Marx & Philosophy I & II (Session 2)

All right. Thank you.

Rhea, are you there? Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Hello? Ray, hey. Welcome back. Hello?

Oh, hey. I'm just asking again if everyone's got the handouts. No. No. Oh, you don't have the handouts. Yes. Okay. Okay, Billy, if you just give me an email, I'll send it to you right now. I'll just email it directly. Great, okay. Could you email me as well, Ray? Yes. I'm Matthew. Matthew Donovan.

No. Right. Let's continue, okay? So, we're trying to, we're just about to introduce Marx's critique of Feuerbach. But Feuerbach's key claim is that the essence of being human is human communality. The essence of communality is interpersonality, which is precisely contrasted to intersubjectivity.

This is why Feuerbach writes that the essence of man is contained only in the community. This is number three on the handout. The unity of man with man, a unity, however, that rests on the reality of the distinction between I and you. In other words, it rests on the sensuous reality of the distinction between persons or between selves. So it assumes that personhood is the root of communality. And then Feuerbach continues, ultimately, that the, this is the quotation in bold in quotation number four, the highest and ultimate principle of philosophy is the unity of man with man.

all essential relationships, the principles of the various sciences, are only different kinds and modes of this unity. So, now, this is important because, in a way, what I think Feuerbach is doing here is that, I think this is the key to understanding Feuerbach's, in a way, kind of quasi-transcendental conversion reinscription of centrist reality the roots of centristness for fireback is communality and the root of communality is interpersonality so this is why all

essential relations all essential relationships are merely different you modes, different modalities of this unity which is the unity of the interpersonal relation. Now this is what Feuerbach means by I think by sensuousness okay and this is why sensuousness is precisely not something that is merely of the order of sensory experience. It's fundamentally transvaluated in Feuerbach's work. So Marx's intervention, this is I think where we can first situate Marx's critical intervention

vis-à-vis Feuerbach. So for Marx, the social relation is irreducible to the interpersonal because it's rooted in social production, which operates behind the back of consciousness, whether personal or interpersonal. This is what I think we have to bear in mind when we read Marx's thesis on Formats. I'm only going to read basically four of them here. There's 11, as you know, most of them are very short, but I just want to focus on four of them here, and then go on to elaborate the underpinnings of Marx's critique as developed,

particularly in the German ideology, which will be the focus of the remainder of today's handouts. So Marx's first thesis on fireback states that the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism, that of Farback included, is that the thing, reality, or sensuousness is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism, which of course does not know real centrist activity as such.

Farback wants centrist objects really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in the essence of Christianity, he regards a theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its churchy-Judaical manifestation. Hence, he doesn't grasp the significance of revolutionary or practical critical activity. So here we see, so the key contrast here is between Marx's practical materialism or practical critical materialism and Feuerbach's merely centrist materialism. materialism and I think that what Marx is suggesting here is that even though you know

sensuousness has been de-empiricized by Feuerbach and it's been you know reconceived as the core of the interpersonal relation, which is the source of all human communality, this communality is an object of contemplation. In other words, communality, as prioritized by Feuerbach, is still merely an object of contemplation. And even the interpersonal relation is a still developed or in a way kind of unfolded in a merely theoretical or contemplative register.

So in other words, so what Marx is suggesting here is that in a way he accepts Feuerbach's emphasis on the primacy of the centuries or the conceptual irreducibility of the centuries, But he says that the root of sensuousness is human practice. And it's human practice, which is, in a way, the condition of possibility for human sociality. So the key distinction is between, you know, obviously contemplation and practice, but also between communality and sociality. Sociality for Marx is precisely what can never be comprehended at the either at the intersubjective or the interpersonal level.

The secret of sociality is hidden or occluded from consciousness, whether that is intersubjective consciousness or even interpersonal consciousness. And this is something that, you know, I think we'll try to kind of develop as we progress through the handouts. The second thesis states, the question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory, but a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this sidedness of his thinking in practice the dispute over the reality or

nonreality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question so here what so what's interesting here is that there's a new this emphasis on the primacy of practice entails relinquishing any metaphysical conception of truth, which is basically the kind of the understanding of truth in terms of a correspondence between thoughts and things or between concepts and objects. Truth in a way, you know, I think what Marx is saying is that, you know, the the adequation of thought and thing is realized in and through practice.

And this is why, and practice which is, you know, sensuous practice or an intervention at the level of sensuous reality is the only yardstick for measuring the truth of thinking. It's this sidedness, as he puts it. This is also something that, although it's simply kind of presented as an aside at this point, it's very important later for when we try to kind of understand the relationship between theory and practice in Marx, but also the relationship between Marx's critique of political economy and the social reality, that that critique is supposed to be you know effectively transforming and this is this will

be an important question when we look at you know the Grundrisse and and capital in a few weeks time the thesis number four continues fireback starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches from itself, detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice.

