Hello and welcome back to Zero Books. This is Acid Horizon on Zero Books, and today we are excited to have a discussion with Ray Brassier, author of Nihil Unbound, Enlightenment and Extinction from 2007. Ray has also made notable contributions to the canon of speculative realist writings. Today, he joins us to discuss Herbert Marcuse's five lectures, Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, a classic in the corpus of Freudo-Marxist writings, which now enjoys a fresh reprint on repeater books, and there will be a link in the show notes, featuring an introduction by Ray. Today, we intend to recapitulate Marcuse's view and its critical challenges, while also perhaps getting insight into its connections and disjunctions with the current political
moment. Ray, thank you for joining us on Asset Horizon and Zero Books today. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. So let's go right to the meat of the book. You've written the introduction, and you've titled your introduction, Utopian Possibility, with which you conclude Marcuse's assertion that it may be less irresponsible today to depict a utopia that has a real basis than to defame as utopia conditions and potentials that have long become realizable possibilities. In view of this claim, you hold up the importance of Marcuse's intellectual legacy as being more important than ever. Could we begin with providing an overview of Marcuse's reading of Freud in these lectures and how he arrives at his utopian hypothesis.
Also, what do you think Marcuse offers with respect to the utopian possibility that makes his work stand out amongst others of its kind? Okay, so I'll begin by trying to say something about Marcuse's reading of Freud. But actually, I'd like to kind of preface my remarks by saying why I think that Marcuse as a figure that needs to be, you know, rediscovered or reread. Because in a way, you know, as I'm sure you know, although he was enormously kind of influential in the 1960s and I guess early 1970s, he, perhaps more than any other member of the Frankfurt School, you know, really his reputation kind of fell into kind of steep decline. And he became as unfashionable in the 1980s, 1990s,
as he was once, you know, celebrated. And there's a tendency, I've noticed, and it's, you know, I quote someone who says something to this effect in my introduction to, in a way, to dismiss Marcuse as a lightweight, you know, compared to figures like Adorno and Walter Benjamin, as someone who was a kind of a pop philosopher, who had a gift for, I guess, for activist rhetoric, but he was not a thinker of the first magnitude, not a really deep thinker in the way in which his friends and colleagues in the Frankfurt School work. And I think that this is unjust. I think this does a great, no, injustice to Marcuse. I think he's a really deep and significant thinker.
And he's been, yes, I think it's important to, you know, to rediscover and to rearticulate his philosophical insights. So that's just a preliminary. And Marcuse is interesting because in a way he's perhaps more Freudian, or he draws more on Freud than his colleagues, certainly the Horkheimer or Adorno. Obviously, if you're influenced by Freud, we're more skeptical vis-à-vis the claims, and more critical vis-à-vis some of Freud's more speculative, at metapsychological thinking. And Marcuse uses, you know, the Strogana kind of drives and also what he takes to be the kind of, you know, the conflict between libido
and thanatos, or eros and thanatos, and makes this into this kind of fundamental, you know, motor of socialization, but also of possible revolutionary transformation of social revolution. And he does this in a way So his claim is, I mean, I've tried to reconstruct the basic argument as I understand it, which is simply that civilization is founded on the repression, the repression of desire. And capitalist civilization represents an intensification and, you know, in a way, the sophistication of the means of repression. What he means by one-dimensionality in this famous book, One-Dimensional Man, is that capitalism is rewiring the unconscious.
Capitalism is in a way kind of reshaping the drives and reshaping the contours of psychic desire so as to subjugate it entirely to requirements of its own eternal reproduction. And on the basis of the starting points, Marcuse's argument is that, in a way, capitalism has reached such a degree of sophistication, allowing us in the means of repression, that it undermines the need to repress. The intensification and the expansion of the means of repression gradually erodes the social need for repression. So in a way that there's a kind of, or as he puts it, I think, in one of the essays in the book,
that the boundary between necessary and surplus repression becomes corroded by the development of capitalist technology. So there's this kind of expansion of surplus repression, which undercuts the need for, or in a way kind of renders the boundary between necessary and surplus repression. And hence, his argument is that this means that it's actually a kind of Hegelian kind of version of Freud, because if repression is understood as negation, then the intensification of surplus repression leads to a negation of the negation. which actually, which interesting,
doesn't simply release a pre-existing drive. It's not as if there's this pristine trans-historical unconscious which has always been repressed and which is finally kind of, and which needs to be kind of set free or released. It's that, you know, in a way, the unconscious of the drive is indissociable from repression. It's shaped by repression. So that's the, you know, the sublimation of repression, the social sublimation of repression through automation, technological automation, leads to a transformation, a transformation in the nature of the drive, of libido. And I think this is a brilliant argument.
