhat inconsistent, versions of these parallels. See Postmodern Condition, pp. 36-7 and 'Presentations', p. 127. 28. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) and Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947). 29. For Lyotard, this is a°chilling consequence:
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In the work of contemporary German theorists, systemtheorie is technocratic, even cynical, not to mention despairing: the harmony between the needs and hopes of individuals or groups and the functions guaranteed by the system is now only a secondary component of its functioning. The true goal of the s y s t e m . . , is the optimization of the global relationship between input and o u t p u t - - i n other words, performativity.
30. 31. 32.
33. 34. 35.
36.
37.
For Jfirgen Habermas, who shares Lyotard's negative assessment of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, the fashioning of an alternative to systems theory is of paramount importance. See the following note. See, for example, Jfirgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), pp. 1-68. Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'Answering the question: what is postmodernism', trans. Regis Durand in Postmodern Condition, p. 82. See Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, pp. 53-60, for Lyotard's discussion of postmodern science. On p. 55, he mentions the following argument against systems theory: 'Brillouin's argument leads to the conclusion that the idea (or ideology) of perfect control over a system, which is supposed to improve its performance, is inconsistent with respect to the law of contradiction: it in fact lowers the performance level it claims to raise.' It is noteworthy that both Castoriadis and Baudrillard similarly claim that bureaucracy and functionalism are fraught with internal contradictions and incoherencies. For Castoriadis, see 'Social regime', pp. 35 and 47. For Baudrillard, see For a Critique, pp. 192-8. Alasdair Maclntyre in his book After Virtue offers further arguments against the systems theory programme. As quoted in Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, p. 60. See Lyotard's discussion of Adorno and 'micrology' in 'Presentations'. Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of the language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot given any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 49e. Lyotard's notion of freedom appears to be 'aesthetic' in the technical sense in which Soren Kierkegaard distinguishes between the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious stages in life's way. Further support for this connection is found in Lyotard's remarks on the temporary contract. (See note 22 above.) Lyotard's references to 'experimenting thought', in p. 122 of 'Presentations' call to mind the category of active defiant despair in Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death. She puts the difficulty this way: Lyotard wants to deny the choice between instrumental and critical reason, between performativity and emancipation. But his agonistic philosophy either leads to a 'polytheism of values,' from which standpoint the principle of performativity or of emancipation cannot be criticized, or this philosophy does not remain wholly polytheistic but privileges one domain of discourse and
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Seyla Benhabib, 'Epistemologies of postmodernism: a rejoinder to Jean-Francois Lyotard', New German Critique (Fall 1984), 111. 38. Lyotard is not unaware of this issue:
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If today we can no longer 'talk big', it is not because the grand discourse manages to signify everything, but rather the opposite: it is so simplifying, with its exclusive criterion ofperformativity, and with money as the exclusive unit of measure for evaluating performances, that it can only set itself up against the proliferating complexities of language games as an abstraction which feeds upon them, gives rise to them and kills them (Lyotard, 'Presentations', p. 121.). See also note 22 above. 39. Support for these views on Marx may be found in Patrick Murray, Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987); Moishe Postone, 'Necessity, labor and time', SocialResearch 45 (Winter 1978), 739-88; and Moishe Postone, 'The present as necessity: towards a reinterpretation of the Marxian critique of labor and time', Ph.D dissertation, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, 1983. 40. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Tenth Annual European Studies Conference in Omaha, Nebraska, October 1985.
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POST-MARXISM IN A FRENCH CONTEXT
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PATRICK MURRAY* and
JEANNE A.