Finally, the thesis number six. Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence, but the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is constantly compelled, one, to abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself, and to presuppose an abstract, isolated human individual, and secondly, essence therefore can be comprehended only as a genus, as an internal dumb generality which naturally

unites the many individuals. So the two points here concern Marx's attempt to transform the meaning of essence and specifically of the very notion of of human essence or species being. So the first claim is that there is such a thing as human species being, but it can only be understood as embedded within a historical process. It It is intrinsically historical and once understood historically, you know, human species being

must be tied to practical production or social production and reproduction. That's the first. So the essence is not fixed and unchanging. something it's a it's a system of relations and it's a system of practices which undergo transformations over time and this is one is because of this that essence isn't simply a kind of an empty container or a kind of a neutral medium within which you know that kind of comprises you know abstract characteristics or attributes but it's a system of it's a system of dynamic

relations between historically embedded individuals and but the meaning of individual changes here Marx's point is that in a way at the level so long as contemplation is you know idealistically you know abstracted from the dimension of practice then human individuality is is also a mere abstraction and it's the it's the the individuality of the the individuality codified by bourgeois philosophy, which sees the self as the thinking subject,

which is also the bearer of various juridical rights and social privileges. So, society can't simply be understood as a collection of individuals. At the same time, society can't be reduced to communality as another kind of abstract relation between pre-constituted selves are already individuated selves okay so this is now this is a it's not yet clear what Marx is proposing we only know what

he's rejecting here but it's important to bear in mind that although he will use the term individual in what follows especially in the German ideology and and his criticisms of these Hegelian thinkers, the meaning of individuality undergoes a radical transformation once it's understood that individuality is nothing over and apart from a set of historically variable social relations. So now we move on to the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. So here this is a continuation of his critique of the Feuerbachian conception of essence.

For Marx, we must understand species being in practical and historical terms. And it's practical and historical species being which is the source, which is the only source for the universality and freedom of human existence. So Marx writes, this is quote number one on page three, man is a species being, not only that practically and theoretically he makes both his own and other species into his objects but also and this is only another way of putting the same thing because he relates to himself as to the present living species in that he relates to himself as to a universal and therefore free being

The point is that the dimensions of universality and freedom invoked here are not atemporal or invariable characteristics. They are a function of an unfolding historical dynamic and a set of practical, a set of human practices. So universality must be tied to practice on one side and to history on the other side. then Marx continues I'll just read the sections in bold from

quotation number two because it's quite long from the theoretical point of view plants, animals, stones, air, light etc. form parts of human consciousness partly as objects of natural science and partly as objects of art they are his intellectual inorganic nature his intellectual means of subsistence which he must first prepare before he can enjoy and assimilate them. From the practical point of view too, they form a part of human life and activity. Physically, man lives solely from these products of nature, whether they appear as food, heating, clothing, habitation, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality that makes the whole of nature

into his inorganic body. in that it is both one his immediate means of subsistence and also two the material object and tool of his vital activity nature is the inorganic body of man that is insofar as it is not itself a human body. So it's, you know, the universality of the human is manifested in practice, okay, and what is peculiar about, you know, the human animal is its ability to convert, you know, to obviously to transform its own

ecological sphere, transform its own environment, you know, at a rate faster that its environment is able to transform it, and to convert, as Marx, what Marx calls, the whole of nature into its, an extension of its organism. So the Social metabolism, in a way the way in which human beings produce and reproduce their conditions of material existence entails a transformation of nature. And it's in this sense in a way that nature becomes the inorganic body of the human.

And this is important because this, in this sense, the inorganic is constitutive of the sociality of human existence. Okay, this is, I think this will have interesting repercussions later. So now we get to the slightly more detailed critique of Feuerbach in the German ideology from 1846. Again, I'll just read out the passages in bold because these are quite long quotations. So in number three, Marx and Engels write, Feuerbach does not see that the sensuous world around him is not a thing given

direct from all eternity remaining ever the same but the product of industry and of the state of society and indeed a product in the sense that it is an historical product the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one developing its industry and its intercourse and modifying its social system according to the change needs even the objects of the simplest century certainty are only given him through social development industry and commercial intercourse so this means so here Marx is emphasizing there is no dimension of centrist reality or so-called allegedly natural reality which isn't in a way kind of mediated or conditioned by the social relation. In other words, by the dynamic

interplay between social production and reproduction. So a relationship, so human beings are a part of nature, but in a way there is no part of nature that is untouched by the social relation which is at the core of human being and he continues the continuum quotation number four so much is this activity this unceasing sensuous labor and creation this production the foundation of the whole sensuous world as it now exists that were interrupted only for a year Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change in the natural world but would very soon find that

the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing. Now this is not, as it's sometimes claimed, this is not a kind of, you know, a wild kind of, you know, know social constructivism you know kind of social idealism Marx is perfectly clear that there is you know a dimension of nature which is you know whose existence is entirely independent of human practical activity but his point is simply that insofar as nature as we know it and nature insofar as we either we either cognize it

or act upon it is always already enveloped by the social relations or there is no kind of nature in itself that exists there is no nature in itself that can be known independently of our practical relationship to it and the practical relation conditions the cognitive relation but this is not to say that nature is somehow you know that the the infrastructure of nature as limbed by natural science is simply itself manufactured by human practical activity Marx I think is very clear about that distinction.

Finally in paragraph 5 he writes Forbach has a great advantage over the pure materialist since he realizes that man too is an object of the senses, but apart from the fact that he only conceives him as an object of the senses and not as sensuous activity, because he still remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, connection, not under the existing conditions of life which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the actually existing acts of men, but stops at the abstraction man and gets no further than recognizing the actual individual corporeal man emotionally. In other words, he knows no other human relations of man to man than love and friendship, and even then idealize.