I mean, it's, you know, obviously it's, there are problems when one looks into the detail, but it's a kind of speculative way. It's a brilliant argument and it's a brilliant fusion of Megal and Freud. And it's what makes it particularly interesting is, again, is that utopian utopia, Either one thinks that communist utopia is automatically achieved through the abolition of private property and the wage labor in the state, or one thinks that utopia is this transcendent possibility that remains un-invisible, that cannot be positively characterized from the vantage of the capitalist presence,
which is the kind of, let's say, their Dornian position. And Marcuse rejects both the claim that utopia is entirely determinable as the negation of capitalism, of private property, class, states, wage, labor, etc. But also the claim that it, he also rejects the claim that utopia is somewhere indeterminable, indeterminable, that we don't have the, you know, we can't know what it could be. And he says, no, we have the, we can anticipate what it could be. And it's this, because it would be this reshaping or re-engineering of desire, which is whose logic, whose social logic is invisible.
And he gives, that's why at the end, that's why I also wanted, in a way, to kind of emphasize those passages, in a way, the most speculative portions of the lectures where he tries to kind of say that, you know, what he calls, you know, this kind of reshaping of desire, the abolition of the distinction between work and play, between activity and passivity, would mean, would be an existential transformation. And these very kind of lyrical passages in which he describes his transformation are, I think, very important because they're a philosophical characterization of existential transformation, a collective existential transformation. So I think, yes, that's why I think that's Marcuse's achievement.
So I think this is, it's very valuable in the current, especially in the current context. Great. A lot of us here work on Deleuze and Guattari. They factor into somewhere in our academic work. And not only that, we followed the trends from them to the accelerationists. And maybe Adam, I'll let you take this question here because you're the one who formulated it so nicely. Just actually before we get into the notion of Deleuze and Guattari and accelerationism, I actually think it's really important that we focus a little bit on what you brought up, about the idea of the existential notion of this and these very lyrical aspects of the spectative parts of Marcuse because it's him at his most philosophical because it's him, it very much seems to me like he's in dialogue with someone like Kant.
He talks about the idea of the free play of the faculties and this liberated, almost kind of productive force, which is very much similar to how Kant treats imagination as a productive force in the critique of pure reason. I guess we can draw these two into a similar debate, actually. Because in a way, the anti-Kantian dimension of what Marcuse is dealing with here is about this against this idea of the purely management-based form of the negative. Because repression is like a negative feedback loop, but he's seeing here the production is the positive feedback loop that will very much undermine the rigidity of these conditions of social experience and render them plastic. So I guess from a movement from Kant to a discussion of accelerationism. I guess we'd ask you a question about Marcuse in terms of
his particular cyber positivity in regarding the transformation technology that are happening at that time. And I guess what the legacy, if you see as a connection with the accelerationist. So to mention, you know, the Dark Lord himself, the first essay in Vang Numa is about Kant and the conditions of experience as social mechanisms, how they function to negate the productive imagination we could have for what he would call new Amazons and Marcuse would call a post-capitalist utopia. So that's why I asked if you had any thoughts on that sort of lineage from Kantianism all the way down to the accelerationism through the mediation of the historical turn in cybernetics. Thanks. This is a very rich question. There's a lot to kind of digress in this question.
I think there is a clear line. I think in a way, Marcuse is the missing link between Deleuze and Adorno. If someone wants to try to figure out how these otherwise completely kind of, you know, antagonistic and incompatible thinkers might be connected, it's through Marcuse's work. And I think there's a passage in One-Dimensional Man where Marcuse cites Marx in the Grundrisse, and the Grundrisse is one of the texts that the Los and Guattari kind of draw on in Antioedipus, where Marcuse, or Marx rather, talks about the transformation where the industrial machinery in a way releases labor power as such,
so that the, in a way, it's not the discrepancy between concrete and abstract labor is no longer the source of surplus value, but social wealth is generated through the release, through in a way, the mechanization or the automation of labor power. And in a way, it's machinic subjectivation. So it's industrial subjectivation. And it's a really remarkable passage in Marx, which, You know, again, I'm a bit wary of just trying to kind of, you know, paraphrase or explain what's going on there because, you know, there's a lot. It's a very kind of dense passage. But the basic idea is that what it prefigures what Deleuze and Lotari call machinic surplus value in Antiochus.
The idea that there's a source of surplus value which would not be trimmed to the exploitation of labor power. However, there's also a significant divergence in the way in which Marcus and Deleuze and Guattari use this passage from Marx. And I think that it hinges on, you know, for Marx, or at least for Marx, you know, as I understand them, this transformation requires a transformation of social relations.
In other words, it's not, it's the reinscribing, in a way, the repurposing of industrial production in the following the kind of the, you know, the abolition of the class relation is what frees machinery, allows machinery to produce in this kind of unprecedented, you know, in this communist dimension, which was foreclosed by capitalism. So in a way that there's a social revolution, which is the condition for, in a way, the conversion of production from the production of exchange to the production of use. Because capitalist production is the production of exchange value, of abstract value.
And in a way, all capitalist production, all that is ever produced under capitalism is surplus value. That's all that capitalism is. Every commodity is the magnitude of surplus fat in some sense. Whether it's an iPhone or a chicken nugget, it's just a magnitude of value. So I think the Marxian point is that to release use from subjugation by exchange entails a social revolution, the abolition of class, and of the class, the separation of the producers from the means of production.
