What is Philosophy, Benjamin?

Walter Benjamin begins The Origin of German Tragic Drama with an “epistemo-critical prologue” in which, before he presents his idea of the baroque, he articulates his conception of philosophy, the activity by which he represents ideas and conceptualizes phenomena (such as the baroque).[1] Benjamin does this by charting a dichotomy, in which he situates philosophy clearly on one side. Philosophy, Benjamin clarifies, is “not [. . .] a guide to the acquisition of knowledge” but is “the representation of truth” (28). While mathematics tends towards the “elimination of the problem of representation” (thereby renouncing “that area of truth towards which language is directed”), “philosophical writing [presumably having to do with language. . .] must continually confront the question of representation” (27). Unlike the concept of the system that, in a syncretic fashion, connects “separate kinds of knowledge” (thereby acquiring universalism)[2] to catch a truth that comes from outside, (28), philosophy “in its finished form [. . .] assume[s] the quality of doctrine” (27), which has “didactic authority” (28). Philosophy, in other words, is for Benjamin the activity that, through language, represents truth, in an immanent process in which it gains the status of doctrine (something that in itself has authority, without the need for external verification).

Benjamin illustrates these principles at work through the treatise (“without which truth is inconceivable” (28)), what can be thought of as the beginnings of a doctrine, philosophy commencing its work. The treatise, Benjamin describes, lacks the authority of the doctrine (since it is still in development) at the same time that it dispenses with mathematical proof (since mathematics is not philosophy’s method) (28). “The only element of an intention [. . . that the treatise has, Benjamin explains,] is the authoritative quotation” (28).[3] True to philosophy, the “method [of the treatise] is essentially representation,” which, Benjamin elaborates, is “a digression,” a method that lacks “uninterrupted purposeful structure” (28). The “process of thinking” involved in the treatise, in other words, is one that “makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object” (28). Benjamin also calls this method contemplation, which is characterized by the “continual pausing for breath,” as the philosopher “pursu[es] different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object [in which the philosophical activity . . .] receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification for its irregular rhythm” (28).[4] The aim of this “contemplative mode of representation [. . .] is not to carry the reader away and inspire him with enthusiasm” but to “force[. . .] the reader to pause and reflect” in a detached manner (29). [Marx, of course, criticizes precisely such contemplative philosophy as complicit with the state (of things).]

The things or tools that philosophy works with are what Benjamin call ideas (29). To clarify what they are, he distinguishes truth, which “bodie[s] forth in the dance of represented ideas,” from knowledge (29). Knowledge, Benjamin describes, “is determined by the fact that it must be taken possession of” (29). As such, its method is not representation but the acquisition of the object targeted to be known (29). Knowledge acquires its object when the knower gets to know individual phenomena, collecting knowledge about them (30). These individual phenomena, Benjamin notes, are not unified in themselves. To be fully known, then, a secondary process is called for in which the knower “derive[s . . .] a coherence [. . . of these separate phenomena] in the consciousness” (30). Knowledge, in other words, requires a secondary process (the conscious derivation of coherence) in addition to the direct knowing (or perception) of individual objects. Because of this, the unity gained by knowledge, Benjamin evaluates, is not immediate. It is moreover only a conceptual unity, where “the concept is a spontaneous product of the intellect” (30) and not of the experience that precedes that intellectualizing (perhaps even rationalizing) process (characterized as this primary experience is by individual (and not unified) phenomena). [Husserl is charting the same mechanism when he makes the call to go back to phenomena, except Husserl’s “phenomena” does not relate to knowledge but to direct experience; Benjamin, of course, makes a very different move from Husserl when, rather than staying with phenomena, he connects them to ideas, as explained below.]

In contrast, Benjamin defines truth as “self-representation,” describing it as deriving “from an essence” (30). Benjamin explains that “all essences exist in complete and immaculate independence, not only from [reality], but especially, from each other” (37). Unlike individual phenomena (what knowledge works with), then, essences are unified and complete in themselves. Being more specific, Benjamin states that truth deals with ideas, which “are simply given to be reflected upon” (30). As such, ideas, unlike concepts, have a “unity of essence,” where essences have “supreme metaphysical significance” (30). It is, Benjamin clarifies, the “harmonious relationship between such essences [i.e. ideas. . . that] constitutes truth” (37). Because of the essential nature of its materials/components, then, “unity is present in truth as a direct and essential attribute” (30). Representation is thus immanent to truth and while “knowledge is open to question, [. . .] truth is not” (30). It is precisely this—truth, not knowledge—that for Benjamin philosophy is concerned with. [Thus in a way Benjamin aims to overthrow the tradition begun by Descartes that made epistemology the first philosophy.]

Reading Plato, Benjamin then presents “truth—the realm of ideas—as the essential content of beauty” (30) (emphasis added).[5] Benjamin clarifies that “truth is not a process of exposure which destroys the secret [of beauty], but a revelation which does justice to it” by being “the guarantor of the existence of beauty” (31). By content, then, Benjamin does not mean something exposed. Rather, it is something “revealed in a process which might be described metaphorically as the burning up of the husk as it enters the realm of ideas, that is to say a destruction of the work in which its external form achieves its most brilliant degree of illumination,” i.e. the revelation (truth) that leads to illumination (beauty) (31). This to Benjamin demonstrates even more so how truth is not the object of knowledge, that philosophical truth is not scientific truth, and that philosophical truth “applie[s] to the world of ideas instead of empirical reality” (32).

Materiality of Discourses on Decolonization

[The Pintura of Chimalhuacán-Atoyac, an Amerindian "map"]

Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance explores different practices of representation/expression (literature, history, cartography) and the way in which in their respective registers (language, memory, space) they have been shaped and utilized by the imperial power (Europe, Spain in particular) for its colonizing project (of the Americas).[1] Mignolo makes no gesture to deny that some material world exists outside of these discourses (discourses here simply meaning processes that produce representations such as a literary work, a historical record, a map). Rather than straightforward correspondence between the discourse (which produce entities related to what Saussure calls the sign) and the material world (Saussure’s referent; “reality”), however, Mignolo questions such notion of objective truth.[2] He points instead to the political motivation and implication of such discourses, arguing that the construction of representations and the shape that they take constitute a significant part of the process of colonization (i.e. these discourses forward the imperial power’s political interests). In effect, the colonizer does not merely take over physical space (the territory) and assert its power by physical force (e.g. by the execution of insurgent elements in the colonized population); part and parcel of the colonizing project is the discursive imposition of representations. This is the way in which discourses of colonization, which manifest materially (in the text, the map), have a material effect (as “tools” for colonization).