SCHULER*
In 1972 western Marxism was still described as the 'unknown dimension '1. The subsequent decade and a half has witnessed a surge of articles and books exploring the philosophical roots of the European Marxist tradition, its debt to Hegel, its attention to the interplay between consciousness and history, its involvement in radical politics, its courageous attempts to preserve a humanistic side of Marx in the face of Soviet mechanistic science and authoritarian politics. 2 So recently recognised as a continuous tradition, western Marxism is being abandoned by many of its former proponents. The movement beyond Marx is made on both sides of the Atlantic by eminent intellectuals who have spent decades affiliated with a humanistic brand of Marxism and who, in recent years, have 'gone public' with the insistence that Marx, rather than opening up fruitful critical perspectives on capitalism, is part of the problem. 3 We are familiar with attacks on Marx from conservatives. It is less c o m m o n to find him villified by those steeped in the Marxist tradition who continue to regard themselves as left of social democracy. A leftist today, goes a refrain, must admit to the obsolescence, even danger, latent in Marx's rationalistic theories. We want to explore this current of Post-Marxism by highlighting the work of three figures working in France: Cornelius Castoriadis, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Post-Marxists are noteworthy for several reasons. Their number and consensus indicate that a shift is underway in the critical theory of society. Unlike some ex-Marxists who work out a compromise with the existing state of affairs, many of these critics charge Marx with a failure of nerve and imagination, a lack of commitment to emancipation, creativity, political p r a x i s - - f o r being a closet capitalist! New models of science, theory and language are used to scrutinise Marxian texts. Cultural anthropology is invoked to undermine Marx's generalisations about history. Rather than the old workingclasses, new social movements--anti-war, civil rights, women's, nuclear disarmament, ecology--are taken as potent sources of resistance, while the concept of revolutionary agency is hotly contested. A deep appreciation abides here for traditional liberal values long overshadowed by economic concerns, e.g. 1free speech and public debates, a convivial civil society. Many of the criticisms are old: the absence of revolution in advanced industrial society; the conservatism and high living standard of the working-class; and, above all, the repressiveness of Soviet Communism. The balance of evidence tilts against Marx as the authoritarian drive of communist parties and governments is *Department of Philosophy, Creighton University, Omaha, NE 68178, U.S.A. 321
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rooted in his theory. Totalitarianism is seen to shadow any social theory that presumptously circumscribes the whole. With an ironic twist, the Post-Marxists put Hegel, lately lauded as a source of Marx's humanism, in the role of the protototalitarian, while the badge of 'humanist' sinks into defamation. In presenting the views ofCastoriadis, Baudrillard and Lyotard, we respond in each case to the questions: (1) What are his chief criticisms of Marx? (2) What are his own philosophical and sociological innovations? and (3) What is left to be done politically? We close with a brief inventory and assessment of the more provocative criticisms made by these Post-Marxists.
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CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS The best gloss on Castoriadis appeared in paint sprayed on the walls of Paris in May of 1968: 'All power to the imagination.' He was an early New Left activist, who, from his youthful membership in the Greek Communist Party to his current contempt for Marxism, has always insisted on the creativity of the masses: power belongs to the people, intellectuals do best simply to heed the ideas uncovered during actual political struggles. Whenever left-wing organisations compromised human emancipation, Castoriadis sided with emancipation. When bureaucracy and terror emerged as the face of communism, Castoriadis resigned from membership in the Communist Party; from the Trotskyite Fourth International; and, after sixteen years, from the journal he founded, Socialism or Barbarism. His mistrust of o r t h o d o x y - - b o t h theories and parties-was congenial to the student movement that aligned with workers and professionals during the strikes of M a y 1968. Like Herbert Marcuse, Castoriadis was able to cross from Old Left issues like unions and strikes to New Left movements of feminism, student power and ecology. The event which briefly crystallised Castoriadis's hopes for a free society was the Hungarian Revolution (1956), when the true meaning of socialism--selfm a n a g e m e n t - - w a s glimpsed. Intellectuals like Sartre who were accustomed to defending political bureaucracies, e.g. communist parties, and not spontaneous political expressions of human beings, condemned the Hungarians or were silent when the Russians crushed the revolution. For Castoriadis, self-management forms the heart of socialism. To focus on ownership or distribution is to remain a capitalist at heart. So the Bolsheviks were not simply totalitarian bureaucrats from the first; they were capitalists who accumulated wealth through a bureaucratic apparatus rather than the fragmented market mechanism. Castoriadis classifies capitalism as classical or bureaucratic, fragmented or total. However, what the U.S.S.R. and western nations share is a social imaginary--the dream of 'the unlimited expansion of "rational" m a s t e r y ' ? The bitter realities of the Soviet Union lead Castoriadis to reconsider Marx. ' Capital must be read in light of Russia, not Russia in the light of Capital.'S In that light, Castoriadis situates Marx's theorising squarely within the capitalist social regime and more generally within the confines of~inherited thought', i.e. western rationalism. The party's grip on all aspects of social life in Russia embodies Marx's levelling of life to labour in the theory of value. Against Marx's theory of value Castoriadis mounts several lines of attack.