But then this frees the means of production. So it's possible to liberate the means of production following the abolition of the class relation. And this is a controversial argument because there's a tension between, or at least on the face of it, there's a tension, Marx, between the claim that every machine encapsulates social relations. So in a way, if capitalist machinery, capitalist production is geared towards the production of surplus value and exploitation of labor, then those social relations are encoded in industrial technology. So in the face of it, it's not clear how, you know, simply how that industrial, this capitalist technology can simply be repurposed for the production of use value under communism following the abolition of the capitalist class relation.
And I think, well, this is a very important point because I think in Deleuze and Guattari, one of the things that, you know, is, I think they are, you know, they skip over the relationship between machinery and social relations. So when they talk about machinic surplus value, they talk about the conjunction of a flow of money and a flow of labor, but they omit the Marxian courage of the commodification of labor as labor powers through the separation of the producers from the means of production, so the class relations.
So a lot hinges on this because it all depends whether, you know, the abolition, whether the releasing the means of production from their subordination to the production of surplus value is predicated on, you know, on one hand, the margin account is predicated on the abolition of the class relation, you know, the reappropriation of the means of production by the producers. Whereas in the Deleuze-Glottarian account, as I understand it, that in a way the class relation is no longer, or at least it's not obvious what role it plays in the account they give of releasing production.
Okay, the decoding, the ultimate decoding of flows. And not to be very, very simple about it, this is the difference between a kind of between communism and certainly kind of, you know, accelerationism in the Landian register. Okay. And the kind of the accelerationist fragments, you all know this passage, but they say it's not about kind of slowing things down. It's about, you know, kind of, we must accelerate the process, you know, go even further still in the direction of marketization, commodification and marketization. And the claim is really striking because I reread this plantation. I mean, if memory serves, the bit about kind of in the direction of the market, you know, the claim about we must go further in the direction of the market.
It still isn't Guattari who say this. It's not Nick Land who kind of superimposes this upon them. Which means that for them, in a way, kind of, you could say that there's a short circuit from, you know, the intensification of capitalist deterritorialization to cosmic schizophrenia. And the problem is that cosmic schizophrenia becomes the alternative to communism because of the articulation of desiring production and social productions. All social production is based on the repression of desiring production. And the conditions under which desiring production is released entails the dissolution of the socius. that's why communism never is never the term communism only crops up once in anti-edipus
and then it's pejoratively in in the context of you know kind of soviet communism there's two mentions of socialism and one mention of communism it's quite you know the fact that the term the word communism is absent in anti-edipus is significant and i think it's not at all kind of accidental. It's crucial because, in fact, this is, I mean, I don't want to kind of overwrite the poem, but in a way it's an anti-communist book. It's saying cosmic schizophrenia is the alternative to communism, which we now know is this, you know, kind of, you know, Hegelian theological kind of regression, which can only entail kind of hideous, which in fact, which theologizes the states, the transcendence of the states.
And I think that the, you know, what I find really interesting about the Marcusean account is that it seems that he still wants, he's talking about, you know, the liberation of desire in a way. In a way, there's a feedback between, you know, production and desire. and it's almost as if the repression of desire under capitalism is there to facilitate value production or surplus value production. But Marcuse's dialectical point is that, you know, surplus value accumulation ends up undercutting its own social preconditions, which is to say, It's the repression of desire.
So then that means that at that point, the releasing kind of desire undercuts is what makes the abolition of value production possible. So in a way, I think that Marcuse articulates social production and libido or drive without simply kind of fusing them. Okay. Or short-circuiting them. Okay. There's a dialectical interplay between them, but they're not simply kind of, you know, he doesn't believe, although some, you know, in one-dimensional man, it sometimes sounds as if he's saying that the dimension of, you know, libidinal, the dimension of desire that is not, that can't simply be instrumentalized for value production is being eradicated.
But in a way, his argument is that that is not possible. That kind of the complete, the automation of desire or the mechanization of libido is impossible on philosophical grounds. And that's why it's possible that capitalism reshapes desire, but reshapes it in a way that undercuts the subjugation of desire to capitalism's own ends. And that's different, I take that to be very different from the accelerationist arguments, or at least as I understand it, which is that capitalism, simply through kind of decoding flows, will release desire or release kind of desiring production.
But in a way, they don't talk about utopia because they don't talk about the social realization of liberated desire. And that's why they don't talk about communism. And even less do they talk about it in A Thousand Plateaus. So I think that Marcuse is a key kind of influence on Antiochus. They mention it a couple of times. But I also think that in a way they kind of draw on the argument about capitalism dissolving its own social preconditions. But the results on their account seems to be a kind of, you know, the dissolution of the need for social production.
