Oh boy if there is one thing I hate it's being forced to look at exegesis in a Marxist tradition. If you want to construct a glossary of terms that is accessible, I suggest, among other things:
1. Keep it as short as possible (each entry). 2. Look at concepts and uses of the terms prior to Marx, in Marx-Engels, and post-Marx. 3. Look at concepts and uses of the term derived from Marxist traditions but not considered 'Marxist' (phenomenology, existentialism, post-structuralism, etc.). 4. Give some real world examples from history and, more importantly, current events. 5. A concept that might seem central to the M-E-L traditions might only be dealt with in passing amongst the post-moderns and post-structuralists. If you can't relate 'class antagonism' with 'power', 'desire', 'motion' etc. in Deleuze-Guattari, then you probably are ignoring a lot of what takes up the time of post-structuralists. Some of the more interesting stuff is caught up in that nexus of Deleuze-Guattari, Negri, Zizek and Spinoza, which I found without even trying to. With some Baudrillard and Lyotard thrown in as well. Which always brings me back to the point of, I'm not sure what non-philosophical American audiences get from reading the Hardt-Negri trilogy when they don't know the philosophical background or Europe of the 1960s. And the American experience of Marx-Engels-Lenin is typically antagonistic NON-READING. It almost seems tragic that there is this audience of a few hundred thousand out there in the US whose understanding of Marx comes from reading Empire. Hardt-Negri seem 'fresh' only if you haven't read Deleuze-Guattari or Baudrillard. Zizek wants to be everyone's post-post-modernist and has read them all (not sure if his usually simplistic syntheses show much brilliance though). I followed class antagonism through a welter of sources (the internet is great for finding secondary sources you have no way of knowing where they came from) and give you: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch03.htm The possibility of purely human sentiments in our intercourse with other human beings has nowadays been sufficiently curtailed by the society in which we must live, which is based upon class antagonism and class rule. We have no reason to curtail it still more by exalting these sentiments to a religion. And similarly the understanding of the great historical class struggles has already been sufficiently obscured by current historiography, particularly in Germany, so that there is also no need for us to make such an understanding totally impossible by transforming the history of these struggles into a mere appendix of ecclesiastical history. Already here it becomes evident how far today we have moved beyond Feuerbach. His “finest” passages in glorification of his new religion of love are totally unreadable today. ------ With Hegel, evil is the form in which the motive force of historical development presents itself. This contains the twofold meaning that, on the one hand, each new advance necessarily appears as a sacrilege against things hallowed, as a rebellion against condition, though old and moribund, yet sanctified by custom; and that, on the other hand, it is precisely the wicked passions of man — greed and lust for power — which, since the emergence of class antagonisms, serve as levers of historical development — a fact of which the history of feudalism and of the bourgeoisie, for example, constitutes a single continual proof. But it does not occur to Feuerbach to investigate the historical role of moral evil. To him, history is altogether an uncanny domain in which he feels ill at ease. Even his dictum: “Man as he sprang originally from nature was only a mere creature of nature, not a man. Man is a product of man, of culture, of history” — with him, even this dictum remains absolutely sterile. -------------------- -------------------- http://libcom.org/library/deleuze-guattari-thousand-plateaus-negri A Thousand Plateaus lays out the terrain on which the materialism of the twenty-first century is redefined. What is Philosophy?16, the pedagogical essay published by Deleuze-Guattari in 1991, as an appendix to the Thousand Plateaus, enlightens us on this matter. This synergy of analyses on science, philosophy and art which was tirelessly deployed in A Thousand Plateaus, with an exuberance worthy of the ontological matter that was treated, turns here into pedagogic illustration, into a popularization of the conceptual mechanisms which are at the basis of the process of exposition of A Thousand Plateaus. In this popularization essay, the methodological, theoretical and practical functions are cir-cumscribed with the maximum of clarity. We think that it is possible to identify here (in A Thousand Plateaus seen through the pedagogical essay) the fundamental elements of the renewal of historical materialism, in function of the new dimensions of capitalistic development, namely this plane of maximum abstraction (the "real subsumption" of society in capital) to which it leads, and on which social struggles today are reformulated. This, without ever forgetting that in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of the sciences of spirit, just as in historical materialism, one finds the same ethical and political demand for the liberation of human power. Which, then, is the productive context in which we are moving and from which historical materialism can and must be renewed, as basis of the sciences of spirit? A Thousand Plateaus gives an explicit answer to this query. Through the extent and the complexity of the analyses it develops, it sketches out the very plane that Marx tendentiously identified in the "Fragment on Machines" of the Grundrisse, which he defined as the society of "General Intellect".19 It is a plane on which the interaction of man and machine, society and capital, has become so narrow that the exploitation of material, salaried, and temporally quantifiable labor becomes obsolete, incapable of determining a valorization, a miserable basis of exploitation in the face of the new social, intellectual and scientific forces upon which the production of wealth and the reproduction of society rest exclusively, henceforth. A Thousand Plateaus records the fulfillment of the tendency analyzed by Marx, and develops historical materialism within this new society. It therefore attempts the construction of that new subject which reveals the power of work, social as well as intellectual and scientific. A machine-subject, which is also an ethical subject; an intellectual subject, which is also a body; a