From: "Karl Carlile" <joseph-AT-indigo.ie> Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 21:51:05 +0000 Subject: Re: M-TH: chaos/Lukacs/class consc. pt. 3 KARL: Deb I find it difficult to work out what it is you are saying. Would you explain to me in a paragraph or two what it your are saying. I dont so much want your interpretation of somebody else's work. Just what it is you are saying. Greetings, Karl --------------------------------------- The primary presupposition of the theory of sensationalism is that sensation's source is the internal world of the body; the brute matter of the body exists separate from the mode of production and its processes foment sensation. This is matterism, and as we have seen with Avenarius, empiricist sensationalism slides quickly into idealism, that is, it is ultimately commensurate with Mach's idealist sensationalism. The ontological basis for both empiricist (-sensationalist) epistemology and idealist-sensationalist epistemology is the presupposition that the objective world is, above all, brute matter that exists autonomously from the mode of production. This presupposition is, to historical materialism, insuperable. The "matter" of the body does not produce sensations "freely," that is, does not produce sensations that are not already organized towards life-needs, towards the goal of reproducing the life of the individual. The body, in short, has needs: clean water, food, shelter. . . . Sensation is first and foremost a response to these fundamental life- needs: thirst, hunger, shivering. Any mode of production works in relation to these needs. I do not mean satisifies them, but rather uses them as the basis for appropriating labor-power, incorporating them into--and thereby shaping them to--the mode of production. In this way, the needs of the body are harnessed to a mode of production, organized further by it. "Sense" is therefore, in any society, socially organized, whether or not need is met. Making meaning of that "sense" is the work of ideology, and dominant ideology works to make the degree of satisfication of those needs as well as the way they are (un)met appear to be natural, socially unchangeable, simply "the way things are." Workers believe the dominant ideology. . .but only to a certain extent precisely because they "sense" that their needs are not being met. This "sense" forms the basis for what Lenin calls "embryonic consciousness," and again, I stress here that the "sense" I speak of in this instance is no longer that "natural" "sense" of an individual, cannot be theorized as separate or autonomous from the mode of production, but is produced as an effect of workers' objective position in the mode of production. It is the basis of the objective interest Lukacs theorizes. This "sense," that is, has (as Kevin Cabral put it) "a historical existence." However, while it is not class consciousness, neither is it "metaphysical," since the "sense" that one's needs are not being met is not a free-floating "idea" but one very much produced by one's actual life circumstances in any mode of production. Nor does this "sense" go unexpressed (as K. Cabral implies); it is expressed in the habits and practices (to borrow from Althusser) of the workers. That they "agree" to sell their labor-power "for a day" yet then seek to alter the terms of the "agreement" (whether through bargaining, "revolting," . . . quitting and changing employers, "theft". . .), or say that they need to, expresses in habits and practices this "sense." Indeed, that they even "agree" to be exploited to begin with is a practice that expresses this "sense": they act as the proletariat because of this sense that tells them that they must do something or die. That their "choice" appears to them in large part to be limited to being exploited or dying is an effect of knowledge being circumscribed by bourgeois ideology, but they are nevertheless expressing this sense that is the basis of class consciousness. This is also why class consciousness is more than "a possibility," as Cabral suggests; because it is based in need that is systemically (un)met, it is, at the very least, a *systemic* "possibility." It is not, that is, a possibility subject to chance apart from social system, such as a pure accident; mutation. . .; or any such "chaotic" event stemming from the interactions of elements of brute matter, occurring perhaps in some systemic relationship, but one that is regarded as not social. In terms of Marxism, the possibility of class consciousness is more precisely understood not as a simple possibility, but as an *historical necessity.