Because all social production represses desiring production. Whereas I think Marcuse wants to kind of continue to articulate them. So, okay, that's my first attempt to answer that question. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Yeah, I agree to say, yeah, that the break between the Landian conception where it is this nomadism is complete or flowing outwards. If anything, it's kind of closer to the kind of more de-libidinalized kinds of exploration would get, say, in the work of Shcherichek and Williams with the idea of the liberation side. And of course, it's with Fischer, His break of land is completed when he turns back to Ebron's civilization in the introduction to the acid communism project, where it all becomes primarily about this very cyber positive liberation of desire, and articulated through the social.
But, Robin, we could talk about this for ages. Matt, I know you have a question as well, sorry. Yeah, thanks. And we really enjoyed that answer. And also just reading this book, because for me, One Dimensional Man was actually one of the most important books I ever read. It was one of the first I read of, let's say, Marxist theory or critical theory or anything like that. So it was really good being able to go back to Mark User. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about this distinction that Mark User sets up. I think you mentioned it a few times. We haven't pulled it apart yet, which is the distinction he makes between what I think he calls necessary and surplus repression, which at least a minus I think goes back to was rooted in Freud's claim in civilization and its discontents but possibility of civilization is premised upon the repression of a certain level
of desire that there are certain things which we might want to do but we simply have to not allow ourselves to do if we are to sort of maintain civilization and get the benefits the greater benefits of you know literature and language or whatever and I'm hoping we talk a little bit have a little bit back and forth about this idea of necessary and surplus repression. It does a lot of work in Marcuse. And as I was reading it, I was also thinking back to One-Dimensional Man, where he talks about, I might not get the terminology right, it's been a few years since I last read that book, but sort of false needs and, or sort of, there's this idea that part of what capitalism does is it essentially produces desire in a way, or you might call it needs, but you sort of think of it as desire within us as individuals as consumers and so on which we
then think these needs to be and can only be satisfied under capitalism which so it seems to be a link to link to that between this idea of false needs and the idea of a kind of surplus repression so i was hoping i guess as a sort of starting point for this we could talk about this for 10 minutes or so like could you tell us a little more about just for listeners who haven't read this and so on as well what's going on in this distinction about necessary and surplus repression? How does it relate to Freud and maybe a little bit about One Dimensional Man there? Maybe you think there's a link that I'm not entirely wrong about. Sure. No, thanks. That's a very good question. And in fact, I think this is where the difficulties begin for Marcuse's account. And I think this distinction is crucial, but I think it is very difficult, if
not impossible, to sustain this distinction between necessary and surplus refraction. Why? And in a way, Marchusa himself kind of seems to realize this because in a way, you know, he says, you know, like a good kind of, you know, marching, marching Hegelian, that, you know, there are no all, you know, there are no needs that are not historical. It needs, you know, there is no kind of like innate kind of, you know, eternal realm of need, you know, that is kind of, that is, remains constant throughout human history. Okay, so what human beings need, you know, to survive is kind of historically shaped.
Now, so on the one hand, you say, well, what about kind of food, clothing, and shelter? Food, clothing, and shelter seems to be this baseline of need. But of course, one quickly realizes that, you know, what, you know, the kinds of foods that human beings need and the not to mention clothing and shelter is indissociable from social relations. So even that is socially mediated through and through. And that's why, in a way, need is a social category. It's a social historical category. And that's why the ratio of surplus to necessary repression becomes historically indeterminable.
So it's like at what point, you know, if repression is the condition of harmonization, if to be human is to be subject to repression, primary repression, at what point does it kick in? And then you realize that, and this is where I think, you know, that the kind of the Lactanian contribution to the kind of, to the understanding of Freud enters in, you realize that it's a mistake to substantial, you know, libido. And it's a mistake to kind of, in a way, there is no domain of, you know, originary, you know, needs or desires, you know, whose repression marks the inception of humanity or the humanist social animal.
And as Palenka Zupanchuk points out to who I think is very clear about kind of explaining this is that, you know, There's a sense in which the drive, it's not as if the unconscious is this substantial reservoir of forces which pre-exists repression. The unconscious is constituted by repression, which is to say that what is desired or what is wanted, or it's compulsively kind of wanted, is always constituted through primary repression.
And therefore, you know, Freud's myth of the primal horde, it's the murder of the primal father, is what institutes the kind of the law, the figure, you know, the interiorization of the murder of the primal father is, you know, ends up being kind of, you know, the guilt that the kind of the horde experiences afterwards leads to the introjection of repression and the, you know, the emergence of super egoic law. But this is a mythical account in Freud. You know, this is like a, in a way, this is a kind of a quasi-transcendental account. It's not a historical. The whole point is that it's an attempt to reconstruct, you know, the logic of repression, which instantiates the social order or social law.
But it's always already happened. And it's not, you can't draw the line. you know, there is no historical kind of boundary where you could say, you know, between man and animal, between the kind of the human and the animal. And that's why, in a way, the consequence of this is also that humanity is not a natural kind, is that being human is not a kind of an ontological category. And this is also why Marx, and this is, you know, where Marx agrees with Freud in saying that, you know, we're still living in prehistory because humanity or homonization is a process that is constantly underway, that has never been definitively accomplished, and exactly what it means to be human is yet to be determined.