He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus, he never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it. And as Marx points out, he doesn't understand that this, the world, the sensuous reality composed by the activity of human beings is contradictory. It is riven by these fundamental contradictions which are ultimately social in nature.

So finally, number six, Marx and Engels write, this is why, you know, Feuerbach's communalism is insufficient to grasp what is most radical about communism. And they write, Feuerbach's whole deduction with regard to the relation of men to one another is only aimed at proving that men need and always have needed each other. He wants to establish consciousness of this fact. That is to say, like the other theorists, he merely wants to produce a correct consciousness about an existing fact, whereas for the real communists, it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things.

So in other words, Marx and Engels are proposing that So, in a way, the communal bond or the interpersonal relation is conditioned by a dimension of productive practical activity, which generates contradictions and inequalities in the relationships between humans. So, there will never be harmony or reciprocity at the interpersonal level unless the constitutive contradictions in productive and social production and human practice are eliminated.

This is why the contradictions at the level of theory or contradictions which are contemplated in the cognitive domain can only be practically resolved because their resolution entails fundamental transformation of the modalities of human practice that generate these contradictions. Finally, this is why, so Marx's materialism ties, is tied to this claim that, you know, all human consciousness is rooted in social practice. And this is why he can say,

insists that the social relation is the source of the materiality of human consciousness. And in number seven he writes, the mind is from the outset afflicted with the curse of being burdened with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds in short of language. language is as old as consciousness language is practical real consciousness that exists for other men as well and only therefore does it also exist for me language like consciousness only arises from the need the necessity of intercourse with other men where there exists a relationship it exists for me the animal does not relate itself to anything it does not relate itself at

all for the animal its relation to others does not exist as a relation consciousness is therefore from the very beginning a social product and remains so as long as men exist at all now just to clarify something here it this could be I think interpreted the tying consciousness to language as Marx does here in a way it does seem as if it could be aligned with the far back in perspective and so far as consciousness language arises from the need for communication and we and it seems that communication is necessarily

interpersonal so therefore you know the question is doesn't this make you know kind of doesn't this make the interpersonal relation more fundamental you know the condition for the existence of consciousness I think the key you know for marks here is that intercourse between humans is not primarily interpersonal. In other words, social intercourse, relations between producers and consumers, or economic relations of production, exchange, distribution and consumption, precede any possible interpersonal relations. Or interpersonal

relations can be abstracted from relations of social production and reproduction. So this is why even language itself will be shaped by human practices which are themselves irreducible to the dimension of interpersonal intercourse. And this is why and it's this dimension of productive practice in a way which is always operating behind the back of consciousness and we behind the back of language or communication itself which is why human social relations are not transparently communicable at the

interpersonal level because language itself is structured by these social relations so now we come to Marx's Marx and Engels materials conception of history or what will be known as historical materialism which emphasizes which is the claim emphasizing the primacy of social reproduction over ideation in other words all so here this is the opening of the German ideology in which Marx and Engels critique both you know left and right hegelians for you know the debate between left and right again unfolds in the in the contemplative sphere it's it's a you know it's a it's a battle of

ideas or a war of ideas which ultimately boils down to a conflict of interpretations but the point is that these conflicting interpretations are you know materially conditioned by social practices which are themselves which can't themselves be reduced or re-inscribed within the dimension of interpretation. In other words, a change in consciousness will never suffice to transform reality. As Marx and Engels writes in number eight, this demand to change consciousness amounts

to a demand to interpret the existing world in a different way, to recognize it by means of a different interpretation. But this is insufficient because for Marx and Engels the real premise of materialism is that human social production is the ultimate determinant of ideation. So as they write in quotation number nine, the premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones. They are not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life,

those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. Now, a warning about this last, in the German ideology and elsewhere in these kind of writings by the, these early writings of Marxism, there are many things of a, you know, the term empirical often crops up and in a way it invites misunderstanding because it seems that he's talking about the level of a level of empirical reality which is somehow accessible to cognition. But in fact, if one understands what Marx means by

sensuousness, in a way the weird paradox of Marx's materialism is that sensuousness is empirically inaccessible. In other words, there is no empirical access to sensuous reality because it's not transparent either to individual consciousness, individual perceptual consciousness, nor is it transparent even to theoretical consciousness, which is conditioned by ideology, in a way which can only kind of apprise that reality by misrecognizing its fundamental character. And this is something, you know, we'll return to in a minute.

But the point is that the real premise of historical materialism is what Marx calls real individuals, their activity in the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. But again, although despite Marx's appeal to the empirical here, the point, the important point to remember here is that this activity, this practical activity and the conditions for this activity and the conditions generated by this activity are never merely, you know, empirically accessible to individual theoretical

consciousness. So moreover, human activity in this sense is both determined by existing conditions and produces new conditions. It's this circuit of conditioned and conditioning activity that is the empirically as opposed to logically real starting point for materialist theory. It is concretely centrists as opposed to super centrists in farback sense but it's not an abstract datum or a matter of fact of the sort favored by philosophical empiricism thus the history of humanity including the history of humanity's

relation to nature is the history of social production and reproduction no sensuous datum is merely given it has always been socially produced so as they write in number 10 the first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these human needs the production of material life itself and indeed this is a historical act a fundamental condition of all history which today as thousands of years ago must daily and and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. Even when the centrist world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick, as was St. Bruno, it

