From: "Lois Shawver" <rathbone-AT-california.com> Subject: RE: Marx's critique Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 17:44:24 -0700 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. You may well be right, Steve, that Lyotard's postmodern philosophy of the PMC will not be of any use in the struggle against capital. But don't you agree that Lyotard was not trying to struggle against capital at the time of PMC. He had given up that struggle. What he was struggling to accomplish was a new form of oppression, a form of oppression that was just becoming possible through the advent of computer databases, a form of oppression that could be averted, he thought, if a more postmodern understanding of knowledge were accepted, a form of knowledge in which plural paradigms of knowledge were tolerated, not by permitting people within these competing paradigms to loiter side by side in their comments, never connecting, but by permitting the competing paradigms to look for ways to improve themselves in the hopes of winning the battle of the competition of ideas, especially new ideas emerging from new language games.. That seems like a noncontroversial interpretation of the impulse that organized Lyotard's thinking in the PMC. Do you agree? And, as such, that interpretation still leaves it an open question as to whether the philosophy that readers have taken from the PMC can be useful to them for whatever purpose they might have. I do not yet recognize that any test has been made that would dictate any conclusions like that. Yet, if I understand you correctly, you say that you once did think that the PMC philosophy would serve the purposes of the Marxists of our era, purposes you identified as your own. But you tried it, gave it a chance, and the results were completely discouraging. Do I hear you right? So, please tell me, how did you interpret Lyotard so that he seemed to you he could be useful? I'm not planning to be rigid about your interpretation of Lyotard. I think a certain degree of drift of meaning is really quite inevitable, and probably good. But still, perhaps, there should be a certain contact with what he said if one were to claim that it had something to offer one's projects, even though you no longer seem to feel that way. ..Lois Shawver Lois/all I think your two brief statements are fair. Whilst I am in this context deliberately understanding the issue of 'critique' in terms of it's Hegalian and Marxist context - it is also worth remembering tha[Lois Shawver] . t Lyotard interprets the phrase against all the related uses of the term and positions. It is only in the PMC period that critique is readable as being predominantly a Hegalian and Marxist issue. Reading the material from the late 60s and early 70s it should be clear that any position founded on a 'critique' is being questioned and by implication refused. My specific interest in the PMC statement is based on the resurgence of marxist thought that has been building up in the past half decade. During the 80s and early 90s when the postmodern positions were at there best the 'paralogist' inventor of new systems did not produce any utopian phantasmagorias that helped to structure a response against the primary problem of our era. I thought during the 80s that the best approach to resist the counter-reformation of the neo-liberals was founded on a radicalism built on such approaches but nothing sustainable developed and it has increasingly seemed that we attempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater when we willfully accepted the 'end of critique' along with the 'end of emancipation'. (To maintain the line of thought then): In the PMC Lyotard is highly critical of Marxism, he states that the general critique of capital is undermined by the incorporation of the working class within the system of development that is constructed to maximise performance and value. With this he refuses the 'critique' because of what he argues is a Marxist essentialism which he contrasts to postmodern pluralism, but in the 21st Century as the bombs are warmed up to fall on another set of Innocents this can be considered almost a casual indictment of postmodern... regards steve Lois Shawver wrote: Steve, "Everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the subtitle of Marx's Capital) and its correlate, the critique of alienated society, are used in one way or another as aids in programming the system." PMC, p.13 Oh, I think I see how you're reading Lyotard. If so, I think you put it remarkably well, remarkably clearly. I was just slow to get it, and of course, I will put Freud aside and try to frame the debate, as I think you see it. Please feel free to revise. Please think of it as a formulation in process. Lyotard's notion of critique, as you see it, then, portrays the Marxist as locked in the critique of capitalism and unable to invent a system of its own. All the Marxist can do, according to Lyotard, is protest the alienated society, that which is, and cannot invent new social structures, new forms of life. Lyotard dreams of another superhero, the paralogist, who will be an inventor of new systems, new language games that can take us out any closure we want. But, according to the Marxist critique of Lyotard, paralogy just doesn't have the fuel to make the new systems materialize. And, while admitting the forward path is blocked, the recovering Marxist chooses to stay with the critique, where there is plenty of fire in the gut to fuel the protest in the struggle against Capital. ..Lois Shawver -----Original Message----- From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu [mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of steve.devos Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2003 6:45 AM To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Subject: Re: Marx's critique Lois/all "Everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the subtitle of Marx's Capital) and its correlate, the critique of alienated society, are used in one way or another as aids in programming the system." PMC, p.13 To answer the two questions, caused by my terrible lack of clarity - (an old problem caused by the slow uselessness of email ). To return tothe beginning the rejection of 'critique' associated with Lyotard's review of AO was not something Deleuze agreed with, nor was he in agreement with the idea that Marx and the Critique were wrong. In the early 90s in a journalistic interview he said that he did not understand what it meant to claim that Marx was wrong, still less when they claimed that Marxism was dead for the urgent task of analysing the world market and it's transformations cannot be carried out without Marx. Only the high postmodernists and the high theorists of the neo-liberal counter-reformation really believed that the 'critique' was over rather than understanding that we were in a period of defeat and repression. I am interested not in an understanding of the PMC in 1979 - or even in 1984 - but rather to read the statement in the light of the ending of the counter-reformation, when history has returned with a vengence - Seattle, Genoa, Porto Alegre, Stop the War and the WSF and ESF - so that Fukayama, Furet and indeed Lyotard can be seen to be either wrong or been superceded. The point of the critique for a materialist is not related to the question of communism or socialism but rather to the question posed by Deleuze related to capital and the question of surplus value. Capitalism does not work in the same way now as it did in the 19th C or prior to the invention of the spectacle in response to the great crisis of the 1920s - and yet it does function. To understand what it does, to address the phantasmagorias of the spectacle and to respond to its contradictions - this is the business of the critique. Where early in his Career Lyotard argued that the notion of 'Critique' implied that the critic was unable to leave the ground established by the adversary's domain - what he discards is the means to understand and work against capital. It is for these reasons that Lyotard's refusal of the notion of 'critique' has to be inverted and the refusal placed against his refusal of the critique. Now more than ever it is necessary to question precisely what the results of arguing that the critique of political economy is simply another aid to the continuation of the system means. (Lyotard's position is very different from arguing as Negri and Hardt do in Empire that capitalism changes in response to the struggles, resistences and demands of oppositional groups.) regards steve Lois Shawver wrote: Steve, I found the remarks by Lyotard that you told us (the remarks from the preface of D & G's Anti-Oedipus book) quite compelling. It also relates in an interesting way to a short paper by Freud, and we know that Lyotard did read Freud. Read Freud's paper, "Negative Remarks." (It is contained in his "Collected Papers" series of 5 volumes.) There Freud says that if a patient in analysis free associates so that she simply denies the truth of something that had not been brought in any systematic way, say, perhaps, the patient that a dream figure "was not my father," this indicates that the person is struggling against the idea that the dream figure is, indeed, the father. I think Foucault has a similar remark somewhere, too, but for the life of me I can't, at the moment, remember where. Probably in his book on Power. And, I can see how this would be construed as a form of false-consciousness, too. However, Freud, at least, was not talking of critique of others, but self-critique, that ostensibly made the undenied truths "false" but left the whole logic and reasoning in tact, although in a negative form. It sounds like Lyotard is talking about critique of others - but I think I see a connection, anyway. Can you? You said, Steve, Without going deeper into this, fundamentally Hegelian and Marxist understanding of what 'critique' means, it does seem that given the current impossibility of constructing a radical understanding of our societies without the use of some aspect of critique then the question that Lyotard proposes needs to be inverted. " I'm not sure I'm following you. I am struck, nevertheless, as I read your words by the thought that before Hegel there was Kant talking about "critique". What Kant was talking about was the "critique of reason", or rather "pure reason". I hope you elaborate your understanding of the Hegel and Marx sense of critique. ..Lois Shawver -----Original Message----- From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu [mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of steve.devos Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 2:15 PM To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Subject: Re: Marx's critique Lois It depends on whether you accept the proposal that 'critique' does remain within the existing system. It is around the false consciousness of cultural theorists and philosophers, the incredible but nonetheless real mystification that translates "social relations into the propositions of things themselves (reification...) still more explicitly transforming the relations of production itself into a thing" The notion of critique is consequently then the incessent labor of consciousness against our own neo-religious representations in what is after all a socially and historically determined society. Without going deeper into this, fundamentally Hegalian and Marxist undeerstanding of what 'critique' means, it does seem that given the current impossibility of constructing a radical understanding of our societies without the use of some aspect of critique then the question that Lyotard proposes needs to be inverted. In 