I think that the critical kind of point to make about Marcuse's account is that in his account of primary repression, which is supposed to kind of, you know, in a way help demarcate the division between kind of necessary and, you know, surplus, between necessary and surplus repression. There's a claim that originally, there's a positivization of libido, the claim that originally libido is not, you know, localized. It invests, it flows over the kind of the entire, you know, it suffuses everything. Libido suffuses everything, not just the human organism, but man's inorganic body, the earth. This is very close to Deleuze and Gossari.
It's another point of contact with Deleuze and Gossari. And in a way, it's the segmentation or the partialization of libido, the breaking up of desire that makes socialization possible, the restriction of desire to genital sexuality, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that those are points where I'm more skeptical about those points because I think that there's a distinction between primary or between necessary and surplus repression seems to me to depend on a positivization of libido, which is, I think, at least questionable.
And if one does that, one sees that the problem, but I think realizing this, that can actually consolidate Marcuse's account, because the whole point of the Lacanian kind of engagement with critical social theory is that the problem is not repression, it's enjoyment. so it's a problem the real question is not between the real issue doesn't have to do with kind of necessary and surplus repression but necessary and surplus enjoyment and in a way I think that that distinction is more useful or can consolidate more accusers like I'm because that's really what he's talking about when he's a one dimensional man is that capitalism
we learn to enjoy you know we enjoy capitalism we enjoy you know all this stuff yeah and this enjoyment distracts us from our unhappiness because all because enjoyment is not pleasure the whole point is that enjoyment is not pleasure yeah so the more so we are literally we are enjoying ourselves to death and that's exactly what capitalism makes us do so in a way yeah i think that there's a real problem with this distinction between necessary and surplus repression. But actually, I think if you record it in terms of enjoyment, you can salvage Monocruz's account. That's really interesting because as I was reading it originally, I mean, as you were
talking there, another book I was thinking of, well, I think there's some link here is, I don't know if you've read it, but Frederic Lordon's Willing Slaves of Capital. He approached in a quite different way by Spinoza, rather than Hegel and so on. But there, the idea is actually quite similar, I think, which is that one of the many ways or major ways of things in contemporary, highly industrialized capitalist societies, society reproduces itself, is through a kind of manufacturing of desire and a kind of drip feed of smaller pleasures, just all the time, a little purchase here, a little purchase there, so on and so forth, which it's sort of our understanding of what is actually possible of greater of greater goods or greater happiness and so on and so maybe maybe there's a there's also a link there oh absolutely and some interesting
links now now i think about it and i can see why you know why you're sort of going back to mark user today i can ask one final thing i mean i know will has a question as well on sort of this topic so again this sort of this distinction between surplus and necessary repression my My understanding is that, and I'm just trying to give a broad characterization of Mark Hughes' argument, is that there's a degree to which certain desires are basically always going to have to be pressed on some level in order for us to have some kind of function in society. But part of what's happened in the development of capitalism, or at least in the development of the technical composition of our society, is that what was once perhaps necessary at a certain stage is massively out of alignment with what we have now, such that the existing means of production,
if they were to be repurposed through new social relations, i.e. something like communism, could instead be made to realize this greater possibility of freedom, which capitalism at once makes possible in a certain sense through accelerating the development of equipment and so on. But on the other hand, prevents us from ever actually achieving and missed deferral of, I think you talked about in your introduction, the way that the worker defers their temporary pleasure in the idea that the individual does that, such as society can reap the greater rewards, but never quite pays off for any individual in particular. Is that sort of a broadly accurate account? Because I think we'd like to add a thing. No, that's completely accurate. That's completely accurate. And yes, I guess the point is that we're socially compelled
to defer gratification. We work. We have to work in order to be allowed to enjoy, but in a way, the enjoyment becomes a kind of just indissociable from the work. And actually, this is the point, you know, so the distinction between labor time and free time, or between work and leisure, becomes they're two sides of the same coin, which is why, and this is already in Marx's account of alienated labor, that even the way in which we enjoy under capitalism is alienated, which is to say that it's something that actually prevents us from being happy. And not because Marx thinks that there is a kind of transhistorical
human essence, there's a right way to be human, but simply because, in a way, because it preemptively restricts, because in a way, it's capitalism that enforces a regime of human normative. This is the right way to be human. It's capitalism in a way that kind of preemptively restricts the scope of human beings, whereas communism would kind of open it up entirely. I have just a very fundamental basic question. There's sort of an extreme carefulness with, in both your introduction and in lecture two, of not submitting necessity to a sort of prediscursivity that is, let's say, primordial. But what I find kind of interesting is that
that same carefulness is not replicated when it comes to questions of anthropogenesis and the technical, when it comes to human enjoyment or repression. This is in line with Adam's thinking, if we are to try to see Marcuse as developing along the lines of a kind of cyber positivity or a sort of unlocking of productive capacity, how are we supposed to then understand Marcuse on the relationship between exchange and use and the passage from exchange to use if we're leaving, say, both machinery and these two modes, repression and enjoyment,
in sort of a realm of kind of a cohabitated primordiality? Okay, let me try to answer, to say, to respond to the part of your question about use and exchange, because I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to respond adequately. but tell me, I'll say, you know, I'll try to respond and then you tell me, you know, if I'm addressing your concern. So you're right that, I mean, in this, you know, when I mentioned kind of this passage from the Grundrisse of the Rakuza Codes approving about releasing, you know, use value from its subordination to the exchange value. Well, the problem, which I did skip over, is that there's a sense in which use and exchange are the two dimensions of the commodity.
