From: "Lowe Laclau" <lowelaclau-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Are heterodox (non-marxist) economists our friends?
Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 15:49:14 -0400



 



>I did not mean for it to sound as if it was science which produced the 

>commodity form in "man's manners of approaching life." I was really 

>thinking of Hegel and Marx's use of the idea of reflecting, which is not 

>photocopy reflecting a la Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and Plekhanov. 

>I was thinking more that commodity fetishism is reproduced within science 

>(not perfectly or uncontradictorily), which then produces its own ideas, but 

>ideas which are already more reflective of commodity relations than of 

>anything simply 'objective'. In none of this is the gaining of knowlege 

>precluded. Contrary to how it must seem at this point, I am no defender of 

>philosophy per se, but against the idea that philosophy can be counterposed 


>as 'bad' to science as 'good.' 

OK... I see where we're not meeting eye to eye I think, but I'll comment at the end


> 

>Let me take up the example of nature again. I do not think that 'nature' 

>exists objectively outside of human relations. I do not mean this merely in 

>the sense that we are a part of nature because that already assumes the very 

>objectification I am calling into question. The production of 'nature' 

>begins not with the biological coming into existence of human beings, but 

>with the the development of certain types of human relations (which cannot 

>be thought of as developing narratively in some uniform fashion for 

>humanity.) 

> 

>Is it an accident that science as we know it today, as many specific 

>sciences, only appears in coincidence with commodity society? That nature 

>only takes on this status of Other to us as we begin to break from it? In 

>other words, in negating our indivisibility from nature, we for the first 

>time create nature as absolutely separate, but that is a process which has 

>begun in all societies with some degree of commodity production. 

> 

>The natural sciences take 'nature' for granted, as economists take 

>'economics' for granted, as political scientists take the 'state' for 

>granted, etc. 

> 

>This returns me to the fact that science reproduces or reflects the 

>commodity form back to us as 'nature'. Just as you say that all speheres of 

>human knowledge and expression do so to one or another degree. However, 

>just as the commodity form is unable to be a true universal because it is 

>riven with contradictions, neither is science simply 'bad faith'. In that, 

>one might argue that many a scientist, in struggling against convention and 

>against the received ideas of the day, also struggles against certain forms 

>of thought which the commodity form has either generated or subsumed. But 

>in so far as Natural Science does not take 'nature' to task as a social 

>conception and relation, it is hobbled, just as careful thinkers in any 

>endeavor are hobbled by not taking into account the unnaturalness of their 

>'field of study'. 

> 

> > It seems to me that only in the appropriation of scientific production 

>does it play on the commodification of nature. Or perhaps we could say that 

>its precedes the activity of scientific production in and of itself, insofar 

>as 'it' (science under the industial-military complex) likes to start from 

>the level of the diagrammatic and the production is not even invested in 

>unless it corresponds to this. But even then the actualizations of the 

>scientific production process are only indirectly related to 

>commodifications. They only indirectly act as agents of reproduction as 

>well, I would think insofar as their tasks are to supercede past 

>actualizations of scientific functions. Their relations to reproduction are 

>presupposed in the necessary repetition that all of labor has vis a vis 

>their mutually immanent labor and commodity relations. We must all reproduce 

>to a certain extent such commodification in our own labors, no? It is not 

>solely a product of Scientists. I can only think of! 

> > philosophers, artists and scientists as those whose labor is internally 

>sculpted to defy such commodity objectification. 

> 

>See above, in part. Mostly, however, I want to disagree that the 

>appropriation is the only place where commodification takes place. This is 

>much like saying that capitalism only takes place in exchange and 

>circulation, in supply and demand. It was central to Althusser's own 

>limitations (cf Simon Clark's critique of Althusser.) The problem is in the 

>production as well, in the total cycle. The reproduction of the assumption 

>of 'nature' is the reproduction of the assumption of the material world as 

>separate from us and as a 'resource'. I might play the bad 

>anthrolopologist, at the risk of being conked on the head by Thiago, and say 

>that it would be unusual for many non-commodity societies to see themselves 

>as relating to 'nature'. 




I agree with what u r saying. Where I think we're not seeing things the same is perhaps the result of my faulty understanding of economics... and perhaps my desire to be a lot more specific with regards to what is "science" and what lies outside of that designation. 

First, it would be my understanding that a commodity can be considered such insofar as a homogeneous space of value applies to it a measure. But because the homogenization of economic objects is of course, a social relation, whereby the private labor of individuals produce in anticipation of exchange, but not a priori in exchange itself, products of labor must meet the socius somewhere somehow in a transaction that realizes the uniformity of products as commodities under the abstract labor of the society. Its for this reason that I assume that commodification can't just be assumed in reproduction-of-commodity relations of prior commodifications. I would take it that such can never be simply assumed because of course any object can resume a position of being-subject without precluding its physical determination (or physical finality)... This act of subjectification is always something that we do as actors and agents in Nature. I would also assume that scientists very often have to take up such tasks of challenging objectival determinations. 

But I was thinking after writing the last e-mail that if you were considering labor-power as commodity then that changes everything about my argument because of course in this regard the commodification is assumed in the reproduction by definition. In this regard what you say about the "reproduction of the assumption of 'nature' as the reproduction of the assumption of the material world as separate from us and as a 'resource'" makes sense because your speaking of the commodification of the relations themselves within a capital exploitative context... which isn't what I was assuming previously. 

I always like to proceed from a different way so that the category of science and the  conceptual personae of the scientist are not confused with the business of science, which of course involves a much larger multiplicity of relations with non-scientific actors. This way I tend to find that people are much less able to objectify unilateral critiques (not saying that that is what u were doing... just saying out of experience with people who say that science does this, or technology does that...). Critiquing the relations with which the sciences are caught up is for me a bit different that critiquing the sciences themselves, as objective and singularizable categories. I don't think that "Science" is so hopelessly wrapped up in commodity production that one would be justified in overdetermining them in such a way... Hopefully this a clearer explanation of what I was saying.

Ciao,

Lowe





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