2003 the necessity for critique, the critique of political economy (a wierd german science)and an understanding of Hegel's logic seem more necessary than ever. Can one say the same of the strange positivism that occupied us (who are sadly old enough to remember it) during the 70s and 80s - now that we are gradually emerging from a dark and unpleasent tunnel ? regards steve Lois Shawver wrote: Here is the Lyotard sentence Steve and I were talking about: "Everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the subtitle of Marx's Capital) and its correlate, the critique of alienated society, are used in one way or another as aids in programming the system." PMC, p.13 I like your answer. As you suggested, then, the critique remains within the language game of the original ideology. It simply negates the key phrases, leaving all the linkages intact. In other words, the critique has not yet invented a new language game in which can emerge a new form of life, a new way to live. So, is it in this way, in keeping us within the conceptual circles established by the language of the old ideology that the critiques aids the programming of the existing system? I think it can also be read that the critique prepares the ground for the new system to emerge. What does he mean by "the system"? The old system or the new? ..Lois Shawver . -----Original Message----- From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu [mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of steve.devos Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 11:48 AM To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Subject: Re: Marx's critiqu Early in his Career Lyotard accepted and argued that the notion of 'Critique' implied that the critic was unable to leave the ground established by the adversary's domain. By implication, given that marxism is a critique of capitalism it follows that Lyotard would at some stage argue that marxism cannot leave the ground on which capital stands. The question is whether in 2003 the sentence means the same thing that it did in 1979 - plainly for the majority of postmodernists the sentence must be meaningless as the dream of socialism and communism is defined as over. In his review of Anti-Oedipus he states this very clearly: "In spite of its title, Anti-Oedipus is not a critical book. Rather, like the Anti-Christ, it is a positive, assertive book, an energetic position inscribed in discourse, the negation of the adversary happening not by Aufhebung, but by forgetting. Just as atheism is religion extended into its negative form-is even the modern form of religion, the only one in which modernity could continue to be religious-so does the critique make itself the object of its object and settle down into the field of the other, accepting the latter's dimensions, directions and space at the very moment that it contests them. In Deleuze and Guattari's book you will see everywhere their utter contempt for the category of transgression (implicitly then for the whole of Bataille): either you leave immediately without wasting time in critique, simply because you find yourself to be elsewhere than in the adversary's domain; or else you critique, keeping one foot in and one out, positivity of the negative, but in fact nothingness of the positivity. And this is the critical non-potence one finds in Feuerbach and Adorho. Marx said in l844 that socialism doesn't need atheism because the question of atheism is positionally that of religion; it remains a critique. What is important in the question is not its negativity, but its position (the position of the problem)...." regards steve Lois Shawver wrote: Anyone feel inspired to comment on this passage from Lyotard? "Everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the subtitle of Marx's Capital) and its correlate, the critique of alienated society, are used in one way or another as aids in programming the system." PMC, p.13 ..Lois Shawver
HTML VERSION:
Lois/all
I think your two brief statements are fair.
Whilst I am in this context deliberately understanding the issue of 'critique' in terms of it's Hegalian and Marxist context - it is also worth remembering tha[Lois Shawver] . t Lyotard interprets the phrase against all the related uses of the term and positions. It is only in the PMC period that critique is readable as being predominantly a Hegalian and Marxist issue. Reading the material from the late 60s and early 70s it should be clear that any position founded on a 'critique' is being questioned and by implication refused. My specific interest in the PMC statement is based on the resurgence of marxist thought that has been building up in the past half decade. During the 80s and early 90s when the postmodern positions were at there best the 'paralogist' inventor of new systems did not produce any utopian phantasmagorias that helped to structure a response against the primary problem of our era. I thought during the 80s that the best approach to resist the counter-reformation of the neo-liberals was founded on a radicalism built on such approaches but nothing sustainable developed and it has increasingly seemed that we attempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater when we willfully accepted the 'end of critique' along with the 'end of emancipation'. (To maintain the line of thought then): In the PMC Lyotard is highly critical of Marxism, he states that the general critique of capital is undermined by the incorporation of the working class within the system of development that is constructed to maximise performance and value. With this he refuses the 'critique' because of what he argues is a Marxist essentialism which he contrasts to postmodern pluralism, but in the 21st Century as the bombs are warmed up to fall on another set of Innocents this can be considered almost a casual indictment of postmodern...