So you can't simply separate or you can't simply abstract use value from exchange value because they're locked together in the commodity. And in a way, the use value of a commodity is there as a support for its exchange value, because capitalism doesn't produce things that human beings need. It makes human beings need what it produces in order to kind of keep producing, maximizing, you know, exchange value. So the question is that a capitalist machine is designed to produce surplus value, and it's that the use value of the commodities it produces together with its use value of capitalism is entirely kind of subordinated to this production of value as such.
And the point here is then to say that the dimensions of use or the possibilities of use that would be opened up by abolishing the class relation, expropriating the expropriators, and can simply be kind of, we wouldn't be able to use things in the way we've been using them under capitalism. What things are useful for and what we want to do is precisely what would be completely kind of transformed with communism. So there's an issue here that, in a way,
that undermines the claim, or it seems to kind of go against the claim about repurposing, that you can simply kind of repurpose capitalist technology for communist ends. Why? Because the social relations, if purposes are a function of social relations, of an ensemble of social relations, once you reconfigure social relations, you completely reconfigure the means and the ends pursued by human beings. And it's not clear then that capitalist technology would be adequate. But I take the point then to be that there's going to be a necessary transformation, is that the transition, this is why the problem of transition is inevitable, because if you're going to build a new world, you have to build it using the materials, even the junk, the detritus of a capitalist civilization.
You can't build a communist reality ex nihil from nothing. Even if you have to take everything apart, and it looks like you would have to take everything apart, but you would have to, you know, the raw materials you would use to build a communist society would be, you know, the vestiges or the vestigial forms of, you know, capitalist social relations. That's why the transition to communism will take time. I mean, it's a labor, it's, you know, it's, it would take a long time, probably. So that's the first, in a way, that's why, I mean, I agree that there's something, in a way, Marcuse's account is very abstract. And in a way, or at least in the text, the text I'm familiar with, when he proposes this
account, it's quite abstract. And, you know, one, I guess, you know, one needs to hear more about exactly how is the, repurposing of capitalist technology would go about. And I think that, I mean, you use the expression cyber positivity. I mean, look, on the one hand, there's a suspicion that if you simply want to kind of abolish, you know, everything, all these capitalist social forms and the technological instruments that have been generated within those social forms, you end up with an abstract negation. You end up with an abstract negation that can sound like a kind of, you know, some kind that invites a suspicion that you think that there's a form of social organization,
that it's possible for human beings to organize themselves, which is not technologically mediated, which is not historically and technologically mediated. And so either you think that there's a way of going back, we can reinstate a set of originary kind of, you know, natural pre-capitalist relations that have been perverted by capitalism. I don't think Marcuse believes this. I don't think any kind of serious, you know, Marxist believes this. So the point is that communist social relations have to be kind of, you know, engineered using, you know, once, you know, in the wake of the dismantling of these capitalist forms and capitalist structures. But how this will unfold is difficult to kind of, you know, to predict or to foresee.
But at least it's clear that what needs to be done is, you know, I think the negation of communism must be determined. That means that, you know, there's a very simple kind of injunction for anyone who wants to call themselves a communist is that no one should go hungry, okay? If communism entails the abolition of hunger, of human hunger, so that no one should be kind of starving, shelterless, naked, etc. And that means that there are material needs that need to be satisfied. And those material needs require technological resources. We have to find ways to kind of satisfy those needs. It can't be about reinstating a dimension of need, you know, hunger, fear, you know.
And that's the utopian dimension of communism is the idea that human beings don't have to live in fear. They don't have to, and their existence need not be a struggle against, you know, degradation and, you know, humiliation, which is in a way the religious viewpoint, the viewpoint that says human beings are, that suffering somehow makes us human. And I think that that, Marcuse's kind of, when he talks about the promise of happiness, communism is a promise of happiness. The idea is that we could be, it doesn't have to, history as we know it is not ineluctable. It didn't have to be this way.