desiring subject which is also productive force; a plural and disseminated subject which however unifies itself in the constitutive drive of new being. And vice versa, in all directions. What is fundamental here is the total dislocation of the valorization of production, in the passage from the sphere of direct material exploitation to that of political domination (over the social interaction between the development of collective subjectivity and the intellectual and scientific power of production). In that dislocation, social inter-activity itself is subjected to the molar contradiction of domination, it too is exploited; but the antagonism is brought to its highest level, it acts through a paradoxical implication of the exploited subject. Confronting the Foucaldian analyses of power,20 Deleuze emphasizes the passage from "disciplinary society" to the "society of control", the fundamental characteristics of the contemporary State-form. Today, in that context, which is the one to which A Thousand Plateaus refers, domination, while remaining permanent, is as abstract as it is parasitical and empty. Brought to its highest degree, the antagonism has so to speak emptied itself, the "social commandment" has become useless. The control over productive society is thus a mystification from the start: it no longer even has the dignity that the function of organization took on, which in some sense was co-natural with the figure of the exploiter, in the disciplinary society and State-form. If such is the case, the productive labor of the new social subject is revolutionary from the start, always liberating and innovative. It is on this basis that historical materialism finds itself renewed, implicitly in the phenomenology of A Thousand Plateaus, explicitly in the methodology elaborated in What is Philosophy? ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ http://www.situation.ru/app/j_art_902.htm "Spinoza’s true politics is his metaphysics" Negri says (1992). The political implications of his metaphysics are his definition of things by their capacity of act (potentia agendi ). This capacity is enhanced or diminished according to the affects or passions that encounter modes, how they are being affected, affect others or let others, by their passions, rule them. If there exists nothing else but the acting powers of human individuals, it follows that the power of the state and its government is nothing but the disposition of all the citizens’ powers together, i.e. democracy in a sense before it got its liberal interpretation. And since powers give right, people have as much right as they have power, contra Hobbes who saw men as giving up their powers in a fictious contract. Spinoza states that men always retain their powers, and never actually leave them. But do people know this ? What is the political function of 1st order of knowledge, imaginatio, besides 2nd ratio and 3rd, beatitudo (salvation)in Spinoza’s epistemological scheme? Can imagination develop to some extent into reason, 2nd order of knowledge ? What is the (political) place of desire in the transformation of the people’s imagination and reason ? What role does antagonism play in the political strife of different desires, between men and men/state? These questions remain to be solved in depth in further research, and have been to a large extent by French contemporary Spinoza scholars since the 1960’s. Here we now consider passions in Spinoza’s theory. ------------- "If we admit with Spinoza /. . . / that communication is structured by relations of ignorance and of knowledge, of superstition, of ideological antagonism, in which are invested human desire and which expresses an activity of bodies, we must also admit with him that knowledge is a practice, and that the struggle for knowledge (philosophy) is a political practice. In the absence of this practice, the tendentially democratic processes of decision described by the PT would remain unintelligible. We understand thereby why the essential aspect of Spinozist democracy is from the outset liberty of communication. We understand also how the theory of the ’body politic’ is neither a simple physics of power, nor a psychology of the submission of the masses, nor the means of formalising a juridical order, but the search for a strategy of collective liberation, for which the password is: to be the greatest number possible to think the most possible (thoughts)"(p. 118 in Balibar 1985, my transl). -------------------- "First he [Negri] has seen the need to shift his own focus as a reader of Marx from Capital (with its negative emphasis on the irresolvably constradictory nature of capitalist production) to the Grundrisse (with its positive stress on the constitute capacity of the proletariat to appropiate social wealth; and second, he has turned to Spinoza in his quest for an ontological foundation for the new revolutionary subjectivity that has emegerged since 1968" (Surin, p. 13). Negri takes Marx’ notions of formal and real subsumption (see Hardt 1995 for the marxist notions) to deal with what has happend in 20 th century capitalism. In formal subsumption, there exist still pre- or noncapitalist modes of production, of pre - bourgeois values etc, but in real subsumption, all of society is dominated by the command of capital (and what is left of non - capitalism is fully integrated. This move spreads the antagonism between capital and labour (and its allies) to all of the planet and all beings in its entirety. The sites of struggle become fluid, generalized and diffused, just as the student rebellions, the sudden presence of marginalized groups, were in the 60’s and early 70’s, especially in southern Europe. There is no way to establish the old corporate order in such a flow of desires and productions, but rule through postmodern fragmentatization by a postfordist capitalist ideology and command by political measures (fiscal crisis e.g.), which creates new protests and so on. --------------------------------- Readers unfamiliar with philosophic desiring machines (see appendix) must free themselves from a naive conception of Deleuze/ Guattari’s philosophy of desire as simply envisaging a celebration of anarchy or sudden removing all political and social obstacles. Rather, one must extract, express, produce, or better, multiply, create and desire the new in a selective way, as what empowers people, make them able to do more, go as far as they did not know. Desire is not a universal ontological concept (there are none as such in Deleuze own philosophy), underlying all of existence, but as