regards
steve
Lois Shawver wrote:
Steve,"Everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the subtitle of Marx's
Capital) and its correlate, the critique of alienated society, are used in
one way or another as aids in programming the system." PMC, p.13Oh, I think I see how you're reading Lyotard. If so, I think you put it remarkably well, remarkably clearly. I was just slow to get it, and of course, I will put Freud aside and try to frame the debate, as I think you see it. Please feel free to revise. Please think of it as a formulation in process.Lyotard's notion of critique, as you see it, then, portrays the Marxist as locked in the critique of capitalism and unable to invent a system of its own. All the Marxist can do, according to Lyotard, is protest the alienated society, that which is, and cannot invent new social structures, new forms of life. Lyotard dreams of another superhero, the paralogist, who will be an inventor of new systems, new language games that can take us out any closure we want.But, according to the Marxist critique of Lyotard, paralogy just doesn't have the fuel to make the new systems materialize. And, while admitting the forward path is blocked, the recovering Marxist chooses to stay with the critique, where there is plenty of fire in the gut to fuel the protest in the struggle against Capital...Lois Shawver-----Original Message-----Lois/all
From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu [mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of steve.devos
Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2003 6:45 AM
To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: Marx's critique
"Everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the subtitle of Marx's
Capital) and its correlate, the critique of alienated society, are used in
one way or another as aids in programming the system." PMC, p.13
To answer the two questions, caused by my terrible lack of clarity - (an old problem caused by the slow uselessness of email ).
To return tothe beginning the rejection of 'critique' associated with Lyotard's review of AO was not something Deleuze agreed with, nor was he in agreement with the idea that Marx and the Critique were wrong. In the early 90s in a journalistic interview he said that he did not understand what it meant to claim that Marx was wrong, still less when they claimed that Marxism was dead for the urgent task of analysing the world market and it's transformations cannot be carried out without Marx. Only the high postmodernists and the high theorists of the neo-liberal counter-reformation really believed that the 'critique' was over rather than understanding that we were in a period of defeat and repression. I am interested not in an understanding of the PMC in 1979 - or even in 1984 - but rather to read the statement in the light of the ending of the counter-reformation, when history has returned with a vengence - Seattle, Genoa, Porto Alegre, Stop the War and the WSF and ESF - so that Fukayama, Furet and indeed Lyotard can be seen to be either wrong or been superceded. The point of the critique for a materialist is not related to the question of communism or socialism but rather to the question posed by Deleuze related to capital and the question of surplus value. Capitalism does not work in the same way now as it did in the 19th C or prior to the invention of the spectacle in response to the great crisis of the 1920s - and yet it does function. To understand what it does, to address the phantasmagorias of the spectacle and to respond to its contradictions - this is the business of the critique. Where early in his Career Lyotard argued that the notion of 'Critique' implied that the critic was unable to leave the ground established by the adversary's domain - what he discards is the means to understand and work against capital.
It is for these reasons that Lyotard's refusal of the notion of 'critique' has to be inverted and the refusal placed against his refusal of the critique. Now more than ever it is necessary to question precisely what the results of arguing that the critique of political economy is simply another aid to the continuation of the system means. (Lyotard's position is very different from arguing as Negri and Hardt do in Empire that capitalism changes in response to the struggles, resistences and demands of oppositional groups.)