One such discourse imposed by imperial power is European cartography, the development of which Mignolo charts in chapter 6 (“Putting the Americas on the Map: Cartography and the Colonization of Space”). Mignolo explains that the West mapped the world as divided into four parts in which, at the outset of its colonization, the Americas was represented as a “New World.” This representation equated knowledge by the West of a part of the world previously unknown to it with that part’s existence, as though prior to that knowledge, the Americas was an empty space that therefore had no perspective (coming as perspective does from people) and as though the perspective of the West corresponded to the actual shape of the world (259-62). Mignolo notes that all cultures fall into this centrism (262). If this is the case, it can be asked: why does Mignolo focus on the “hypothetical European observer,” critiquing only Eurocentrism (and not say, Amerindianism) (262)? What makes European centrism unique? Is it because the West at the time that Mignolo speaks of was in a position to do something with its perspective, i.e. to colonize the Americas, in a way that other powers that were also prone to centrism (e.g. Japan) did not?[3]

An implied assumption in Mignolo’s argument is that the European colonization of the Americas worked partly because of European cartography, that, as it were, representation is a tool for colonization. At the same time, however, (this may be what makes the European case unique) the success of their (material) colonization of the Americas allowed Europeans to disseminate their perspective—including to the colonized who come to adopt the colonizers’ maps not in the least because their land has become a part of the colonizers’ territory, thereby necessitating some synchronization of the representations of space—not to mention the forceful imposition by the colonizers of their representations, as, for example, in “the suppression [by the Spanish] of native graphic traditions and modes of communication” (303). Thus not only is discourse a part of the colonizing project; through colonization the discourses of the colonizers seem to gain more universality, if only because that discourse is incorporated into the representational framework of more people (the colonizers and the colonized).

After discussing European cartography, Mignolo turns to “the other side of the mountain” to provide an account of Amerindian representations of space—the same space represented by the Europeans, albeit differently—the presence of which testifies that there were, in fact, albeit silenced, Amerindian representations of space prior to and after the Europeans’ arrival in what the latter called the “New World” (296). Mignolo hints that he can do this with less certainty compared to his account of European representation since “Amerindian ‘maps’ are not as well documented as Spanish and European ones partly due to the fact that most of them were destroyed in the process of colonization,” which once again makes felt the effect of the material situation on discursive representations (296). Nonetheless, Mignolo is able to determine that Amerindian representations were, like the actual space they inhabited, hybrid ones in which both “ethnic spaces” of the Spanish and the Amerindian coexisted (307). This is the way in which Mignolo is able to make the distinction between the two discursive strategies of representation: the European empties space so that he can then organize it with himself occupying the center; while the Amerindian empties the center to show the two ethnic groups inhabiting the same (or a contiguous) space with each other (309).

At first it seems as though it is only the Europeans that are, through their representations, committing a political act, as though it is only their discourses that have a material effect. Emptying space, the Europeans are able to impose their own perspective and position themselves at the center of representations, thereby making felt, even in their representations (i.e. in addition to their setting up of a government, their military bases, etc.), their power. Amerindian mappings of space after the conquest, however, are also political. The Amerindians were faced with a (material) situation in which the colonizers occupied the center. Even as their hybrid representations do not attempt to push these colonizers out (since they represent both groups, including the colonizers), the latter are nonetheless de-centered, in a move that likely calls for an equality of status between the two groups (since in the representations no one is at the center; rather, both groups coexist in two ethnic spaces), in effect dethroning the colonizers from their position of power—undeniably a political move. The two representations have two different starting points (a space that was just discovered, targeted to be colonized; colonial rule in which the colonized “native” inhabitants of the land, occupy a subordinate position) and as such different tasks—and, it must be noted, different goals (colonization, with the hierarchy, usurpation, and oppression it implies; equality without necessarily demanding the colonizers to leave). Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that both discursive strategies are political: created by groups that have political interests (although politics may not be the only reason that they were created), the representations work towards (material) political goals.

Zone of Social Abandonment, Constructed, (In)Visible

[João Biehl and Catarina in Vita; image by Torben Eskerod from the book]

There is a place outside of Porto Alegre in Brazil where families leave behind “undesirable members” (14) (mostly sick) to wait for their death. It is called Vita, what João Biehl, in an ethnographic work, describes as a “zone of social abandonment.” Zones of social abandonment are sprouting in Brazil’s big cities to perform a function left over by other social institutions: the exclusion of certain elements (those who don’t produce, those who don’t vote (104)) from the body politic in the form of “social death.” (The) Social (production of) death(s) (14) is death in a very real sense since human beings in need of care (usually considered to be mentally ill) are left in these zones (due to the family’s lack of ability and/or willingness to care) to allow their death and since, upon entrance to these zones, these human beings become excluded—dead as far as it is concerned—from the social context in which they once were. Thus death, in Vita (nowhere to be seen on the map), is dealt to both the “biological entity [. . . and the] ‘social being grafted upon the physical individual’” (37)—creating ex-humans (52)—in what Biehl describes as “the end-station on the road of poverty” (2) and of the disintegration of social links (106-107).

Biehl puts in context the emergence of these zones. The declaration of health as a public right in Brazil (provided by the State) raised expectations (demanding social inclusion) even as it “collided with historically entrenched forms of medical authoritarianism” (47). “Decentralization and community- and family-centered approaches to primary care [was called for by health workers against psychiatric institutions] amid [not unrelated to the worldwide neoliberal wave] the rapid encroachment of private health care plans” (47). Faced with “high rates of migration and unemployment, the rise of a drug economy in the poorest outlying areas, and generalized violence,” “police forces [at the same time] increasingly engaged in erasing signs of misery, begging, and informal economies from the city, [and] pastoral and philanthropic institutions took up the role of caregiver, albeit selectively” (48). Tasked with growing burdens amid increased pressure, “families frequently [. . .] redefin[ed] their functional scope and value systems” (48), at times making the decision to abandon family members in need, thereby “making decisions about who shall die and who shall live and at what cost” (52). As a result, then, of “disciplinary sites of confinement, including traditionally structured families and institutional psychiatry, [. . .] breaking apart; [of] the social domain of the state [. . .] ever-shrinking; and [of] society increasingly operat[ing] through market dynamics” (41), zones like Vita have emerged in response to a new social need unfulfilled by institutions already in existence. “In the face of increasing economic and biomedical inequality and the breakdown of the family, human bodies [have thus been] routinely separated from their normal political status and abandoned to the most extreme misfortune, death-in-life” (38).