something existing "outside or alongside" existence. In Deleuze earlier writings (on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche), he developed strange irreducible concepts like "intensive difference", "becomings", "extra - sense" to escape traditional Western philosphy of representation, that relates all being to a model, a standard, to represent something or someone, in order to get away from a hegelian dialectic, whether liberal universialist or marxist proletarian. Instead he posed difference as something in itself, not different in ressemblance, identity, in opposition, by analogy (see Deleuze 1994). In his preface to the French publication of Negri 1992, Deleuze called this tradition a "juridicism" which Spinoza opposed as himself. This implies four things: 1) that forces have an individual or pirvate origin, 2) that they must be socialized, 3) that thre is a mediation of Power (potestas ) and 4) that being is inseparable from a crisis, a war or antagonism for which Power is presented as the solution, but an "antagonistic solution" (like in Hobbes’ contract), that never will be abolished if not its conditions (of capital) are. ---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia01/parrhesia01_sinnerbrink.pdf One of the more interesting implications of Deleuze’s attempted Aufhebung of Deleuzian difference is to suggest that there is a parallel between Deleuze’s pure difference and Ernesto Laclau’s concept of an antagonism (OwB, 65 ff.). Laclau argues, in very Hegelian fashion, that while the logic of difference and logic of equivalence are opposed, pursued to their logical conclusion each converts into its opposite. A system of pure differentiality (defined by purely relational elements) without the possibility of antagonism renders all elements equivalent to each other; pure difference converts into pure equivalence in relation to an absolute outside (OwB, 65). The logic of difference and the logic of equivalence assume opposing poles, but are in fact mutually reliant since they convert into each other once taken to their respective extremes. Laclau argues that there is therefore no primordial opposition of poles (between difference and equivalence) but rather “only the inherent gap of the One” (OwB, 65). Equivalence is not opposed to difference; equivalence emerges because difference remains incomplete in itself. A system of pure antagonism without mediation, on the other hand, devolves to an intractable conflict between a naturalised Us and Them without any possibility of resolution or transformation. Hence the need find a way of rethinking antagonism so as to avoid this conceptual and political dead end. Within antagonisms such as sexual difference or class struggle, Laclau argues, it is not opposition but rather “the fissure” that is “primary” (OwB 65). ------------------------------------- ------------------------------------- http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jeanbaudri404134.html The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil. Jean Baudrillard --------------------------------------- -------------------------------------- http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal155811.html Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts. Joseph Stalin ---------------------------------------- --------------------------------------- http://intertheory.org/eid.htm Whereas Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer see no hope in the working class since it is completely manipulated and co-opted into the system,[3] Mandel believes that late capitalism itself "educates the worker to challenge the division of national income and orientation of investment at the superior level of the living economy as a whole" (1974:24). That is, as the living standard of the "new" working class rises with their skills and wages, their attention transfers to more basic aspects of capitalist exploitation.[4] The third industrial revolution, like capitalism in its industrial revolution phase which created its antagonistic class, does create and require a high level of education from workers. These 'new workers' started raising more fundamental questions regarding the use-value of their products, which according to Mandel, found expressions in the slogans of the May movement. This is not to deny "the apparent stability" of the late capitalist society, and by the same token not to deny the social reality of the daily experience of manipulated and oppressed workers, women, blacks, and other minorities. It is understood now that labourers have been integrated with managers, a process which has become necessary for "coping with the crisis of 'alienation' of labour in the high-tech labour force" (Zavarzadeh and Morton, 1994:141). However, this does not mean that class conflict and antagonism between labour and capital are over. On the contrary, the reasons behind their exploitation, though concealed, are still the same; namely the ownership of the means of production by one class and the performance of labour by another, and the extraction of surplus value. Zavarzadeh and Morton go further and argue that "[managers] are an important part of (post)modern capitalism: they foreground (because they do not erase) the proletarization between capital and labor". The importance of managers, then, articulates capitalism's "particular historical shape" (1994:141). --------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------- http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/althusser/index.htm Overdetermination (Althusser) Freud used this term to describe (among other things) the representation of the dream-thoughts in images privileged by their condensation of a number of thoughts in a single image (condensation/Verdichtung), or by the transference of psychic energy from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial images (displacement/Verschiebung-Verstellung). Althusser uses the same term to describe the effects of the contradictions in each practice constituting the social formation on the social formation as a whole, and hence back on each practice and each contradiction, defining the pattern of dominance and subordination, antagonism and non-antagonism of the contradictions in the structure in dominance at any given historical moment. More precisely, the overdetermination of a contradiction is the reflection in it of its conditions of existence within the complex whole, that is, of the other contradictions in the complex whole, in other words its uneven development. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