presupposes the action of producing this stick. The last sentence is a reference to Bruno Bauer, who's a target, you know, who's a kind of a left-hand alien, who's being targeted by Marx and Engels here. The point is that, the point they're making is even the perception of something as simple as a stick, you know, the sensuous reality of the stick is itself has been made, not given. Because even the... there is no feature of, no objective characteristic of this physical, this natural physical object,

which is not contaminated by cognitive categories that are themselves a reflection of productive relations. The cognitive categories that we use to characterize the reality around us is itself conditioned by our practical activities, by the ceaseless kind of dynamism of production and reproduction. And this is why then, you know, the difference between the human and the animal is materially

produced by human activity. It's not a metaphysical or transcendental difference. Humans differentiate themselves from other animals in practice before distinguishing themselves from them in theory. So Marx and Engels writes in 11, men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, religion or anything else you like but they themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence a step which is conditioned by their physical organization by producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life and the way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the means of subsistence they actually find in existence and have to

reproduce this mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals rather it's a definite form of activity of these individuals a definite form of expressing their life a definite mode of life on their part as individuals express their life so they are what they are therefore coincides with their production both with what they produce and with how they produce hence what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production this production is this production only makes its appearance with the increase of population in its turn this presupposes the intercourse of

individuals with one another but the form of this intercourse is again determined by production so here we see that the developments of material production determines the development of social relations in number 12 they write not only the relation of one nation to another but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. And this, you know, evolution of material production

goes hand in hand with the division of labor and which in turn conditions the development of forms of property. In number 13 they write the various stages of developments in the division of labor are just so many different forms of property i.e. the existing stages in the division of labor determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material instrument and product of labor no okay just to recap here so the the claim is I mean I take you know kind of the gist

of the account being offered here is that so men you know humans begin to produce they produce what they need in order to be able to to survive and to reproduce but they quickly develop you know increasingly sophisticated ways of satisfying these material needs food, clothing, shelter. And as Mark's conjecture in human history, as human social groups

expand in number, in a way the more successful, the more efficient humans become at satisfying their material needs and ensuring their material reproduction, the more their population will expand. And then the more the population expands, in a way the more internally differentiated the structure of production becomes. So this is the root of the division of labor, that there are more and more collective tasks are broken down into kind of, you know, I guess, discrete component parts

or functions and allocated to different members of the community or group. So this is why there's a direct relationship between the developments of productive forces and the development of the division of labor. They go hand in hand according to Marx and Engels. But at each stage, in a way, the more labor is differentiated, in a way, the more this has a kind of a, you know, this feeds back into the production process. itself becomes more efficient and more sophisticated so now they you know in

the German ideology Marx and Engels have a lot to say about how this dynamic plays out over the over history and the evolution of social formations but for the time being I just want to focus on again the in so-called vulgar Marxist account this is you know we have a kind of a straightforward distinction between the base and the superstructure the basic idea is that the base is productive forces and social relations we've got forces of production which conditions social relations which feed back into productive forces this is the kind of the fundamental

or the base stratum of society and everything else you know everything requiring everything that kind of is generated in and through human consciousness belongs at the level of the superstructure. Now this is, I think this is not really, even in marks and angles this is actually not, the picture isn't quite so simple because they don't rule out the feedback, a more complicated feedback mechanism through which in a way the superstructure can also retroactively determine the

infrastructure but the point is that there is a hiatus separating practice productive practice from consciousness and I think this is fundamental for Marx and this this distinction doesn't require the base superstructure distinction I think so what Marx and Engels are pointing to is a distinction between the reality of material production as it is the reality of material production is not as it appears in the consciousness of producers or consumers in 14 they write the social structure and the state are continually

evolving out of the life process of definite individuals however of these individuals not as they may appear in their own other people's imagination but as they actually are as they act and produce materially and hence as they work under definite material limits presuppositions and conditions independent of their will okay and fine and this is why consciousness is therefore the inverted reflection of real social relations the limitations of material production and social relations impose this inversion upon consciousness

number 15 Marx and Engels write if the conscious expression of the real relations of these individuals is illusory if in their imagination they turn reality upside down then this in its turn is the result of their limited material mode of activity and their limited social relations arising from it I'll read number 16 as well because it develops this idea straightforwardly men Men are the producers of their conceptions, their ideas, etc. That is, real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces

and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. But consciousness, that's Bewusstsein, can never be anything else than conscious being. The Bewusstsein. And the being of men is their actual life process. If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside down, as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life process. Okay, so I want to pause here on this. This is a very famous metaphor in German ideology.

So the claim is that ideology systematically inverts real relations or real social relations between productive forces and human classes. And the claim that Marx and Engels are making is that this is not merely, this misrepresentation is itself socially conditioned and in a way is inevitable or unavoidable. It can't simply be kind of revoked by cognitive fiat.

It's not something that can be rectified at the level of... Why? Because it's conditioned by what Marx calls the historical life process. This phenomenon arises just as much from the historical life process as the inversions of objects on the retina does from their physical life process. In other words, that just as the inversion of spatial relations on the retina is a condition of visibility, the physiological domain, So I think what Marx is suggesting here is that ideological inversion or ideological

misrepresentation in a way is structurally necessary, is materially conditioned and unavoidable. So that there's a necessary relationship between a stage of configurations of relations between productive forces and social relations and the way in which they are represented or the way in which they are consciously you know understood or interpreted so I think that the important suggestion here in a way is

that material reality conditions its own ideological misrepresentation and the key to understand so in order to understand the nature of the misrepresentation or the ideological inversion we have to understand the character of this material activity or productive activity but the paradox of But now the question is how do we get to this dimension of the stratum of material production if it is systematically inverted by consciousness, by the consciousness which it generates and conditions.