More interestingly, Biehl traces the subjectivity of Vita’s patients/inmates itself to its social causes (going so far as to suggest that their “conditions” are social constructs?). Catarina, Biehl’s main subject of study in the book, suggests that a shift in family relations amidst her medical treatment (she complains of “rheumatism,” in fact a paralysis) made possible her reconstruction as “mad” (8). This begs the question: Is she mad, then? Does she in fact have a mental condition that requires treatment in an institution, and, if she does, was it caused by a social dynamic (the shift in family dynamics, the use of pharmaceuticals) rather than a biological determinant (e.g. genetic predisposition)? Biehl points out that “the soundness or unsoundness of [Catarina’s] mind was the nature either presupposed by her kin and neighbors or mastered by pharmaceuticals and the scientific truth-value they bestow,” implying that what is considered normal/mad is a matter of norms, a social judgment (relying on common sense, later on taken to be scientific) (9). From this Biehl speculates that “familial and medical deliberations over Catarina’s mental state [none of which is objectively definitive (reliant as it is on current common sense)] and the actions that resulted made her life practically impossible” (9-10), leading her to Vita although there may in fact be no justification for it (she may not in fact be “mad,” or she was made mad) other than the family’s intention to leave her there (the “madness” labeled upon her serving as pretext).

After hearing some of Catarina’s life story, Biehl tells her, “You seem to be suggesting that your family, the doctors, and the medications played an active role in making you ‘mad’” (95). Catarina’s life situation before Vita was indeed potent for “madness” (“objective”/scientific or imposed?). Married to an abusive womanizer who later on took their children away, financially taken advantage of by a brother-in-law, and neglected and disparaged by her brothers (92-98), Catarina was admitted to a psychiatric hospital based solely on a history of mental illness in the family (123) and the word (not even of a family member) of a family friend (126). In the hospital, she was given inadequate mental treatment (124) characterized by “highly stigmatizing diagnostics and routinized overmedication” without much differentiation between patients, in which the aim was “sedating [the patients], controlling [their] aggressiveness, and alleviating the supposed psychotic episode” (127), the patient’s resistance to which is taken as a sign that the diagnosis is correct and the treatment appropriate (128). Catarina keeps telling Biehl, her ethnographer, “When my thoughts agreed with my ex-husband and his family, everything was fine. [. . .] But when I disagreed with them, I was mad. It was like a side of me had to be forgotten. The side of wisdom” (79). It is likely that Catarina does in fact have a mental condition (probably mild, partly caused by her physical ailments, likely caused by complicated labor in childbirth (79)), but, aided by institutional medication, this was socially constructed by people she was intimately linked to into the madness that abandoned her to Vita, the “end-station” where she is made to await death.

Once in Vita, people like Catarina become invisible, excluded from the social body. An implied thesis in Biehl’s book is that if only these people were not forgotten, if only these people were visible, then they would be cared for, they wouldn’t suffer such fate, they wouldn’t already be (in life) dead. This is reminiscent of politics of representation (Badiou?) that argue that the reason that certain people are or can be oppressed is because they are invisible, that invisibility itself (e.g. no documents, no right to vote) is oppression. Catarina is in fact in some sense invisible: while she is seen by fellow inmates and is known (not only in her personality but also in her condition, if vaguely and uncertainly) by the administrators of Vita (in that sense, she does not totally lose her subjectivity), like the zone itself (not marked on the map) she is invisible to the outside world, including the family that abandoned her. (There are levels of (in)visibility, it seems.) The question is: would visibility do her and the zone itself (and its other patients) any good? I ask this question conscious of Foucault’s analysis of the ways in which those who exercise power accumulate knowledge of the subject (by virtue of his visibility to them) in order to use it to subject him (in fact is what makes this possible), the exercise of power yielding knowledge, which allows the (further) exercise of power, (further) production of knowledge . . . in the mechanism that he referred to as power/knowledge (see also his analysis of disciplinary power). If Catarina’s visibility would lend her to potential intervention (not unlike interventions by her family that led her to a psychiatric institution, and then Vita), is it what Biehl, her beloved ethnographer, should be calling for?

Long Hiatus Ended–to protest!

It has been a looong time since I last posted something here. Partly because I took a break (from writing, at least), partly because I had to move to my new settlement for the next few years (beautiful SoCal). To restart another period of (hopefully prolific) activity, I significantly revised the profile page of (mass)think! (the only work-related product of the summer, really). Think of it as, “What is (mass)think?” or better yet, “How to (mass)think?” the profile of an “approach” (attitude, methodology, purpose), as it were, which really is a record/reminder of the most important things I learned in grad school (so far).

I also want to take this opportunity to alert those who are concerned about quality and accessible public education in America that, in lieu of the present economic “crisis” (manufactured by them who are being bailed out while they were singing, “I can do this by myself! No government! No sociality!”), the University of California is being threatened to be privatized and turned into a business. A letter by UC Berkeley professor Catherine Cole provides a guide through the economic woes passed onto the excellent public university system (one of the best, if not the best, in the United States) and the administration’s tendentious response to it. UC San Francisco professor Stanton Glantz explains how UC and CSU budget policymaking works and assesses options and their consequences (looking at UM), pointing to the importance of the governor. UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff clarifies that privatization is the real issue. To take a stand against the destruction of public education in California, on September 24th, UC faculty, students, and staff from all ten campuses are planning a walkout.

Update (2009.09.21):

The show Subversity on campus radio KUCI has been providing coverage of the UC budget crisis and planned worker response to it. Dan Tsang points to an earlier report (2002) by economist Peter Donohue on a history of the UC refusing to improve workers’ pay despite its ability to do so (more from its own revenues than state appropriations) without harming educational programs. Donohue also clarifies the distinction between “restricted” and “unrestricted” funds, pointing out that “committed” funds are not legally or contractually binding and that unrestricted funds have increased over the years, some of which have been non-mandatorily transferred (i.e. hidden).

More up-to-date analysis is provided by UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus in Physics Charles Schwartz at University Probe. Schwartz points out that for the proposed 2009-2010 budget, students’ financial input (2.5 billion) to the UC core operating budget actually matches the funds that come from the state (2.6 billion). If this is how things were to work, then the university, Schwartz reasons, ought to be more student-oriented. Calling attention to the fact that the administration is “cutting Teaching Assistants, who are graduate students employed as the first line in serving the educational needs of undergraduate students,” noting that “the total cost to UC for all TA’s [. . .] is between $100 million and $200 million per year, [. . . which] are peanuts compared to the total $1.5 billion that undergraduate students are paying in Educational Fees,” Schwartz remarks that “there is something wrong here.” The “$1.5 billion in money that [the UC] get[s] from undergraduate students paying their Educational Fees should be used – as a first priority – to provide the quality undergraduate education that UC has been famous for [including the hiring of excellent faculty and TAs].  If there is a dire shortage in state funding, that may certainly have some painful consequences; but since students are paying so much for their own education, that money must be used to supply them that education.”