regards
steve
Lois Shawver wrote:
Steve, I found the remarks by Lyotard that you told us (the remarks from the preface of D & G's Anti-Oedipus book) quite compelling.It also relates in an interesting way to a short paper by Freud, and we know that Lyotard did read Freud. Read Freud's paper, "Negative Remarks." (It is contained in his "Collected Papers" series of 5 volumes.) There Freud says that if a patient in analysis free associates so that she simply denies the truth of something that had not been brought in any systematic way, say, perhaps, the patient that a dream figure "was not my father," this indicates that the person is struggling against the idea that the dream figure is, indeed, the father. I think Foucault has a similar remark somewhere, too, but for the life of me I can't, at the moment, remember where. Probably in his book on Power.And, I can see how this would be construed as a form of false-consciousness, too. However, Freud, at least, was not talking of critique of others, but self-critique, that ostensibly made the undenied truths "false" but left the whole logic and reasoning in tact, although in a negative form. It sounds like Lyotard is talking about critique of others - but I think I see a connection, anyway. Can you?You said, Steve, Without going deeper into this, fundamentally Hegelian and Marxist understanding of what 'critique' means, it does seem that given the current impossibility of constructing a radical understanding of our societies without the use of some aspect of critique then the question that Lyotard proposes needs to be inverted. " I'm not sure I'm following you. I am struck, nevertheless, as I read your words by the thought that before Hegel there was Kant talking about "critique". What Kant was talking about was the "critique of reason", or rather "pure reason".I hope you elaborate your understanding of the Hegel and Marx sense of critique...Lois Shawver-----Original Message-----Lois
From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu [mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of steve.devos
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 2:15 PM
To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: Marx's critique
It depends on whether you accept the proposal that 'critique' does remain within the existing system. It is around the false consciousness of cultural theorists and philosophers, the incredible but nonetheless real mystification that translates "social relations into the propositions of things themselves (reification...) still more explicitly transforming the relations of production itself into a thing" The notion of critique is consequently then the incessent labor of consciousness against our own neo-religious representations in what is after all a socially and historically determined society. Without going deeper into this, fundamentally Hegalian and Marxist undeerstanding of what 'critique' means, it does seem that given the current impossibility of constructing a radical understanding of our societies without the use of some aspect of critique then the question that Lyotard proposes needs to be inverted.
In 2003 the necessity for critique, the critique of political economy (a wierd german science)and an understanding of Hegel's logic seem more necessary than ever. Can one say the same of the strange positivism that occupied us (who are sadly old enough to remember it) during the 70s and 80s - now that we are gradually emerging from a dark and unpleasent tunnel ?
regards
steve
Lois Shawver wrote:
Here is the Lyotard sentence Steve and I were talking about:"Everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the subtitle of Marx's
Capital) and its correlate, the critique of alienated society, are used in
one way or another as aids in programming the system." PMC, p.13I like your answer. As you suggested, then, the critique remains within the language game of the original ideology. It simply negates the key phrases, leaving all the linkages intact. In other words, the critique has not yet invented a new language game in which can emerge a new form of life, a new way to live.So, is it in this way, in keeping us within the conceptual circles established by the language of the old ideology that the critiques aids the programming of the existing system? I think it can also be read that the critique prepares the ground for the new system to emerge. What does he mean by "the system"? The old system or the new?..Lois Shawver.-----Original Message-----Early in his Career Lyotard accepted and argued that the notion of 'Critique' implied that the critic was unable to leave the ground established by the adversary's domain. By implication, given that marxism is a critique of capitalism it follows that Lyotard would at some stage argue that marxism cannot leave the ground on which capital stands. The question is whether in 2003 the sentence means the same thing that it did in 1979 - plainly for the majority of postmodernists the sentence must be meaningless as the dream of socialism and communism is defined as over.
From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu [mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of steve.devos
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 11:48 AM
To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: Marx's critiqu
In his review of Anti-Oedipus he states this very clearly: "In spite of its title, Anti-Oedipus is not a critical book. Rather, like the Anti-Christ, it is a positive, assertive book, an energetic position inscribed in discourse, the negation of the adversary happening not by Aufhebung, but by forgetting. Just as atheism is religion extended into its negative form—is even the modern form of religion, the only one in which modernity could continue to be religious—so does the critique make itself the object of its object and settle down into the field of the other, accepting the latter's dimensions, directions and space at the very moment that it contests them. In Deleuze and Guattari's book you will see everywhere their utter contempt for the category of transgression (implicitly then for the whole of Bataille): either you leave immediately without wasting time in critique, simply because you find yourself to be elsewhere than in the adversary's domain; or else you critique, keeping one foot in and one out, positivity of the negative, but in fact nothingness of the positivity. And this is the critical non-potence one finds in Feuerbach and Adorho. Marx said in l844 that socialism doesn't need atheism because the question of atheism is positionally that of religion; it remains a critique. What is important in the question is not its negativity, but its position (the position of the problem)...."
regards
steve
Lois Shawver wrote:
Anyone feel inspired to comment on this passage from Lyotard? "Everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the subtitle of Marx's Capital) and its correlate, the critique of alienated society, are used in one way or another as aids in programming the system." PMC, p.13 ..Lois Shawver