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Bureaucratic capitalism supersedes market mechanisms and suspends the law of value, but the theory's problems begin earlier. Castoriadis argues that none of the defining features of value: socially necessary labour time, simple labour, abstract labour, are intelligible. The famous laws of the increasing organic composition of capital and the falling rate of profit are rejected as non sequiturs. Only by abstracting from the reality of the class struggle can Marx assert that labour power has any determinate value or use-value. In actuality, both the amount of work done and the wages received are determined politically, through class struggle. Castoriadis further holds that Marx's theory of value cannot accommodate the reality of significant technological change: the value of older machinery would fail to be conserved; the values of capital goods would be indeterminate, not fixed quantities. Not surprisingly, these last criticisms appeal to human creativity; 'economic laws', Marxist or otherwise, preclude human spontaneity. Castoriadis extends this criticism to the doctrine of historical materialism: there is no law, teleology or science governing history. The technological determinism of historical materialism could not be reconciled with a class struggle that involves freedom and imagination. So Marx abandoned class struggle. Regarding the primacy of the mode of production in historical materialism, Castoriadis minces no words. Such productivism 'amounts to judging the entirety of human history on the basis of the crudest and most brutal mentality a capitalist employer could ever have had'. 6 The notion of the mode of production is not discarded, merely subordinated to the more comprehensive 'social regime', which refers to the institution of a society, including its 'social imaginary'. 7 Marx's pseudo-sciences of economics and historical materialism flourish in the soil of the capitalist social imaginary. Its dream of unlimited 'rational' mastery appropriates 'the axiom of the sovereignty of theory, which underlies all of western history', s The suppression of human creativity, presupposed by rationalism's privileging of theory, breeds authoritarianism. Castoriadis allows for ambiguities in Marx's thought but none in Marxism's history. Ironically, 'Marxism has become the transmission belt of capitalist significations into the proletariat'. 9 Marxism turns out to be the ideology of bureaucracy, the flowering of the spirit of capitalism. Castoriadis's anti-authoritarian politics drives his study of capitalism back to a radical critique of western thought. He is impressed by the homology between economics and rationalism. The economy is the domain where the Different is nothing but a form of the identical, where the Other is reduced to the Same. It is here, to a large extent, that the form of equivalence rests and triumphs, that two things become essentially the same to the extent they have the 'same value', where the heterogeneity of objects and of human subjects is therefore reduced to purely quantitative differences.~° 'Reduction', 'identity', 'equivalence', 'purely quantitative' smack of intolerance and domination. Castoriadis shares the revulsion toward the 'clear and distinct' and the converse attraction toward the radically other that typifies today's French thinking. As a lifelong activist, however, he is repelled by the
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post-structuralist tolling the death of the subject. On this count, he belongs more in the company of Fichte, the Young Hegelians, or Existentialism, than a Foucault or Derrida. Politics is the activity of self-constituting a whole social formation. The spontaneity of the process bewilders traditional thought.
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To think the institution such as it is--as social-historical creation--requires the smashing of the framework of inherited logic-ontology. To propose another institution of society raises the issue of a political project and a goal, which can certainly be discussed and argued, but cannot be grounded in some kind of Nature or Reason. ~ According to Castoriadis, the prospects for revolution--creating an autonomous society--are largely what we make them to be. The proletariat, which took vital historical action over the past couple of centuries, no longer exists as a class. ~2 Given the extent to which the working-class absorbed the productivist imaginary of capitalism via liberalism, social democracy and Marxism, however, the dissolution of the proletariat and the upsurge of youth, women, minorities and others who question the system count as hopeful signs. The dubious side of Castoriadis's trust in the primacy of lived experience is the belief that Marx's text--or any other--is given its definitive reading by history. Castoriadis states that Marxism can no more be judged apart from the history of Marxism than Christianity can be judged apart from its institutions and traditions. ~3 He always identified Marx first as a revolutionary, and revolutionaries are measured by their fruits. This is a peculiar hermeneutic: to read a text through the behaviour of its interpreters. Though the motivations of Castoriadis are admirable, we find little to agree with in the criticisms themselves. A close reading of Marx suggests that he had no theory of history--'historical materialism' is a paper tiger of dogmatic Marxism. Marx's concept of theory or science with regard to capitalism is not the hackneyed deterministic one Castoriadis comes up with. Marx's theory of value parodies Hegel and puts forward a socio-epistemological critique of Hegel. And the claim that Marx (half the time) invokes value as a historical universal rests on a fundamental misreading of Capital. For a man so open to the creative dimensions of human activity, to settle for such an unsympathetic reading of Marx is out of character. Why is Castoriadis able to find insight in Aristotelian texts, despite their defence of slavery and hierarchy, when Marx presumably must be sacrificed to history--some atonement for the brutalities committed in his name?