I think this is a problem that will take Marx, that Marx will not satisfactorily resolve until he writes capital. Okay, now I'm gonna just read out one final passage here, then I'm gonna stop so we can have time for discussion. So ideology, whether it's religious, juridical, economic, philosophical or scientific, is the inverted image of social existence, understood as the circuit of conditioned and conditioning

productive activity. So hence, as Marx famously said, it's not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness. One caveat here is that I think some philosophers reading these passages, there's a temptation to inflate life here into some kind of master category. I think what Marx means by life or by the historical life process, he doesn't mean anything metaphysical. He certainly doesn't mean anything that could be kind of inflated into some kind of ur-principle.

He simply means productive activity. He simply means social production and reproduction. So I think, once again, I think the philosopher like Michel-Henri, I think, basis his entire interpretation of Marx by taking these passages and you know in a way interpreting this these references to the life process or to or to life in I think in a kind of in a transcendental phenomenological register which I think you know it re-phenomenologizes Marx's materialist critique of the primacy of

consciousness which I think is a mistake because I think that you know what's most radical about Marx's materialism at this point and why it's it's a real challenge to philosophy is precisely it's the first delineation of what you will call socially necessary false consciousness and the claim that what human beings do practical productive activity is this is unconscious it's not simply that we're not it's not simply that we kind of we don't think about it while we're doing and then we can subsequently recapture it through

reflection is that this dimension that there's this dimension of practical productive activity is necessarily misrecognized misrepresented in consciousness I think that's Marx's radical proposition here okay I want to to stop because I mean I realize I'm going for quite a while so just any questions about you know what we said what I've gone through so far would anyone like to ask

Sure, Rachel, go ahead. Okay. Yes. Okay. So Rachel's question. Is your microphone not working? Rachel? My mic is working. My mic is working.

Okay. Okay. Well, I'll just read out your question. The question is, can I say a little bit more about the temporality of ideology here? Yeah. Can you just say quickly what you had in mind by the temporality here temporality of ideology I'm sure sure what I had in mind was so I'm gonna take my headphones off to do this okay yeah sure what I had in mind was questions along the line of historical materialism and ideology as you know as a concept with a materiality of its own

if you could say that I mean that it's not a it's not a an ideal it's not an idealism there it's ideology it exists it has a historical process behind it its thing which makes me think about temporality in a way and wonder if it has a in the historical process of it of its if its own does ideology have to have a a long development does it can happen quickly I mean things along this line when when you're talking about this inverted image of social existence as a circuit of conditioned and conditioning

productive activity so those are very specific sort of processes there and also this these illusions that he's making talking about a camera and giving at this very material aspect of metaphors for understanding, you know, allusions for understanding this, I also wonder why those particular examples, and so this is why I'm asking about temporality of ideology as a material thing, and what that process could look like or or is it not not a specific answer to that sorry if that was rambling

hi okay that was a that's a very good question um it's um it's a difficult question Look, I mean, in the German ideology, Marx and Engels, okay, what they're doing is that they're, first of all, you're absolutely right to emphasize that ideology is, has material effect. So it's not unreal. To say that something is ideological is not to say that it's unreal or merely illusory. It's simply to say that it's a symptom of a reality which it does not transparently represent,

which it's incapable of mapping using its own conceptual resources alone. So there's a link that therefore between you know material production and ideology. Ideology always ideology which is simply you know how human beings in a way you know kind of think about and understand themselves in the most kind of general sense and by the way in the German ideology Marx and Engels say that priests are the first ideologues Okay, so the division of labor is a condition for ideological production and once you have,

once kind of material production has advanced to the stage where you can have a privileged class which is exempted from the need to, you know, to work, to contribute to the task of material production, then, well, two things, then you have the kind of the class of kings or nobles who benefit from the material goods provided by the rest of society, and then you have an intellectual class whose function is to provide the legitimation for this division of labor and

for this exemption of labor, exemption from labor by this privileged social class. So in a way, so, you know, ideology performs a very specific social function, and it's part and parcel of, you know, the machinery of social reproduction, okay? If you don't have, it's there, in a way so it's it's there to legitimate class stratification and the division of labor and therefore to make sure that the whole thing kind of you know keeps going sorry can you hear me yep can any okay okay I thought I was

I muted my, okay, good, okay. So in that sense, you know, ideology, in a way, the picture was, I think Marx and Engels, it's more complicated. It's like you've got kind of material, you've got material production, productive forces and then, you know, productive relations, relations of production, which generates a kind of a class stratification and a division of labor. the ideologues emerge as those whose specific social function is there to kind of to justify this stratification and this division. So therefore there's a historicity to the function

of ideology because the function of ideology becomes more and more, you know, itself internally differentiated and complicated as a society evolves in internal, in productive sophistication and differentiation. So in a way, there is a kind of a historicity to ideology. But the term historicity is ambiguous here. In a way, intellectual history, an intellectual historian could be charting the historicity of ideology within an intra-ideological framework.