Remaking the University links to a series of videos from the UC Budget Crisis Teach-In at UC Berkeley on 2009.09.14.

Defend-UCI links to a document by senior faculty from UC Irvine providing a “more informed understanding” of the UC crisis, highlighting UC contributions to California; property taxes that are too low (thanks to Proposition 13 in 1978) and corporate taxes that were cut, making the state dependent on individual income tax; the Schwarzenegger-Dynes-Reed Compact that shifts education finance away from the state general fund onto private sources; the governor demanding radical shrinkage of the pubilc sector (vowing “no new taxes,” instead calling for “structural reform”). More directly pertinent to the UC, the document explains the most recent reduction (2008-2009) in state support from $3.2 to $2.4 billion and the state of fiscal emergency declared by UC President Yudof as he imposed salary cuts, office restructurings, service reductions, administrative consolidations (“the net result has been a substantial and accelerating decline in the quality of students’ educational experience—growing class sizes, fewer courses, greater difficulty enrolling in courses, fewer teaching assistants, less student access to labs”; “The University of California – the greatest public university in the world — usually hires dozens of faculty members each year. Most campuses have had to declare a hiring freeze”) and recommended a net 30% increase in student fees over the next year (“with the proposed increases in student fees, the UC is still cheaper than its peers, [. . . but] to fully recoup from tuition [w]hat is being cut in state support, students would have to pay twice as much as they do now”).

Students from the Radical Student Union at UC Irvine publish the first ever UCI Disorientation Guide.

Contact the media (TV, radio, blog) and ask them to cover the 9/24 UC walkout! My letter to Democracy Now!:

On September 24th professors, students, and staff are planning a system-wide walkout at the ten UC campuses to protest state cuts on education funding and make the UC, one of the best and few truly public universities in America, to be more reliant on student fees. Berkeley professor George Lakoff makes clear that the issue really is the privatization of the public university (http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/?p=77), with consequences reaching far beyond California. Berkeley professor Charles Schwartz points out that for the proposed 2009-2010 budget, students’ financial input (2.5 billion) to the UC core operating budget actually matches the funds that come from the state (2.6 billion) (http://bit.ly/1yeT5f). The Donohue report (2002) shows that the UC has a history of refusing to improve workers’ pay despite its ability to do so (more from its own revenues than state appropriations) without harming educational programs (http://bit.ly/388pIH). UC Irvine senior faculty describes the salary cuts, office restructurings, service reductions, administrative consolidations, and tuition hikes imposed by UC president Yudof (http://bit.ly/1bYi1). Berkeley professors offer a teach-in on the crisis (http://bit.ly/2qmR0H). The LA Times and mainstream media in general has not covered this story. It has been mentioned in the Pacifica Evening Radio News, but in-depth coverage and analysis is lacking. Given the groundbreaking tradition of Democracy Now to bring news from the progressive ground, I’m sure it would be easy to find the professors mentioned above and ask them to explain these issues–pertinent to the whole nation, specifically to public education, which is dying–in a public and national forum. September 24th is an important day, because if the protests fall flat, then the UC administration would take it as a signal that they can do whatever they want, without input and, more importantly, significant resistance from faculty, staff, and students, the true lifeblood of the university. Please consider this request; do your part in taking a stand against the destruction of public education.

In Between and Outside, Difference and Dialectics

[Some of the PhD programs I applied to wanted to know more about my person and how it has shaped the kind of work that I do. This is the statement of “personal history and philosophy” I wrote in addition to the “purpose of study.”]

I was born in cosmopolitan Manila, capital of the Philippines, between two so-called “ethnic communities.” I lived most of my life in that milieu referred to in official state records as “Filipino-Chinese,” lacking both the “nativeness” of the Filipino and the “elite” status of the Chinese. In grade school I remember being chosen as a speaker in an event celebrating Philippine independence and the revolutionary struggle against Spain. My history teacher had picked me to be the Filipino “representative” (to mirror the Filipino rebel leaders) because of my diligence and my brown skin. I will never forget, however, that I was not really what she was looking for. My small Chinese eyes, she remarked, betrayed me.

This uncanny position in between characterized many of my interactions in early life that I can only identify now. In college, for example, “native” “Filipinos” had the stereotype of the “Chinese” as good with numbers, obsessed with business, and dismissive (if not disdainful) of Filipino culture. My “native” classmates thought I was one of them. I could not speak Chinese, however, and I did better on minor classes in the humanities while struggling in business courses required by my major. At the same time, I could not understand some expressions my “Filipino” friends used and was not familiar with some typical activities. Interacting with both groups failed, as it were, to make me think of myself as belonging to either one—on the contrary only heightening the problems of identity I felt.

Ironically enough, this can perhaps be accounted for by the fact that there is virtually no identity politics in the Philippines. Even as it is a very diverse “nation-state,” for some reason, Filipinos don’t really talk about ethnic differences (at least not formally). When riding the jeep, for example, while it is commonplace to find two Filipinos who could not look any more different from each other, there is no way to talk about such things or to raise such issues (much less claim one as more “Filipino” than the other). People simply do not think about it, much less bother with it. After all, were differences to be pointed out, many fine grades of distinction would have to be considered: for example, between the Spanish-Filipinos (the mestizos), the Filipino-Americans (the Fil-Ams), and within the “truly” “native” “Filipinos” the many different tribes (originating from different regions) incorporated in that entity, not to mention the uncertain status of the Muslims (the Moros) in the south and the somewhat unassimilated but homegrown “Chinese” (and, mixed with the “native” Pinoys, the Chinoys). Not to be forgotten, of course, are the intermarriages and mixtures between these already mixed groups (like myself). Thus I grew up finding no sense (or use) in so-called “identity categories” at the same time that I felt sharply my own singular difference. This is partly to account for, I think, my aversion to large, fixed, exclusive categories and attraction to syncretic combinations, singular performances, and molecular differences.