JEAN BAUDRILLARD Marx indicts capitalism for turning all products into commodities and for exploiting workers. Baudrillard finds this assessment obsolete. By passing from the sphere of production to the superstructure--culture, family, ideology-commodification not merely intensifies capitalism but marks out new social relations. To understand these new relations, Baudrillard goes beyond the
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commodity form to the more general object form and sign form. These forms streamline our entire existence and destroy all symbolic, inherited meanings. All of life is now exposed to the hard glare of Enlightenment. Examples of this trend abound. The symbolically mediated, home-cooked supper is replaced with the TV dinner or a trip out for fast food; sex is picked up in bars and fitness clubs; wombs are contracted out for baby-making; media churches market spirituality; houses are no longer homes. By comparison, the code of exchange-value only partly realised the logic of abstraction and fungibility now pervasive. For Baudrillard, Marx's critique does not reach far enough. He rightly reveals the classical categories of exchange-value and value to be socially specific but treats use-value, needs, labour and production as universally applicable. Hence he falls victim to a bourgeois anthropology. Treated as properties of the species, use-value, need, and labour become fetishes which shrink the scope of radical politics. Use-value, equated by Baudrillard with utility, emerges from the destruction of the symbolic modes of relationship prominent in traditional societies. It is not a neutral category. Utility subjects all objects to abstract equivalence and functionality; this encoding is called the object form. 'For the object is not a thing, nor even a category; it is a status of meaning and a form. Before the logical advent of this object form, nothing is an object, not even the everyday utensils--thereafter, everything is, the building as well as the coffee spoon or the entire city. '14 Utility belongs to Enlightenment, to a disenchanted world. Needs, for Baudrillard, are the specific, subjective correlate of utility --desire honed down and designated. It is necessary to grasp that what produces the commodity system in its general form is the concept of need itself, as constitutive of the very structure of the individual--that is, the historical concept of a social being who, in the rupture of symbolic exchange, autonomizes himself and rationalizes his desire, his relation to others and to objects, in terms of needs, utility, satisfaction and use value) 5 As the storeclerk says, 'you'll find all your needs up on the shelves'. Marx contrasts socially specific abstract labour that creates exchange-value with the general notion of useful labour. Baudrillard, however, situates useful labour within the confines of capitalism 'as what disinvests the body and social exchange of all ambivalent and symbolic qualities, reducing them to a rational, positive, unilateral investment'. 16 Labour produces utility to satisfy needs of autonomous, rational subjects. This interpretation of labour undercuts the supposedly universal categories of historical materialism, such as mode of production and relations of production. For Baudrillard, the theory of historical materialism is circumscribed by capitalism. It is not merely a bust as a theory, but it signifies an ethnocentric and capitalistic imposition on history. Under the influence of Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes, Baudrillard adds the sign form to the object form in order to analyse capitalism. Just as Marx unmasked the presuppositions of classical political economy and denaturalised the commodity form, Baudrillard locates the basic presuppositions of structural linguistics and semiotics (signifier, signified, code, message, denotation) within a
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peculiar social construction, thereby denaturalising the sign form. Sign-value rationalises social power and gauges status. It is governed by a code distinct, from though not unrelated to, those of exchange- and use-values. Consider the relative sign-values of a Cadillac versus a Plymouth, a Rolex versus a Timex, a Heineken versus a H a m m s , Marriot versus Motel 6. In paying for a label or a name we convert money (exchange-value) into prestige (sign-value). In joining the object and the sign forms to Marx's concept of the commodity form, Baudrillard projects a generalised political economy which would be a theory of value in all its forms. 1+ The logic of value underlying its three forms (exchange, use, sign) is identity, equivalence, discreteness, reduction, abstraction, system, code. In the shadow of this pervasive logic is the non-valued: ambivalence, concreteness, irreplaceability, the unsaturated, reciprocity. Here Baudrillard offers his own deconstruction of western metaphysics with 'ambivalence' evoking Derrida's 'diff~rance'. TM Rationalism, idealism, humanism, empiricism--all the epithets of post-structuralist t h o u g h t - - a r e gathered by Baudrillard under the rubric of value. A distinctive and almost hyper-Marxian quality of his deconstruction is the claim that western rationalism is the metaphysics of political economy. To overthrow the system of political economy, then, would be to open up radically new horizons for thought, as well as for relating to persons and nature. This triple coding of value--exchange, use, sign--allows for a more differentiated analysis of the contemporary world than the Marxist preoccupation with exchange-value. Baudrillard makes it clear that the three codings of value have their different histories. The commodity form takes hold first; the functional aesthetic of the Bauhaus early in this century inaugurates the object form, while the penetration of consumer consciousness by the mass media announces the upsurge of the sign form. In a fascinating chapter, Baudrillard suggests that postmodernism arises from the crisis of functionalism, t9 As the utilitarian code of design loses its bearings, the kitschy code of sign-value supplants it and propagates fashion; witness the Swatch watch, designer cigarettes, TV politics. Social contradictions have shifted from production to consumption. Economic restructuring in the wake of