* Class consciousness emerges in embryonic form from this historically produced "sense" of the workers, the critical moment arising at the point when, as Lenin argues, "The workers abandon. . . their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them" (What Is To Be Done 32). Their "sense" becomes embryonic consciousness when they no longer have "faith" that the system is immutable. The Lukacsian theorization of "the knowledge yielded by the standpoint of the proletariat" can be read as explaining why this "faith" is "abandoned." Very broadly speaking, the standpoint of the proletariat develops on the basis of the worker's understanding of himself as a commodity: "Inasmuch as he is incapable in practice of raising himself above the role of object his consciousness is the *self-consciousness of the commodity*" (as I read it, Lukacs' term for what Lenin is calling embryonic consciousness; emphasis in original). This "self- consciousness of the commodity" emerges because the worker's "sense" that needs are not being met requires him to go "outside" of common (dominant) explanations; that is, necessity pushes the worker outside of the dominant ideology and into an emergent class consciousness: "In every aspect of daily life in which the individual worker imagines himself to be the subject of his own life he finds this to be an illusion that is destroyed by the immediacy of his existence". . . "The worker's consciousness is "force[d] out of . . . pure immediacy". . . "he becomes aware of himself as a commodity" [I don't have H&CC here, only a section of it in an anthology, so I can't give page numbers]. Reading this Lukacsian theorization through my explanation of "sense", it is possible to say that this awareness would be present no matter how many ideological layers were sedimented on top of it because such "sense" is necessarily and historically present, if un(evenly)developed, in all whose labor is appropriated. The beginning of class consciousness, in short, is an objective fact. "Sense" of need is not idealism. However, while according to Lukacs, workers are forced beyond "immediacy" because they are "denied the scope for . . . illusory activity" [whereby "effects" are understood to "emanate from (one)self"], we might instead say that they are forced beyond immediacy by the "sense" that their needs are not being met, and therefore give Lukacs' theory more historical accuracy (in my view, workers are not "denied" "illusory activity"; such illusory activity may be denied them in terms of making decisions reserved for the employer, but it is encouraged elsewhere, for example, when the male is deemed "head of the household" and therefore chief executor of decisions in that realm--he then acts "as if" the effects he produces "emanate from himself" rather than the hierarchization of differences for the cheapest extraction of labor-power. The possibility of engaging in illusory activity in this realm--which appears to the worker as natural, autonomous from the labor site-- provides a basis for the worker to accept as natural the employer's engagements in illusory activity.) The knowledge that comprises both embryonic consciousness (ec) and the worker's "self-consciousness as a commodity" (scc) is not "partial" knowledge. Partial knowledge presumes the movement of matter, not social system, to comprise the objective world, and therefore posits an objective world that is fundamentally unknowable and largely immutable. Ec and scc presume the laws of motion of capital to comprise the objective world, and therefore theorize the objective world as knowable and, consequently, changeable. They are the beginning of interested (not partial) knowledge. However, according to complexity/chaos theory, as well as more common sense forms of this dominant ideology, ec and scc are simply partial knowledge, not the beginnings of interested knowledge/class consciousness. And because the dominant ideology of partial knowledge asserts that only partial knowledge is ever possible, it effectively encourages ec and scc to remain undeveloped, remain at the level of "sense" or "felt need" only-- remain at the level, that is, of affect, where it finds many forms of expression, to be sure. None of which, however, finds in itself the level of organization necessary for systemic, transformative change. This is why vanguard knowledge, as Kautsky argued and Lenin approvingly quoted him, must come from "without." By this is meant both "outside" (outside capitalist relations of production/from socialist theorization, itself produced by the forces of capitalism) and "from need" (the "sense" of necessity pushes the worker out of the immediacy of capitalist relations and into emerging class consciousness). (NOTE: As I hope this indicates, Marxism does indeed have the conceptual framework to theorize not just the subject, but subjectivity.) Without vanguard knowledge, worker subjectivity is left to oscillate between "senses" and from "senses" to whatever "knowledges" or "meanings" are imparted through formal, everyday, and worksite pedagogy. The sense and knowledge of course may develop in the direction of class consciousness to a certain extent. But without developing ec and scc into principled knowledge of systemic forces of capitalism, the worker is, in the main, left to believe that there is nothing to be done because, quite simply, shit just happens. Why shit happens to some people more than others, the matterist would respond, is because some people's "sense" is "deficient." Here we have the core of *The Bell Curve*. Not to mention an alibi for more of the (bourgeois) pedagogy that produces this ideology of incapacity to begin with. As well as a scapegoat, in education, for the repeated "crises" (necessary to capitalism, but which capitalism must also necessarily suggest is "caused" by something other than capitalist relations of production--). Next, one more return to Lyotard. Deb Kelsh Red Theory Collective The University at Albany, New York --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- Yours etc., Karl --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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