The feeling I had of being in between—an outsider—did not merely have to do with ethnicity. I never did understand how my father, the son of Chinese immigrants and who could barely speak Tagalog (the dominant dialect that serves as the basis of the national language), was able to develop an “understanding” with my mother, a “Filipina” from the province of Pampanga for whom Tagalog was a second language and who could not speak Chinese. The moments I spent with my father were moments in which he was trying to learn Tagalog. He also passed away early in life and was not able to teach me Chinese. My mother, on the other hand, taught me my “first language,” Tagalog, although in conversations with family she herself used her own mother tongue, Kapampangan (from her province). In grade school, I encountered, of course, that other dominant language, English, an unofficial “official” language of the country in which I was for the most part educated (although not in the way that the rich were; hence my accent).

From very early on in life, then, I existed amidst many, shall we call, different “traditions.” Which one is my own?, I never really could tell. Other than identity, however, there were also issues of power, palpable to me from the very beginning. It struck me that, on the surface, one can be thought to be part of a dominant group (“He is part Chinese . . .”) yet, in reality, not have much power (my father did do a lot of business, as a traveling businessman of sorts). Similarly, one can indeed possess substantial power (“I speak fluent Tagalog, the major language of the country”), but, as I realized later, only within a certain context (“You’re abroad. What is your Tagalog worth now?”). In my experience, at least, I felt as though a shifter, occupying positions in the majority or the minority according to the time, place, and situation I was in.

Compounding this shifting position in power is the inability to fully identify with not only one’s “natural group,” as it were, based on one’s “inherent” characteristics, but also with the political ideologies or causes in which one believes. So-called “left-wing movements” in the Philippines, for example, demand of the state to curb economic inequality. This is partnered, however, with the conservative appeal to traditional “Filipino” values in response to the globalizing and modernizing pull of the West, which, due to some admiration I have for the West, prevents me from pledging full solidarity with the “national” leftist movement. The absence of men and the preponderance of women (my mom, aunts, sisters, cousins, nannies) in my life has also, despite my somewhat successful education in the performance of the “masculine” gender, affected my desires such that to an extent I feel the stirrings of feminine sexuality—which keeps me even more at odds with the movement I am supposed to belong. It seems as though there is always something that keeps me from identifying and belonging. Less a matter of choice than simply the way that my life has worked out, again and again I am relegated to the outside.

Studying the Cultural Libidinal-Political Economy

[A revised version of the “purpose of study” I sent out when applying for the PhD, written with the feedback of professors, friends, and family]

I have taken a long and unusual route to decide what kind of work to do for the PhD. Partly this is due to my Third World background. Focused on financial concerns and lacking predecessors in my family, I had only later in life considered a career in the humanities. More important, however, was my feeling that academic departments were artificially divided, which left me confused as to where to pursue the scholarship I was interested in. This is perhaps not unfortunate. In the process, I was trained in the intellectual frameworks used in economics and history (my major and minor in college) as well as in literature and continental philosophy (in which I will obtain my MAs).

The complex intermingling of these disciplines gave my research interest its present form, which attained coherence in graduate school. After a few years of serious study, the common thread that emerged in my work is the capitalist cultural, political, and economic social formation. The lasting influence appears to be Karl Marx, especially in his critique of the political economy of his day that, in my undergraduate years, were imbued in me as (neo)classical and (neo)liberal economics. I will never forget my first encounters with Marx in graduate school when the issues he raised clashed with the economic dogma I was educated in. At first economics and Marxist criticism seemed diametrically opposed, until I realized that Marx was only taking the work of political economy to its full conclusion by, ironically enough, looking at what it took for granted as “natural” and relegated to the outside.

This intellectual background developed in me a sharp eye insatiably curious about the workings of the capitalist social economy. Like Marx (with Nietzsche), I am interested in tracing the genealogy of political economies. This would help me, I think, shed light into the capitalism of our day, specifically to its deliberate construction and the symptoms that accompany it: e.g. consumerism, inequality, globalization, imperialism, and revolution. Especially interesting to me in this regard are the evolving dynamics of power and desire that maintain and change the way in which the social is organized. More than Marx, however, I would like to pay attention to components of the social formation other than the economic. This perhaps betrays the influence of literary theory (mainly structuralism and philosophies of language) and cultural Marxism (mostly the Frankfurt School). I believe that equally potent in the social economy are cultural artifacts/performances—“discursive” ones such as literature, popular culture, politics; “material” ones such as social institutions, family structure, city shapes, tools, and bodies—which sometimes lead to culture wars. These “cultural” matters, I believe, are pertinent objects of study, especially in how they reinforce and contradict the strictly “economic.”

My reading of Marx and approach to the social has tended to be influenced by “postmodern” thought. I find the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, for example, pertinent in stressing not only class divisions but also contentions in sexuality and race (and the subdivisions therein). Focusing on these molecular aspects not only bring in other traditions (e.g. psychoanalysis and bastard philosophies and anthropologies) into the inquiry but also allows a more comprehensive analysis by, among other things, raising issues not only of material things but also of the intellect and desire, providing a fuller picture of what is a libidinal-political cultural economy. Another influence is Michel Foucault with his dissociation of power from particular persons or orders. It is arguable whether these thinkers are in fact “postmodern,” but there is in them, I find, attempts to refuse definiteness or systematic accessibility in order to think flows in their complexity. This shadow of Nietzsche over Hegel in these thinkers, I feel, is a promising supplement to (or is perhaps a trace of) Marx’s own work. This is not to say that I have not been influenced by “modern” schools. In fact, if I had to list my theoretical/philosophical influences, they would include critical Marxism, deconstructed psycho/schizoanalysis, Nietzschean poststructuralism, and Heideggerian phenomenology—the “modern” and the “postmodern” in monstrous combinations.

Inquiry into the conflicts inherent in capitalism, however, would remain incomplete if it examined only the conflicts between how capitalism is thought about. That, one can argue (as Marx did with political economy), is still remaining within the established system. Responses not solely intellectual have been and are being mounted against the “system,” whether they be effective or counterproductive. Examples include past and ongoing political struggles and social movements, especially those that assert ethnic and state nationalisms and fascisms, religious belief, and lifestyle and gender identities. These things must also be thought, I think, especially when it comes to how sometimes they emulate the workings of power and desire in the very order that they seek to undermine. Like capitalism itself, I would like to submit its discontents to theoretical inquiry.

Spontaneous Generation and Capitalist Capture

I recently finished and defended my thesis for my MA in Philosophy. I wrote about surplus value in economics, Marx, and Deleuze. Here’s the introduction:

In his critique of political economy from the Grundrisse to Capital, Karl Marx presupposes abstraction and quantification. The process by which activity and its product are alienated from the human worker, which as independent existences are then measured and valued numerically, is in fact a pervasive phenomenon in the capitalist political economy. Equally widespread is excess, which economics, the political economy’s official science, records as profit. Marx thinks the phenomenon differently as surplus value resulting from the processes of alienation and valorization. Surplus value, in turn, is connected by Marx to the further but no less marked phenomenon of recurrent crises, recognized by economics as a structural feature of the capitalist system.