the Depression solved the crisis of production and developed extensive controls over marketing and desire. Under this new social regime, the traditional Marxist aims of redistributing income and ownership become a dead weight for progressive politics. The truly radical movements today question the compulsive performance principle and the commodity code of prestige. The challenges are coming from those denigrated or shunned by the code: women, racial minorities, youth, the aged, the unemployed. Of our present society Baudrillard writes that its chief deficit is not economic or political but the inability to reproduce itself symbolically. As symbolic exchanges become endangered, human personality suffers ever more dissociations. New contradictions arise: consumers experience a 'falling rate of enjoyment "2° as our pleasures are crimped by the code. It is the frustrating search for satisfaction, not class struggle, which sparks political consciousness today. As an interpreter of Marx, Baudrillard appreciates what is most brilliant in the work: his attentiveness to the social, political and philosophical content of categories, notably those of classical political economy. Like Lukfics, Adorno,
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Marcus and Sohn-Rethel, Baudrillard continues this radical social critique of forms (the object form, the sign form). Distinguishing the sign and object forms (utility, needs, the autonomous subject, and labour) from exchange-value is most perceptive. Some of the specific criticisms of Marx, however, are poorly founded. The identification of use-value with utility and useful labour with instrumental action misreads the text in an Enlightenment direction. Moreover this reading misses two key features of the placement and status of the categories of use-value and useful labour at the beginning of Capital. These categories are general abstractions which apply to all societies, but do not fully characterise any particular product or labour. In any context, use-value and useful labour will be further determined, in ways that could include symbolic exchange. More to the point, Marx does not leave the categories of use-value and useful labour in static opposition to those of exchange-value and abstract (valueproducing) labour. They interact under the rubric of the 'real subsumption' of labour by capital, whereby the actual process of labour as well as the way in which labour is conceived are transformed by the logic of value. It is this real subsumption which resonates with Baudrillard's notions of utility and labour (as instrumental action). The potential of Marx's rubric of real subsumption has been largely unexplored. Baudrillard's investigations into evolving capitalist forms should be brought under this rubric. He is less Post-Marxist than he recognises.
JEAN-FRANCOIS LYOTARD Lyotard writes in a spirit of celebration31 We are moving into a postmodern age, fortunately. This optimism is fueled by what others fear as the breakdown of social networks. He sees in the fluid, shifting patterns of human life, a possibly healthy non-normalisation. Lyotard is one of the few outside Madison Avenue who is upbeat about the prospect of institutions, relationships, emotions and politics in which 'nothing lasts'. The temporary contract which pervades society is a welcome, if ambiguous, development. 22 Modernism legitimates science and social norms by appealing to an allencompassing narrative. Since the Enlightenment, human emancipation (associated with English and French revolutionary politics and Kant's philosophy) and the unification of science and praxis (associated with the founding of the University of Berlin and the philosophy of Hegel) have been the grand narratives. They govern our lives no longer. Discourse is now regional and diverse, like styles of art. Even to long for one common explanation betrays a dangerous bent of mind. This condition of disbelief is defined by Lyotard as postmodernism. One explanation of postmodernism is socio-economic. Once measured in factory inventory, wealth and power are now housed in computers. Knowledge has become the leading force of production in 'postindustrial society'. Not those who own, but those who manage information, control our lives. The objectification of knowledge into saleable 'bits', the inversion of knowledge
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from the loftiest goal to a means for accumulating money and power subvert the grand narratives. Lyotard also provides an internal, intellectual account of postmodernism's genesis. Under critical scrutiny, both the speculative and the emancipatory narratives prove unstable and decompose. Nietzsche deflates the speculative narrative by pressing for its legitimation. 23 Lyotard offers the following scenario regarding emancipation's distinction between the descriptive and the prescriptive: 'the effect.., is to attack the legitimacy of the discourse of science... indirectly, by revealing that it is a language game with its own r u l e s . . , and that it has no special calling to supervise the game of praxis (nor the game of aesthetics, for that matter). The game of science is thus put on a par with the others. '24 A further account of performativity is found in Lyotard's discussion of the fate of the two modern models of society; society as a functional whole (structural) performativity. 25 This power discourse comes out of the industrialisation of science. 'The State a n d / o r company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power. '26 We shall see that there is more to the pragmatics of science than this dependency on costly technology. A further account of performativity is found in Lyotard's discussion of the fate of the two modern models of society: society as a functional whole (structural) functionalism and systems theory--Parsons and Luhmann) and society as divided and conflictual (Marxism). In Marx, Lyotard notes a struggle between the influences of Kant (emancipation) and Hegel (speculation), with the latter prevailing. Hence Marx lacks skepticism about the claims of theory to capture the truth. Science supposedly reflects reality; truth is univocal. Theorising, perhaps history, is expected to stop with the completion of a thorough explanation. Marx didn't realise how theories inevitably generate differing perspectives which 'make our lives new' by undermining received views. He is throughly under the sway of Hegel with new actors performing old roles: the proletariat as Spirit, the political party as the university, socialism as absolute knowledge. 