And it doesn't have to be this way in the future. And this is what has to be achieved as a way to kind of, not just for human beings to survive, but for human beings to be freed from the tyranny of biological need, you know, hunger, the fear of disease, of premature death, et cetera, et cetera. So that's, okay, that's one half, but that's only addressing, I don't know if that even addresses a part of your question. If you can continue, and I'll try to kind of see more about it. I think that makes it quite clear about where Marcuse is actually, even in relation to the second part of the question, which is about what is left in the realm of the prediscursive as it
relates to it being transposed onto forms of production and forms of exchange and use. I think that can actually be applied to both parts of the question. So I think that's pretty thorough. Okay, good, good. that we're living in today. So one of the questions I said many leftists today may find
little credence in a positivistic theory of progress. I mean, speaking for myself, there are good reasons to believe that the productivism valorized by socialists in the 20th century is either naive or antiquated, especially against the imminent collapse of global ecosystems. Moreover, Marcuse gestures towards a critique of productivism similar to the one made by Bataille, which is, you know, under Stalinism, for example, this notion of productivism that we see in capitalism today was elevated to its most rational limit. And it's obvious in the second lecture that Marcuse makes reference to either that particular argument or one very much like it. And for me, I don't think Marcuse, at least in the context of that particular lecture satisfyingly turns out of it. He doesn't afford us any additional axioms to this notion of
a theory of progress that would allow us to get out of productivity being an end for itself. And so thinking about a figure like George Bataille, for example, if we were to reframe or resituate our revolutionary consciousness or insurrectionary consciousness, if you will, towards the end of reclaiming sovereignty, reclaiming one's consumption for oneself. It would entail forms of resistance that would basically cut against the grain, at least as I see it, cut against the grain of any sort of imminent and present injunction towards a certain kind of productivity. And to put that in very simple terms, just think of what happened during
COVID-19, there was a brief moment where there was a kind of refusal of work. Granted, it might have just chalked up to people sort of shifting jobs laterally, but there are places in the United States today where people are finding it more difficult to find employees for certain kinds of jobs and wages have gone up as a result because there is a demand there. And so it seems to me that an incipient political gesture to realize some sort of revolutionary program or to, you know, effectuate, you know, this sort of last stage of repression that would get us over this hump into the territory of the utopian would involve some kind of resistance, some kind of reclamation of sovereignty. I mean, how does that chalk up for Marcuse in very real terms? And do you
take issue with any of that? Like, is there a solution within Marcuse's work or maybe within your own philosophy? I mean, I'm also thinking about your Prometheism a bit here too. I think there's a point at which the Prometheans and all of us, the fire that we need to reclaim is our sovereignty. And often I think that is most aptly realized in a form of refusal than it is, you know, in terms of accelerating the process, as it were. Okay, thanks. Well, I mean, so I think it's clear that, you know, capitalism is production for the sake of production, and it's what capitalism, all that capitalism ever produces is abstract value, you know, whose substance is, you know, human labor.
So in a way, capitalism, you know, it doesn't, in a way, this is a demystification of capitalism. It undermines the claim that capitalism is endlessly innovative, or also that it produces, that most of what it produces is in fact useless, or like it has no kind of, is only useful because of the kind of perverse and kind of oppressive social relations in which we find ourselves. But there's a lot of stuff that we are compelled to use that we shouldn't have to use and that should not be produced at all. So I think that Martusa is not guilty of extolling productivism.
In other words, it's not about releasing the productive forces. In a way, there's a critique of productivism in late 20th century critical theory and the productivist paradigm that was held to be part of the world view Marxism, for want of a better term. which is the claims that, you know, capitalism fetters, capitalist social relations fetter the productive forces. Once we, you know, do away with those social relations, we can, we release the forces of production. Now that's, in a way that leads only to kind of, that led to kind of various disasters and, you know, under actually existing communism. And Marcuse is very critical of that. He doesn't accept that at all.
But production and social reproduction remains ineluctable. Human beings are social animals. They can only, you know, they can only live together and they depend upon one another. They depend upon each other to produce what they, you know, what they all collectively need to stay on. And the claim is simply that they could find ways to organize their collective social production, which wouldn't entail this, in a way, the subordination of collective production to the production of an absurd amount of social wealth for a tiny minority of the population.
So the production then becomes, in a way, the liberation of production as Marcuse sees it, I think. So it's neither simply kind of, you know, producing according to these pre-established needs, apart from simply kind of, you know, feeding, clothing and sheltering everyone. but nor is it, you know, nor, I mean, it's not, he doesn't want to, he's not fetishizing production or productivity, I think. And in relation to what you said about sovereignty, I mean, could you say, I mean, in a way, I agree that, I mean, the question is whether, I mean, I take that sovereignty, you know,
if communism is, you know, the free association of producers, it means that each of us would produce what they want to produce. And this production would be, we'd be able to satisfy our desires through producing without anyone having to pay the price for this, without anyone's basic needs having to be sacrificed for the gratification of a few individuals' desires.