There is, in a sense, a consensus between Marx’s thought and mainstream economics, originating as this latter does from the political economy of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, which is precisely the target of Marx’s critique. In both strands of thinking about the economy, there is the recognition, taken almost for granted, that there is excess: there is more in the end than was there in the beginning. It is assumed, in other words, that the product has more value than what was put in its production. The disagreement lies rather on how this excess originates (where it comes from). This is a question worth raising not only because it clarifies the nature of the excess and its production (which then may have significant consequences over its distribution), but, more importantly, because this excess itself is that upon which the social formation is founded and rests (and as such sheds light on its rules and relations).

This thesis sets against each other the economic and Marxist claims on excess. As its official science, economics takes the capitalist economy as a given (as the ‘natural’ state of the economy, as it were) and explains excess as savings on costs resulting from the strategic planning of capitalist agents, whose point of view, in studying economic phenomena, modern economics takes. Marx, in a historicist move, argues that capitalism is but one political economy among many, where the facts assumed by the likes of Ricardo, such as the savings supposedly reaped by capitalist planning, are, far from given, attributable to a particular systemic formation (a political event) of social relations and materials into an economy. This systemic social formation that comes to be called capitalism, Marx argues, involves at its core the exploitation of labor, in which capitalists expropriate the surplus value that laborers produce, appropriate it as their profits, which is then accumulated as additional capital.

Initially these ideological claims seem irreconcilable and mutually exclusive. While this thesis takes the view that something similar to what Marx refers to as exploitation in fact takes place in the capitalist social formation, a fundamental mechanism covered over by the naturalizing mystifications of political economy and revealed only through a historicist stance like that of Marx, I argue that the roles implied by that power mechanism are not mutually exclusive and, as such, the acts of ‘exploitation’ are not rigidly designatable to either only capital or labor, as Marx claims. I argue that a further standpoint beyond historicism is called for to account for the contribution, in addition to that of labor (whose point of view, directly opposed to economics’, Marx takes), of capital to the system, not to mention those by other elements, including non-human ones.

The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (sometimes with Félix Guattari), combined with insights from complexity and organization theory, provides this necessary standpoint. Refusing to take the capitalist ‘socius’ as natural, taking it, like Marx, as historical, Deleuze nonetheless provides some metaphysical grounding through the abstract process that he describes underlies all political economies, namely the assemblage of different elements into a unified, consistent, and productive whole that is the social formation. Thereby exploitation is revealed as a concrete actualization of the virtual process that Deleuze calls capture, an actualization specific to the historical socius that is capitalism.

More importantly, exploitation or capitalist capture is revealed to presuppose a spontaneous generation of excess. As such, exploitation does not exhaust all the productive capacities of the system and is but one potential source of further values among others. As Deleuze is quick to point out, however, all the (economic) potentials presupposed to be spontaneously generated are inseparable from the (political) process of capture that subordinates values to the dominant element in the system (e.g. to capital). Marx thus has some warrant to assert that exploitation is fundamental not only to the workings of the capitalist system but, more importantly, to the production of excess.

My inquiry into the nature of excess in capitalism is thus both historical and metaphysical. A historical standpoint towards the social formation is assumed to avoid taking the structural arrangements that lead to certain economic phenomena (such as savings), often reified by economics, as natural. At the same time, certain abstract processes, such as the formation of the assemblage (that generates excess), are recognized for their virtual reality in all social formations, although they appear in historically different forms (e.g. as surplus value or profit in capitalism) in which the potentials actualized are different.

The approach I take, then, reverses that of traditional political economy (which has evolved into modern economics). Rather than taking the capitalist political economy and its historical phenomena as natural, what I recognize is the metaphysical (and thus universal and ‘eternal’) status of the virtual assemblage that generates excess. Taking the assemblage as the abstract structure or framework (‘abstract machine’ or ‘Idea’ in Deleuze’s terms) that underlies all concrete and historically specific political economies, I draw from Deleuze’s philosophy to show that capitalism is an assemblage that generates excess. The metaphysical conclusions derived from this insight, the processes that will be shown are the true givens of any study of the political economy, will then inform the second look at phenomena at work in the capitalist political economy, especially the savings and profit (and sometimes loss) that economics takes as given, even ‘natural’ (or as resulting from the system that economics takes is the ‘natural’ configuration of the economy).

Strange Realities

I finished teaching Marx in class today. We had started out with his philosophy where I traced Marx’s intellectual development (in the context of Hegel and Feuerbach) and the historical materialist method that he developed (I offered a schematic and a narrative based on a Deleuzian flat ontology made possible by Heidegger’s notion of mode). We then made a detour into Althusser (to elaborate on the State and ideology) and, taking material from my thesis, finally discussed Marx’s critique of political economy (the forms of activity, material, and value in the capitalist political economy; labor and capital at the level of forces, classes, personifications, and persons; profit in exchange from the exploitation of labor; the need to realize surplus, crises of overproduction, and the changing form of capitalism). I ended the class with a brief and intentionally vague sketch of “species-being” and what Marx describes as the “free development of the human individual” in “communist society.”

There is a recent incident that illustrates what Marx critiques about the political economy that, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to raise in class (so I do it here). In late 2008, in lieu of the current economic crisis, former US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan was called to testify in Congress. He had a revealing exchange with California congressman Henry Waxman:

Towards the end of his interrogation, Waxman asks Greenspan, “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wished you had not made?” Greenspan circles around the question, proffering his own definition of “ideology.” Greenspan who, consistently in the past, has uttered the term only with bitter contempt, identifying it with those who (like Naomi Klein)—unlike Greenspan and his experience (40 years in the Fed)—were somehow misinformed or misguided, perhaps even, for some tendentious reason, willfully misrepresenting reality. Those who—unlike Greenspan and the objective “science” he was a part of (along with University of Chicago guru Milton Friedman)—were delusionary, if not downright power-crazed totalitarian Commie. All the while as he enacted neoliberal policies (that monstrous combination of classical and Keynesian economics: deregulation, privatization, welfare cuts from the poor, wealth redistribution to the rich . . .) not only at home but abroad in a truly global economy.

In the debate with Naomi Klein (in late 2007), Greenspan retorts: “First of all, ideology is not what I hold. I try to learn what are the facts, and I let my opinions, judged on the facts, not by some preconception, which I regret is what ideology as a notion means.” In contrast, in front of Waxman: “Ideology is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology.”