27 The web which takes us from Hegelian totality through Marx to Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot is nearly seamless. In Lyotard's view, the Frankfurt School's battles against one-dimensionality or the eclipse of reason, 28 along with the politics of the Socialism or Barbarism group, represented the dying gasps of Marxist theory. With the demise of the master narratives on which it was based, more particularly, with the demise of the revolutionary proletariat, Marxism drops out as an alternative to systems theory. 2~ Lyotard's postmodern alternative sidesteps the choice between systems or conflict theory. The language game provides a better model of society than the gestalt of structural functionalism or Marxist classes. From Wittgenstein, he takes the cue that language cannot be formalised but is concerned with human practices, struggles and decisions over rules. Persons are united in shifting alliances governed by language, interests and competition. Diversity is an irremediable fact since there is no metadiscourse encapsulating the multitude of
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language games. Even the consensus sought by Jiirgen Habermas expresses longing for identity and aversion to differences, thus taking a step toward the elimination of dissent. 3° 'Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate differences and save the honor of the name TM urges Lyotard. The account of postmodern science bolsters this notion of society as a mix of incommensurable language games and thereby undermines the claims of system theorists to legitimate social norms. Performativity as an ideal of systems theory presumes that the 'one best answer' to any problem can be computed, given sufficient information. But postmodern science, with its fractais, catastrophes and pragmatic paradoxes, views determined solutions as rarities. 32 Moreover, postmodern science itself is not governed by the goal ofperformativity. Pushing the avant-garde views of Kuhn and Feyerabend to the hilt, Lyotard maintains that paralogy (pressing against the limits of the intolerable in a language game) is the product prized by postmodern science. Science labours to generate, not to restrict, ideas. 'Having ideas is the scientist's highest accomplishment' says P.B.Medawar? 3 However, Lyotard wants to do more with science than dispatch the pretensions of systems theory. Paralogy, not performativity, models social life as well as science. This conclusion is, however, ironic. The alternative to positivism and the totally administered society of systems theory rests not with Marx's proletariat. Adorno's micrological excavations, 34 nor Jfirgen H a b e r m a s ' s communicative community, but in the thought of a man for whom philosophy leaves things just as they are, Ludwig Wittgenstein. 35 Freedom, then, is not hinged to some future society. It is immanent in the unruly situation of our language, which refuses simply to say one thing or conform to one purpose. More than economic, freedom is aesthetic: the production of the new. 36 Uncontrolled, unintended allusions can never be driven away from words. Equivocity is cause for celebration, not for a linguistic cleanup. Lyotard argues that justice, respect for the irreducible plurality of perspectives, is the central political virtue. I am no more reducible to my classconciousness than the world is reducible to one meaning. With Seyla Benhabib we wonder if Lyotard is capable of justifying his own commitment to justice. 37 If all language has provisional value only, if it moves and shifts with our interests and needs, why insist on justice above all? Is there really any social theory left? Does only a spattering of political views remain? Lyotard's extension of paralogy from philosophy of science to social life is questionable. Where is all the newness he speaks of?. Do teachers, professionals, ordinary citizens share the experience of novelty found in the art galleries, bookshops and research institutes? Lyotard defends diversity as a bulwark against exploitation; is he rather catering to the needs of a voracious market that also continually promises the new. 38
CONCLUSION With Castoriadis the focus is creative political action; with Baudrillard,
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symbolic exchange; with Lyotard, heterogeneous language games. However, advocating the incommensurable preoccupies all three authors. Each reacts to the dominance of instrumental rationality (labelled variously as the object form, functionalism, rational mastery, bureaucracy, performativity) in present societies, a dominance joined in their minds with terror. On this fundamental level, the three agree that Marx is a rationalist--part of the problem, not the solution. Closely associated with the charge of rationalism is the claim that Marx was a Hegelian, in particular, that he adopted Hegel's conceptions of totality and speculative science. For the Post-Marxists, the epistemological use of 'totality' actually invites some Party to reserve for itself the standpoint of the Absolute, take the reins of society, and direct it according to its 'scientific' vision. This way Marx's Hegelianism becomes his original sin, not his salvation. For Castoriadis and Baudrillard, Marx's rationalism merges with his economism. Despite his critique, Marx shared the capitalist vision of the human as hama ecanamicus, of labour and productivity as the fundamental way of being in the world. So, the problem with capitalism is that it obstructs technological and economic progress. C o m m u n i s m would be well-oiled capitalism with Marx its unwitting prophet. Historical materialism, for these authors, involves the ethnocentric blanketing of history with the capitalist ethos (or social imaginary as Castoriadis would put it). Masquerading as a science, historical materialism suppresses respect for symbolic exchange, appreciation of real political or technological creativity, recognition of the heterogeneity of the language games played out in society. And the protagonist in Marx's grand