So in a way you could chart the historicity of ideology but still using, without ever kind of exiting from the ideological sphere. But I guess if you're from a Marxist point of view, what has to be understood is how the intellectual history or the historicity of ideological products or the history of ideas is conditioned by the history of production or by the history of modes of production and you'd have to be able to tie transformations to material transformations. I take that to be the kind of the

reason for a Marxist account. But things become complicated when one starts talking about history in terms of modes of production and this is you know Althusser rightly points out that there's fundamental difficulty here because in a way history itself or what we call history is ideological students through I mean who writes history okay so it's not as if that there's a kind of there's a kind of sequence of historical facts which can simply be kind of you know which are out there and which can you simply be kind of you know recuperated by the fastidious historian because the conditions under

what you know the conditions under which historical narratives are themselves generated and produced you know are variable will vary according to you know modes of production which is why one can't simply kind of you know stipulate a continuity or a linear kind of evolution of modes of production. And I think this is why by the time you get to capital, you know, for Marx is writing capital, I think, or at least, you know, I think in the most, you know, theoretically kind of sophisticated and compelling interpretations of what he's doing there.

It's, you know, we don't, you know, the capitalist totality, in a way, you know, conditions and influences our understanding of pre-capitalist social formation. In other words, we can simply chart the evolution of societies from primitive to feudal to capitalist in some kind of straightforward evolutionary sequence because there are discontinuities, structural and categorical discontinuities. Structural discontinuities at the level of material production,

categorical discontinuities at the level of the conceptual resources through which we describe and explain material production. So I think it gets, you know, I think it's the historicity of ideology is complex because it has to be in a way, you know, charted across, you know, in these two different, you know, kind of dimensions. Okay, so that's an attempt to answer that question. But it's also, just as an aside, it's also why the historical and historical, just as what Marx means by materialism isn't obvious.

He's not a metaphysical materialist. The matter for him is not just this kind of stuff that's out there. Nor can one kind of cash out the meaning of materialism by adverting to economic facts, because the whole point of Marx's critique of political economy is that there are no such neutral economic facts, trans-historical economic facts, that can provide the basic foundation for a science of economies. So, when sometimes again people say, well, Marxism achieves because he emphasizes the primacy of the economic. What does that even mean?

The whole point of it, the critique of political economy, is that to understand what an economy is, what a relationship, the dynamics of social production and reproduction, there are no ready-made categories for charting that dynamic. So what economics means, I mean economics is an ideological category as well. So I think this is why it's simply kind of unsatisfactory to say that Marx is some kind of, you know, Marx is not an economic determinist. His materialism is not tied to kind of a stratum of economic reality as if this was kind of have been controversially kind of material and self-evidently determining all of social reality. And history, you know, history, what is it, you know, what does it mean to emphasize

the historicity of consciousness and of our understanding of ourselves and our social relations? Well, on one level, it means that everything that we can't, we shouldn't eternalize are essentialized, things that are affecting the contingent historical products. But again, that doesn't give you, that critical claim in and of itself doesn't give you a positive characterization of what history actually is. So if history is the sequence of modes of production, the history, you know, if history is necessarily the history of modes of production,

precisely because a mode of production is not kind of empirically accessible, you know, you can't simply identify mode of production on the basis of, you know, empirically accessible facts you have to kind of reconstruct it so understanding the relations between modes of production and the transition from one mode of production to another is also kind of a complicated business I think in Marx okay there's a couple of other questions I think So there's a comment, the same is true, elites hash out ideology to have people vote against

their interests such as the case of American working class southerners. Is this a remark or a question? Great, can I ask a question? a question yes sure yes um i might have missed i might have missed this um it's it's really simple you say that um around this situation is misrecognized by um why did mark say that the situation that the situation of people uh why do they misrecognize it precisely

sure sorry hello yeah um um it's in uh When Marx talks about the camera obscura in the German ideology, he says that real social relations are inverted in ideological consciousness. So the claim is that people, I think he elaborates more on this in capital, but the idea is that

there's a discrepancy between what we are practically engaged in doing every day of our lives at the level of buying and selling commodities and exchanging commodities and what we actually understand ourselves to be doing. And I think that this is tied to Marx's accounts of real abstraction, that the exchange of commodities, in order for commodities to be exchangeable,

there's a set of the activities that we're engaged in collectively and the social relations that are generated by our activities are unintelligible to us. And this is why the critique of political economy is necessary. So this is what Marx is trying to do, is trying to explain what it is we're actually doing every day we buy and sell commodities. And he thinks this has to be explained because we, you know, he thinks that we kind of systematically and habitually misunderstand what it is we're doing.

Not just that we misunderstand, it's that we necessarily misunderstand it because it's a condition of our being able to do it that we to keep on engaging in this activity that we don't consciously comprehend it I take that to be his clean does it help yeah yeah I you know I and we are misrecognized I have my ideas of why that might be I just I just didn't quite get why marks the thing it was the case but yeah no that's it and

I understand it. Yeah. Ray, you're muted again. Sorry, Billy, shall I read the question you asked earlier, or you wrote earlier in the sidebar? Sure, sure. Okay, so the question is what about the topic, tonic of map making, shoddy cartography and illiteracy? What are some archetypes for neutral mediums?