Waxman is not distracted by the evasions. When Greenspan says, “I found a flaw—” Waxman interrupts in disbelief, “A flaw in the reality . . .?” Greenspan responds with complex formulations. Mindful of the time, Waxman finally demands, “In other words, you found that [. . .] your ideology was . . . not right?” “I was shocked,” says Greenspan, and (finally!): “Precisely.” Yes, I was in ideology.

That is classic! The head of the financial system—dismissive of “ideology” (except for his)—faced with a crisis he is responsible for is forced to recount in public that, as he defined the financial landscape of the world of the past 40 years, he did it with—in—ideology . . . The man possessed of oh so much certainty, hubris, authority, and power, the chief captain of the “free market” who has always posed his stance as “natural,” objective, a “science”—now forced to admit that his view of the world was (like the rest of us) but an ideology. That has got to be one of the most dramatic moments in recent American history—and no one even had to write it!

Greenspan of course could only do all this afterwards, with some reflection, after he had stepped down from power—and when forced (by a crisis!). As Althusser says of ideology:

Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological.’ It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself.

Greenspan could never say, “I am in ideology,” (science itself, I believe, is ideological, and economics, moreover, is not a science!) because then, being inside, he would not see it. (When he says, “I was in ideology,” well, what good does that do?) What makes these free-marketeers even more exceptional (in their being ideological) is that they are particularly self-assured and forceful in insisting that No, they are not in ideology (They are just letting be, laissez-faire!)—and their words (like scientists) carry weight, not to mention that they are (frequently) in positions of power. It is of course not only their discourse that appears as natural, but the capitalist political economy itself of which their discourse is the official science, organized as it is according to neoliberal principles. (Hence the distinct character and potency of Marx’s critique.)

But at least Greenspan was forced to admit. At least (if we can believe him) now Greenspan knows and, more importantly, we (should) know—Which is less than we can say for Ben Bernanke, Greenspan protégé, the new Fed chairman; Henry Paulson, former investment banker, Treasury secretary to the end of the previous administration; Tim Geithner, new Treasury chief, another New York insider; Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, “Liberal” deregulators, Obama’s ear on their mouths. These people never did recant. They never were forced to swallow in public. And they continue to shape the financial and economic policy of this country.

But they did change ways. They did defy their so-called “principles.” Confronted by a meltdown (of their own doing!), free-marketeers (even if only secretly) must have swallowed—swallowed hard—enacting all those interventions in the economy.

The only thing is, their intervention only helped their former colleagues. They are in fact intervening in the economy—to help their own class!

And they are still in charge! And everyone’s shouting, “We have become Marxists!”

The world has become a circus—and the clowns are ruling, if not laughing. What to say, what to say? It is a crazy world we live in!

Addendum (Some background on the economic terms):

Responding to the laissez-faire tendencies of Smith and Ricardo’s classical economics (that argued that the economy is composed of free, equal, and rational individuals in a self-regulating market), Keynesian or Liberal economics was developed by John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression to argue that, over and above the ‘free individuals’ of the classical model, the State has a role to play in the economy in speeding up the process by which it reaches equilibrium, its optimum level of activity (hence its interventionist implications). Neoclassical economics, in turn, was a response to Keynesian economics in the crises of the seventies and eighties when presidents like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher enacted policies that called for low taxes, ‘balanced’ budgets, the reversal of New Deal welfare policies, and the removal of government constraints on private business in general. The neo- in neoclassical signals that the new economics is no mere return to the past but is an advance. True enough, there was in neoclassical economics tacit acceptance that the State would (and should) intervene—if only to make sure it wouldn’t (and that businesses are duly represented). Neoliberal economics is, in many ways, the consummation of the neoclassical model as ‘liberal’ governments of the West (especially the United States) sought to transform developing economies (through institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) according to its own model (systematized by the Chicago School of economists, foremost of which was Milton Freedman). In essentially enforcing policies of deregulation and privatization around the world, neoliberal economics is thus a monstrous combination of classical and Keynesian economics in that a ‘liberal’ State intervenes to enforce classical, orthodox economic principles around the world: a new liberalism, indeed. Despite the seeming variety, then, among the supposedly different strands, economics maintains the core assumption of equilibrium.

Marx’s Method: Narrative

After Marx has laid out the model spatially, he repeats the gesture, as if to say, “Again, again, again . . . Let’s do it again.” But differently, in another way:

[Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory]

Model 2: “Narrative”

Human beings, first of all (before they are even “able to ‘make history’”), “live” (the first circumstance) (181). “Life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other [material] things” (181). “The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of [the means of production, i.e. a certain organization of the productive forces, which thereby produces] material life itself”—“an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life” (181). “Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick [for example, . . .] it presupposes the action of producing the stick” (181-2).

“The satisfaction of the first need [. . .] leads to new needs” (the second circumstance) (182). How to define need, then? How to delimit it? Not only does the (current state of the) (established order of the) social formation stimulate its own demand, stimulating further needs. What is being spoken of, after all, is not the dominant mode of production currently operative, but the first moments of history (or the first moments in all (periods) of history, in all series). Rather, “the production of new needs is the first historical fact,” like the production of the means of production itself (and thereby of material life) (182) (my emphasis). Needs generating further needs is not a phenomenon specific to the current form of the political economy. It is rather a problem of species, perhaps of “nature,” operative, as it were, in all of history, in all political economies.

“[Individuals], who daily remake their own life, begin to make other [individuals], to propagate their own kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family” (a third circumstance) (182). This reproduction, i.e. “the production of life, both of one’s own labour and of fresh life in procreation,” is both natural (an instinct) and social (taking place with other individuals) (182). Production thus entails (not only reliance on natural givens but also) the co-operation of several individuals, i.e. the engendering of social relations (the fourth circumstance), in which the (particular) mode of production corresponds with the (particular) mode of relations. The “mode of co-operation [moreover] is itself a ‘productive force,’” i.e. ‘engendering’ is itself ‘production’ in the context of generalized production (182).

“Increased needs create new social relations and the increased population [that results from that creates] new [and further] needs,” determining the status of the different social relationships created (e.g. whether the family is still primary in comparison to other social relationships created) (182). Throughout this, there is a “materialistic connection of [human individuals] with each other” (183). These four circumstances, moreover, are not “different stages [succeeding each other chronologically], but just [. . .] aspects or [. . .] moments, which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in history today” (182). The model is thus a “narrative” only in a limited sense (in the same way that the “schematic” is representative in a limited way). There are indeed sequences traceable between the different ‘historical’ moments. No moment, however, has any necessary logical priority (in the same way that the “geographical” schematic divisions are not completely definitive).

