File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9706, message 131


From: LKED54B-AT-prodigy.com ( DEB   KELSH)
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 12:27:21, -0500
Subject: M-TH: chaos/Lukacs/class consc. pt. 2




If sensation is a matter of the body's complex systems (Mach and
Avenarius), then any (empirical) experience (event that occurs)
does not only produce knowledge that is after the fact
(descriptive), as I indicated in my last post.  Contradictorily,
because that event can at most, as Avenarius argues, "develop or
enhance simultaneously" sensations already existing in the brute
matter of the body, the experience of the event is always already
known.  That is, experience also produces
(calcifies/codifies/formalizes) "sense" that is always already 
present. 
We could call this sense/knowledge/way of knowing
ANTICIPATORY or even VIRTUAL, that is, not
merely DESCRIPTIVE of what has happened, but of anything that
might happen, whether real or actual, but which is always subject,
first and foremost, not to class contradiction but to (natural)
matterist processes.  (The "events" of virtual reality produce 
virtual
experiential knowledge, that is, the "events" are experienced in
terms of matterist and not materialist sense.)    This
sense/knowledge/way of knowing ANTICIPATES or positions the
subject's knowledge of any event (one's "event"ual knowledge) as
anterior to that event or virtual with respect to it.   Any event, 
that
is, is subject to the sense that is always already in a pre-
formalized
state within the body as brute matter.  In short, it is subject to 
the
"will" of the body as brute matter, "will" which engages in
reading/reducing the event to a form (meaning) that is
commensurate with the body's sense processes ("drives," in
Freudian terms; "intensities" in Deleuze and Guattari's terms).

While historical materialism also produces knowledge that is
anterior to the event (e.g., transformation of the current mode of
production will occur because the social relations of production 
will
become "fetters" on the expansion of the means of production,
which seek "unconditional" development: "The means--unconditional 
development of the productive 
forces of society--comes continually into conflict with the limited 
purpose, the self-expansion of the 
existing capital" [Marx *Capital* vol. 3 ch. 15. pt.
II]), this knowledge is fundamentally different from matterist
anterior knowledge.  Historical materialist knowledge is principled,
explanatory, conceptual knowledge of class contradiction and its
laws of motion; it is working-class interested knowledge,
historically produced by class contradiction, and it can explain 
itself
as such. It is not predominantly a production of sensations of brute
matter.  On the other hand, virtual knowledge is non-explanatory,
and can be read as largely unprincipled insofar as it proceeds
according to what is unknown and not known (Lyotard).  It
presents itself as "partial," that is, beyond class contradiction,
"post" revolution, "post" materiality.  Yet it, too, is historically
produced by class contradiction, the difference being twofold:  it 
is
capitalist-class interested knowledge that works to maintain and
rejuvenate--by making "unpredictability" and "unknowability"
appear "natural," thus producing the "flexible" worker necessary to
late capitalism--the near-exhausted social relations of production
necessary for the ruthless appropriation of labor-power to continue
with minimal resistance; in substituting matter for materiality as 
the
ontological basis of knowledge, it seeks to mask its bourgeois
character.  That is, while claiming to proceed from the positing of 
a
"new" ontological basis of the "unpredictability" and
"unknowability" of brute matter recombining spontaneously and
autonomously from the mode of production, the anterior
knowledge of partial knowledge quite effectively--and predictably!-- 
serves the interests of the capitalist 
class, whose own historical,
material basis the "new" ontology claims to be now--as ever--a
fiction!  Even as that class raises its rate of profit on that 
"fiction"!  

If the system is a "fiction," are CEO's willing to settle for
"fictional" paychecks?  Or, better yet, turn over their "fictional"
ownership of the means of production to the proletariat?

This theorization of knowledge indicates that the "will to truth"--
or
the terrorism of science Lyotard fears--based as it is on the
presumption of the objective world as brute matter, is in no way
identical with or an effect of a systemic understanding of social
relations, in which the objective world is not matter, but material
(an identity often claimed by "postmodern" or "poststructuralist"
theorists).  The "will to truth" is an effort to organize/make
meaning of the world that is commensurate with/serves the desires
of the individual body (or even part of the body).   This is a
capitalist class meaning (ideology) by which that class is able to
realize  profit through the sale of commodities. The vanguard
project is an effort to organize/make meaning of the world in a way
that will serve the interests of all working-class people, above all,

their interest in being free from need.  

Both are forms of interested knowledge, that is, they arise from
class contradiction.  However, the first claims not to be interested,

but partial, based on particular or partial knowledge, in the sense
that one has only SOME knowledge of all that is knowable, even if
that is understood simply as a "sense" of "oneself" (this
understanding of knowledge drives the "know thyself"/know thy
own pedagogy movement evident in Neel's *Aristotle's Voice,*
Gallop's *Thinking Through the Body*) ; the second is explicitly
working class-interested, based on systemic knowledge of class
contradiction.  It is rejected as "outdated" by the first.


Partial knowledge, then, is in opposition to Lenin's embryonic
consciousness as well as Lukacs' "standpoint of the proletariat," a
point I will take up in another post

Deb Kelsh
Red Theory Collective
The University at Albany, NY

l


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