What is a style of music that would coalesce to the materialist inversion theory of contradivision? Can the echo of the ruler measure the frame? Okay, you're going to have to help me a bit to unpack, because I'm not sure I understand all the terms here. So first, what about the topic tonic of map making, shorty cartography and illiteracy? So what are some archetypes for neutral neutral? You mean that even mapping itself is... I mean like how Bucky Fogger designed the map.

How we can create divisions based on layout plans just as an aside. Maybe that would lead somewhere else. I guess it's you know one of the Like models for a universal freedom you talked about this like not it's not a temporal variables universal freedom archetype And I thought of the map as You know our universe and it's it's not accurate and it's very hard to map out correctly and there's the Dymaxion map by Bucky Fuller.

You mentioned neutral mediums. Sorry, I could stop. Is that? Ray, you're muted again. Sorry, yeah, I know who Buckminster Fuller is, but I'm not familiar with this map. Could you tell us a bit more about this map that he constructed? because I don't actually it might help to kind of if you tell us a bit more about this map that he he made or developed it might kind of help you know clarify the issue basically or the point you're trying to to raise you muted Billy my computer is not letting me look up a page for it there you go okay okay

it's a projection of a world map onto the surface of an icosahedron which can be fold and flatten it in two dimensions. Okay, well actually yeah this is relevant actually, this raises a very interesting topic actually which will come up later. I mean in terms of ideological inversion, the sense in which ideology inverts social relations, in a way there's an issue about dimensionality here, about whether you are trying to map a higher

dimensional reality in a lower dimensional medium I'd say and I think this is why in a way the metaphor of inversion is insufficient to grasp Marx's point because it's not just that ideology works just by kind of things you know the inversion is not just operative in a single dimension up down It's not just about, it's not as if you can kind of undo the effects of ideology by simply kind of turning things the right way up. The point is that there are like several different dimensions of social reality, you know, which undergo a kind of,

transformation when they are ideologically represented. And we have to understand, in a way, the conditioning mechanism. We have to understand how ideology is generated, the mechanisms which generate ideology, which are themselves, I think, multidimensional, in order then to be able to understand, in a way, the correspondence between features of the ideological map and you know the features of the reality that is conditioning the generation of the map

so I think yeah I think this is part of and I think this is exactly what Marx is doing in when he's writing capital which is quite such a kind of complicated book it's both the starting point for Marx's you know project his theoretical project is political economy and the categories of political economy as understood as systematically misrepresenting or inverting in more than one dimension actual social reality but the social reality is not itself kind of

is not transparent to the theorist if if Marx thought that social reality was transparent to the critic of political economy, then he would be doing just exactly what he's just criticized philosophers for doing, for trying to grasp in theoretical consciousness the reality of productive activity. And in a way, the point is that practice, practice, it's not just that practice is multidimensional, but that we need the resources for mapping practices or for properly characterizing practices, social practices, have to be constructed.

So I think this is what, so I think in a way, this whole problematic of mapping is part and parcel of Marx's critical project but he's trying to kind of he's trying to kind of construct a map in which its own conditions of generation are themselves encoded if you know I can put it that way I mean that's what capital is it's a mapping of social, it's a representation of social reality, you know, but which actually in which are encoded the conditions under which that

representation stands to that reality and an account also of the mechanisms in which this reality generates its own mapping or conceptual representation. okay there's a can I explain this again yes yes okay it's basically saying is that if you think if you take what does Marx say about what is this whole critique of philosophy saying well philosophers have only interp And his point is that every interpretation is conditioned by social practices which are

not transparently interpretable. The point is that practice is not transparent to interpretation, which is why practice is not simply an interpretable object. So the point of the critique of political economy is to first of all to understand the relationship between practice and theory or practice and interpretation and then to generate a theory which is you know Marx's capital a theory that both you know that insists upon this relationship between the claim that you know all interpretation is conditioned by practice and then tries to generate you know conceptual resources

that allow you to understand how interpretation is conditioned by practice in a way which isn't simply reinterpretable in theory this is why capital is not just another interpretation of the world. Okay, the critique of political economy can't simply be another interpretation of reality and this is why Marx has to insist that there's something about the dimension of practice which is uninterpretable, which is why you have to construct the conceptual categories that allow you to be able to map these practices in a way that will both will explain the

interpretations which are their symptoms, how they generate certain kind of ideological interpretations which misrepresent them, but also which also explains why this this theory is not itself just another interpretation and it stands and therefore why it can be the precondition for a transformative practice so this is very abstract at this point I think this will become clearer when we look at Marx's remarks on method in the Grundrisse where he contrast another concrete and thought in the concrete in reality and then when we

actually look at the you know the capital the this whole account of the commodity fetish so Billy has a question without seeming virtual I'm getting at with the neutral mediums what something could be while treading the thin line of due to being capacity to the critic. I need some help to kind of unpack that question. Billy, would you like to maybe kind of elaborate a little bit on your question? Maybe someone else could give a question

and I'll just keep that in my head and I'll pitch it and it'll be related later. You're muted, Ray. Sure, okay, okay, sure. Yes, and so Mary, the whole point is not about… To say that practices are uninterpretable is to say that they can't simply be construed as objects of interpretation. They can be understood, the point is to kind of understand what they are, to give some kind of conceptual characterization of them. So here's an example, the exchange abstraction. So what is at the roots of, you know, what is the practice which is at the heart of capitalism?