historical narrative, the proletariat, is quite a disappointment. The theoretical centrepiece of Capital, the labour theory of value, does not fare well with Post-Marxists. It is either objectionable from its inception or obsolete. For Castoriadis the basic notions of socially necessary, simple and abstract labour are all incoherent, and the 'law' of value abstracts from the spontaneity found in class struggle and technological innovation. Baudrillard diagnoses the categories of use-value and useful labour as of capitalistic vintage. And all three are impressed by the destructive consequences for the theory following from the bureaucratisation of capitalism and the enormous role of technology and science in production. Since Marx pinned his political hopes on the proletariat, its dissolution leaves his thought without much practical punch. Conversely, the new social movements in which Post-Marxism takes heart, find no mandate from Marx. Of course, the Soviet experience is the most devastating of all commentaries on Marxist politics. Castoriadis, Baudrillard and Lyotard are each precursors and veterans of the events of May 1968 in France. Their work represents an important site where remnants of the New Left think through their relation to the Marxist tradition. Though their politics as well as their criticisms of Marxism are often compelling, we find them misguided with respect to Marx's own thought. Marx does not conform to the cramped Hegelian mold depicted here. If textual subtleties are respected. Marx continues to be a major resource for understanding this postmodern world. 39 Nonetheless, the Post-Marxists pose the difficult question
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that a n y i n t e r p r e t a t i o n must face. Does Marx have a critical theory of r a t i o n a l i s a t i o n or is he a n o t h e r apologist for the basic logic of capitalism? 4° Patrick M u r r a y J e a n n e A. Schuler
Creighton University Nebraska
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NOTES 1. The phrase was used by Dick Howard and Karl Klare in the book they edited, The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism since Lenin (New York, 1972). 2. General accounts of western Marxism include Dick Howard's The Marxian Legacy (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), Russell Jacoby's Dialectic of Defeat: Contours o f Western Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Martin Jay's Marxism and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See also the review essay on Jacoby's book, Patrick Murray and Jeanne A. Schuler, 'Western Marxism's dialectic of defeat', Philosophy of the Social Sciences 16 (September 1986), 375-82. 3. Post-Marxism seems to be most widespread in France, where many other authors could be added to the three we consider. Representatives of Post-Marxism in the United States include Alvin Gouldner, along with several persons associated with the journal Telos. While Jfirgen Habermas in West Germany has made many deep criticisms of Marx, he prefers to think of his research programme as a reconstruction of Marxism. 4. Cornelius Castoriadis, 'The social regime in Russia', trans. David J. Parent, Telos, No. 38 (Winter 1978-9), 46. 5. Ibid., p. 39. 6. Cornelius Castoriadis, 'An interview with C. Castoriadis', trans. Bart Grahl and David Pugh, Telos, No. 23 (Spring 1975), 149. 7. For Castoriadis, the social imaginary is what is at the heart of every socio-historical formation: the complex of imaginary social significations in and by which it organizes itself and its world. That is, socio-historical formations constitute themselves in the first place by establishing a complex of terms and referents (significations), which are imaginary inasmuch as there is no real or rational basis for them and which are social inasmuch as they are valid for all members of the formation. Cornelius Castoriadis, 'On the history of the workers' movement', trans. Brian Singer, Telos, No. 30 (Winter 1976-7), 7. See his 'Interview', p. 154 for a particularly Hegelian sounding version of this thought. 8. Ibid., p. 4. 9. Ibid., p. 40. Castoriadis elaborates: The solemn theorization of the primacy of production and economics, the consecration of the technique and organization of capitalist production as inevitable, the justification of wage differences, scientism, rationalism, the blind obeisance in the face of bureaucracy, the adoration and importation into the workers' movement of models of capitalist organization and efficiency-these are only a few of the themes that firmly anchor Marxism in the capitalist
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universe, that specify the disastrous influence it has exercised on the workers movement, and that show how it was predestined to become the natural ideology of the bureaucracy. I0. Cornelius Castoriadis, ' F r o m Marx to Aristotle, from Aristotle to us', Social Research 45 (Winter 1978), 685. 11. Ibid., pp. 736-7. This passage suggests that while Castoriadis would agree with rejecting what Lyotard will identify as the modern master social narratives, which do appeal to Nature and Reason, he does not share Lyotard's principled rejection of grand social narratives. On the contrary, a society without a grand narrative is scarcely intelligible according to Castoriadis. 12. See 'Interview', p. 150. 13. See ibid., p. 149. 14. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), p. 185. 15. Ibid., p. 136. 16. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975), p. 46. Cf. Mirror, p. 45. 17. The Parker Brothers' board game Life, in which money (exchange-value), happiness (utility), and fame (prestige, status) function as components in a winning strategy of maximising life 'values', catches the gist of Baudrillard's general theory of value. 18. See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 1-27. 19. Baudrillard, 'Design and environment or how political economy escalates into cyberblitz', in For a Critique, pp. 185-203. 20. Baudrillard, For a Critique, p. 207. 21. Jean-Francois Lyotard was a member of Socialism or Barbarism and, like Castoriadis, retired from the group for more philosophical studies. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'Presentations', in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 128-9, on his break with Socialism or Barbarism. He is now professor of philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes. 22. The temporary contract is in practice supplanting permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family, and international domains, as well as in political affairs. This evolution is of course ambiguous: the temporary contract is favored by the system due to its greater flexibility, lower cost, and the creative turmoil of its accompanying motivations--all of these factors contribute to increased operativity . . . . We should be happy that the tendency toward the temporary contract is ambiguous: it is not totally subordinated to the goal of the system, yet the system tolerates it. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 66. 23. Lyotard associates the consequent perspectivism of Nietzsche with Wittgenstein's notion of language games. See Postmodern Condition, p. 39. 24. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, p. 40. 25. This is reminiscent of the 'technological veil' thesis of Marcuse, as discussed by Jtirgen Habermas in his essay 'Science and technology as "ideology", in Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 81-122. It is noteworthy that both Marcuse and Habermas suppose that modern science shares in modern technology's logic of performativity (or instrumentality), while, as we shall see, the key to Lyotard's argument in the Postmodern Condition turns on sharply distinguishing the logic (or 'pragmatics') of science from technology. Paralogy, not
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performativity, is the basis of legitimation for postmodern science. 26. Ibid., p. 46. 27. Lyotard provides two, somewhat inconsistent, versions of these parallels. See Postmodern Condition, pp. 36-7 and 'Presentations', p. 127. 28. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) and Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947). 29. For Lyotard, this is a°chilling consequence:
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In the work of contemporary German theorists, systemtheorie is technocratic, even cynical, not to mention despairing: the harmony between the needs and hopes of individuals or groups and the functions guaranteed by the system is now only a secondary component of its functioning. The true goal of the s y s t e m . . , is the optimization of the global relationship between input and o u t p u t - - i n other words, performativity.
30. 31. 32.
33. 34. 35.
36.
37.
For Jfirgen Habermas, who shares Lyotard's negative assessment of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, the fashioning of an alternative to systems theory is of paramount importance. See the following note. See, for example, Jfirgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), pp. 1-68. Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'Answering the question: what is postmodernism', trans. Regis Durand in Postmodern Condition, p. 82. See Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, pp. 53-60, for Lyotard's discussion of postmodern science. On p. 55, he mentions the following argument against systems theory: 'Brillouin's argument leads to the conclusion that the idea (or ideology) of perfect control over a system, which is supposed to improve its performance, is inconsistent with respect to the law of contradiction: it in fact lowers the performance level it claims to raise.' It is noteworthy that both Castoriadis and Baudrillard similarly claim that bureaucracy and functionalism are fraught with internal contradictions and incoherencies. For Castoriadis, see 'Social regime', pp. 35 and 47. For Baudrillard, see For a Critique, pp. 192-8. Alasdair Maclntyre in his book After Virtue offers further arguments against the systems theory programme. As quoted in Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, p. 60. See Lyotard's discussion of Adorno and 'micrology' in 'Presentations'. Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of the language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot given any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 49e. Lyotard's notion of freedom appears to be 'aesthetic' in the technical sense in which Soren Kierkegaard distinguishes between the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious stages in life's way. Further support for this connection is found in Lyotard's remarks on the temporary contract. (See note 22 above.) Lyotard's references to 'experimenting thought', in p. 122 of 'Presentations' call to mind the category of active defiant despair in Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death. She puts the difficulty this way: Lyotard wants to deny the choice between instrumental and critical reason, between performativity and emancipation. But his agonistic philosophy either leads to a 'polytheism of values,' from which standpoint the principle of performativity or of emancipation cannot be criticized, or this philosophy does not remain wholly polytheistic but privileges one domain of discourse and
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Seyla Benhabib, 'Epistemologies of postmodernism: a rejoinder to Jean-Francois Lyotard', New German Critique (Fall 1984), 111. 38. Lyotard is not unaware of this issue:
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If today we can no longer 'talk big', it is not because the grand discourse manages to signify everything, but rather the opposite: it is so simplifying, with its exclusive criterion ofperformativity, and with money as the exclusive unit of measure for evaluating performances, that it can only set itself up against the proliferating complexities of language games as an abstraction which feeds upon them, gives rise to them and kills them (Lyotard, 'Presentations', p. 121.). See also note 22 above. 39. Support for these views on Marx may be found in Patrick Murray, Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987); Moishe Postone, 'Necessity, labor and time', SocialResearch 45 (Winter 1978), 739-88; and Moishe Postone, 'The present as necessity: towards a reinterpretation of the Marxian critique of labor and time', Ph.D dissertation, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, 1983. 40. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Tenth Annual European Studies Conference in Omaha, Nebraska, October 1985.