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 --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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