Well, it's a commodity exchange. So it's like, you know, buying and selling commodities. and what Marx is trying to elaborate is the logic that governs the exchangeability of commodities. So the logic of commodity production and the logic of commodity exchange, just to say the logic of commodification. and the point is that this logic you know isn't simply open to interpretation it's like Marx thinks Marx takes himself to be a scientist who's penetrating to the reality behind the appearances

behind the you know the the ideological appearances so and it's only and this is the link between he thinks unlike other unlike merely philosophical theories his theory implies a revolutionary practice okay which will transform this reality and you know from the from the ground up so but it's because you know and anyway that's why it's not just another interpretation it's because it's It's describing and explaining these constitutive practices in a way which will allow us to act

in a way and therefore transform the reality that is generated in and through these practices. because because the whole point is that social reality is one that is is that we generate by doing we keep it going by by everything we do on a daily basis but this because we don't really understand we don't know what it is we're doing that we're incapable of changing it Marx's kind of optimistic gambit is that once we properly understand what it is we're actually doing then then we can do something else. Not just do something else, but actually create a modality of doing that will transform the

reality that we are constantly generating. Yes, that's it. so that's what he talks about uncovering the laws of historical no the laws of motion of capital as he puts it the laws of motion of capital but remember this is no for marksman so the reason why Marx's project can't be he's not he clearly Marx doesn't see himself sees himself as a social scientist but he doesn't think that social science can be modeled on physical side because social phenomena are radically different in kind from physical phenomena so the laws of motion

of capital and other modes of production are not laws you know in the familiar types of laws identified by other by empirical sciences You You mentioned can you hear me if I move my microphone because it's feeding back to me and confusing me

Can you still hear me? Yes. You mentioned before, when Marx was talking about reinterpreting Feuerbach's interpretation of sensation or nature as more like a social practice and a historical sort of interpersonal practice, is that Marx, that this, I was thinking when you were saying this, this is a kind of like, isn't Marx just like re-inscribing a kind of idealism here that Feuerbach would reject? And you mentioned a kind of like a social constructivism

or something where ideas are shaping reality historically or something. but he said that Marx is very clear about the distinction that there is a kind of nature that isn't sort of shaped historically but where does Marx say that? Like where does he make that kind of distinction between the natural world or the sensuous that can be historically sort of shaped, if you like, and something that can't. Because, I don't know, maybe I just think in the history

of like the implementations of Marxism, there is a kind of, maybe a kind of idealism where everything is kind of political or something, everything is historical. Does that make sense? Yes, that makes sense. Okay, I'll try to respond. Okay, well, in a way, part of what, there's a sense in which Marx's rejoinder to far back is very Hegelian, when he insists on the fact that there is no kind of dimension of sensuous immediacy

that isn't, so to speak, always already kind of socially mediated, socially mediated as opposed to kind of mediated by the concept or the notion for Hegel. But in a way, it's a very Hegelian rejoinder to fire back. no so yeah and moreover insofar as the social relation is precisely what doesn't simply isn't transparent to not even to self-consciousness you know the social relation is not something that we are kind of you know spontaneously aware of in our day-to-day practical activity it can only be it has to be kind of conceptually reconstructed using abstracts

resources so that also seems to make no marks quite idealist but I think Marx is interesting I think because Marx's proposal is that in order to you know that the meaning the relationship between the abstract and the concrete undergoes a kind of a radical shift in capitalist society and he accepts Hegel's claim that you know there's nothing this you know nothing is you know you know self-evidently kind of you know concrete or abstract in and of

itself everything is is mediated and you can't simply oppose the concrete to the abstract you have to understand how everything can be considered you know as everything can be considered as both at once okay and this is why he thinks in a way at the what he's writing capital he thinks it's precisely the most abstract philosophical system provides you with the conceptual resources required to characterize, to describe a reality which is structured around real abstractions because abstractions become real in capitalism. So that both exchange, commodity exchange

is an abstraction, the labor which generates exchangeable commodity is also abstract labor. So he thinks that our society is saturated with abstractions that are generated through practice not through conceptualization. So in a way this is again, and we'll see that one of the most important aspects of Marxist thinking is this idea that there is discovery of real abstractions, that there is a dimension of abstraction which isn't generated by intellection, which is not the result of an intellectual operation but that is actually, you know, that is real. And by real he means sensuous because Marx's point is that what is sensuousness?

It's practical activity. But practical activity is precisely what is imperceptible to us and therefore completely abstract to us. So Marx's gambit is that you can use the resources of the most, what seems to be the most extreme kind of philosophical idealism, i.e. Hegel's, to generate a critique of a concrete social formation, which is capitalism. But with regard to your specific point, I mean in quotation number four on the handouts, This is from the German ideology. When he's saying, Marx and Engels criticising Feuerbach, saying that this unceasing centrist

labour and creationist production is the foundation of the whole centrist world as it now exists. So in other words, the sensuous world as we experience it or know it is conditioned by our practical activity, which is itself sensuous, which unfolds in the medium of sensuousness. So he's saying that there's a dimension of sensuality which is abstract because it's the result of ideological categorizations but it's generated by a concrete centristness which is the dimension of labor or of practical activity and this

practical activity unfolds in a centrist dimension which he thinks is unproblematically real but that doesn't mean but you know its ultimate nature again is not cognitively