Similarly, it would seem that “only [. . .] after having considered four moments, four aspects of the primary historical relationships, [. . . is] man [. . . found to] possess[] ‘consciousness,’” and with it (implied) ideas and ideology in general (183) (my emphasis). “‘Spirit,’” however, is “from the start [. . .] afflicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter,” as exemplified (embodied?) by (i.e. which “makes its appearance in the form of”) language (183). Language, the social ‘thing’ that it is, which is “as old as consciousness, [. . . which, in fact,] is practical consciousness that exists also for other [individuals], and for that reason alone [does] it really exist[] for [one] personally as well,” reveals that consciousness and ideas in general—ideology—“only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse [i.e. relation] with other men” (183).

This still sounds (as in crude materialism) as though ideology (as embodied in language) is secondary to social relations (i.e. intercourse), but in fact “where there exists a relationship, [language, and thereby ideas, thereby ideology] exists for [an individual]” (183). As soon as there are social relations, language exists; in fact, social relations necessitate language: language co-exists with social relations. Since human intercourse or social relations (the ‘co-operation of individuals’ and their reproduction, i.e. the fourth and third moments of history) are co-existent with the previous moments of the production of needs and the means of production, it follows that consciousness, ideas, and ideology in general, which arise with social relations, also do not come after material conditions. Ideology coexists with materiality.

Marx’s Method: Schematic

Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels) lays out his method of revolutionary critique in The German Ideology. Not a professional philosopher (like Kant and Hegel, or Feuerbach) and more like an intellectual journalist absorbed in political economy committed to the Revolution, Marx, drawing from the philosophical currents of his day (Hegel’s idealism and Feuerbach’s materialism), nonetheless achieved, through humanism, a brilliant methodological synthesis that would inform his quasi-philosophical inquiries. This method is none other than historical materialism. (Compare with the more concrete yet cruder delineation of the base and the superstructure, of which the models in this post and the following, like those by Gramsci and Althusser, are re-articulations.)

[Rembrandt's Philosopher in Meditation]

Model 1: “Schematic”

The starting point of the method is “real,” i.e. “real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity” (176). What is given/assumed are “men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions” (181). The first premise, in other words, are human beings, individuals that are materially organized and, consequently, related to nature (and each other) in structural arrangements that are modified (and have been put in place) “through the action of men” (176, 177). These individuals are set apart from other material bodies by the fact that they have consciousness and (as such?) they “produce their means of subsistence, [. . .] which is conditioned by their physical organization, [. . . in that process] indirectly producing their actual material life” (177). The starting point is thus a ‘dialectical’ relation: human beings are in concrete material conditions, which are (re-)created/organized by them.

Human production “depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence [individuals] find in existence and have to reproduce” (177). The means of subsistence are the productive forces (the what, e.g. raw materials, derived from nature and man); their nature (and the nature of their reproduction) the mode of production (the how, e.g. the household, artisanal, or factory system, defined more or less by technology, broadly speaking). The mode of production is not simply the (re)production of physical existence but is a “definite form of activity [. . .], a definite form of expressing [. . .] life” that characterizes individuals in a particular social organization (177). The mode of production, in other words, is no mere reproduction of what is necessary for survival (i.e. the bare minimum), but in being a human ‘activity’ is the mode (as in Heidegger) itself in which individuals express themselves and how they live—a mode of living/expressing/manifesting life itself—which characterize the individuals in their existence. The mode of production thereby determines not only material conditions but, included in life, the state of ideas as well.

The development of the productive forces implies developments in the division of labor (“each new productive force [. . .] causes a further development of the division of labour”), which are but “different forms of ownership” in society, i.e. a power relation (177). The history of the division of labor can be traced from the latent division in the family, to the division between citizen and slave, to the division between (agricultural) country (with peasants) and (industrial and commercial) towns (with individual labor) (178-9). There is a basic similarity in these divisions—i.e. subjection—“but the [specific] form of association and the [particular] relation of direct producers were different [in each mode] because of the different conditions of production” (179). The particular form that the power relation (politics) takes is determined by the particular form of the conditions of production (economy, which from scarcity organizes things so as to achieve efficiency and effectiveness) (and vice versa?).

The mode of production in which the last division mentioned was operative (feudalism), although there was “little division” there (only between “princes, nobility, clergy, and peasants in the country; and masters, journeymen, apprentices, and [. . .] casual labourers in the towns”), is insightful to the current mode (capitalism), particularly in the emergence, in addition to land in the country, of capital in the town as the “chief form of property,” and of individual labor simultaneous with it (179). The simultaneous emergence of capital and labor is indicative of the fact that the division of labor really is but a particular organization of ownership in society, which is represented by capital (hence with change in one comes change in the other). Links from one mode (feudalism) to the other (capitalism) imply not only shifts in the forms of politics as economic conditions change, but continuities as well, continuities that lead to breaks.

“The existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour,” i.e. to ends, wealth, property, and the ability to further ends (177-8). The division of labor, in other words, entails a particular form of the relations of production. At an even more primary level, relations are necessarily entailed by production so long as it is social, whatever its form is, with or without division in labor. “The fact is [. . .] that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations,” of which the division of labor (and the interrelation, hierarchy, and subjection implied by it) is but the exemplification (180). As such, “the social structure and [implied with it] the State [i.e. legal and political entities organizing social relations, e.g. the Constitution, laws, government institutions; politics narrowly defined] are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals [. . .] as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions, and conditions independent of their will” (180) (my emphasis).

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life” (180). The ideal (or ideology, or, together with the State, the ideological ‘superstructure’), in other words, is interwoven with (in contrast to being a “direct efflux” of (180)) material production (and its relations). Rather than determined by the material ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure’ (the economy, narrowly defined) (as “sublimate” “phantoms”), individuals (possessing an active mind, as in the idealist subject) produce “their conceptions, ideas, etc.,” i.e. their ideology (180). These individuals productive of ideology, however, existing in the social, are, it must be remembered, “real, active men [. . .] conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse [i.e. the relations] corresponding to these,” i.e. conditioned by material conditions (180). These material conditions have, of course, it must also be remembered, reached a concrete determination by a historical act of organization by a collective of individuals (using, among other things, the active mind). Hence production is not only material. In a ‘dialectical’ manner, there is both material and ideational production, and it is the economy of both productions—production in general—that takes on a form as the ‘mode of production,’ that thereby defines life.