And then the question is, is the sovereignty, well, I take it, if you mean collective sovereignty, then, you know, because I think individual sovereignty can only be, you know, entails collective sovereignty. No individual can be genuinely sovereign in the kind of the communist sense, unless, you know, all individuals, unless humans collectively have achieved social sovereignty, which is sovereignty without domination. sovereignty without domination which would mean that you know what's human beings you know once human freedom is no longer one at another's expense it doesn't entail you know the domination of others that means that the domination of nature could be added because the dominant the need to
dominate nature reflects relations of social domination. But then as for the issue of refusal, I think, in a way, I think that refusal is necessary, is indispensable, but I think it's only a starting point. I think that in a way to reassert the need for collective sovereignty, you have to refuse the variety, you have to refuse what is peddled as sovereignty on vocabularism, which is negative freedom, freedom libertarian freedom, freedom from obligations or responsibilities to others. But then this means that this refusal would have to be collectivized and it would have to be rendered. As Marcuse calls it, it would have to become
a sovereign collective refusal so that we could transform our social relations and free ourselves collectively. So again, I'm not sure if I've really answered your question. I mean, I see, I think I see the kind of the reservations you have about Marcuse's account, but I think it's possible to read them in a way that kind of, you know, you know, at least kind of, you know, takes into account some of the, you know, the worries you have. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think we would probably all agree after going through this with a fine-tooth comb that Marcuse doesn't satisfyingly answer this question in this text. Like I said, he certainly gestures towards it. I mean, I don't even see him providing a resolution as such. I think the concerns here
are more situated on the notion of fleshing out the repressive hypothesis and this idea of achieving the communal mass that can overthrow this cyclical repressive habit of civilization in the last instance. And maybe in the interest of moving forward, we'll go to just a few of the wrap-up questions. I mean, we want to find out about the kinds of things that you're working on right now. And I have some questions here from some of our listeners and viewers. One person wanted to know, I thought this was interesting, as you tend to draw from both continental, like BudU and analytic philosophers, Sellers, and so forth. What do you think of divide as it currently stands? Is it real? Is there something valuable or important that is lost when two schools of
thinking refuse to speak to one another? And maybe with that said, I'll lump in another question from a faithful viewer of ours. Who are some thinkers maybe now, maybe it's some of the thinkers that might be from the previous question, do you think are on the horizon or in the sort of contemporary moment that you feel are doing good work and pushing the envelope, as it were, and expanding the horizon of philosophical thought today? Okay. So regarding the analytic continental divide, well, it certainly has an institutional reality. And in fact, it still remains, you know, ineluctable for anyone who wants to kind of, you know, pursue philosophy academically or who's like to be able to teach philosophy,
in a way you're forced to choose and not only are you forced to choose between those two you're either analytic or continental if you want to get a job but within those you have to specialize okay and there's there's an increasing you know onus on specialization like you have to really count but to specialize in and become more and more of a specialist if you want to get job. But I think intellectually and philosophically, I think that the division is very bad. And I think it's been a kind of, it's really kind of, you know, hinder philosophical debates and possibility of progress on some kind of fundamental philosophical problems in a way,
which is deeply unfortunate. I think, I mean, yeah, the reasons for the division are, you know, are complicated. I think that there are, I mean, I think it took me, you know, a long time to really understand, you know, what was really at stake in the division and also to understand, you know, what was going on, like what the key thinkers in each of these traditions was actually kind of saying. And I mean, I think, you know, whether I like it or not, you know, I am, you know, institutionally i mean i'm a continental philosopher because what i do doesn't count as analytic philosophy but i've learned a tremendous amount from you know reading you know trying to
read analytic philosophy and i think you know it has a lot to offer in some kind of areas not all i mean i'm not a fan of like you know all of its manifestations but then normally a fan of all of continental philosophy. I think there's lots of continental philosophy that is, you know, not so impressive. But I do think the key thing is, I think Kant, in a way, Kant and Hegel and Marx are the key, you know, axis of division. There's a line from Kant to Marx. I think that understanding that, in a way, what happens in this historical sequence is crucial to understand what's at stake in being a philosopher what it means to do philosophy now
if you don't you know because i think that in a way i think that philosophy is between well in a way and let's say philosophy tried to model itself on science you know it tried to say that philosophy you know philosophy can only make progress through getting by modeling itself on science, which is to say, using the tools of logical analysis, formalization, you know, being much more careful about specifying what the real problems are, and then working collectively and collaboratively to try to, you know, to solve these problems, you know, in the way in which scientists do. Whereas in the continental tradition, you have supposedly the kind of figure of the great, you know, the great thinker genius, okay, the visionary genius who transforms,
whose vision of the problems of philosophy is always unique and sui generis and kind of, you know, can only be kind of understood, you know, from within. And in a way, so in a way, you could see that there's an objective and a subjective conception of what it means to Indonesian philosophy. And I think that really, I mean, this kind of might sound like a compound, but I think philosophy is a combination of both in that it's neither something that you can approach purely objectively, as a technical domain of specific and compartmentalizable problems, which you can solve through kind of, you know, by learning certain techniques, nor is it something that involves visionary inspiration.
I think, you know, it's something you need to know certain things, you know, to be able to kind of, you know, to be a philosopher. but you know how you learn you know and how much you know can't simply be trying to you know can be purely objectively defined in other words you can contribute to philosophy on the basis of you know a very you know perhaps a kind of singular understanding of a problem or you know the by reimagining you know what's at stake in a problem and by developing conceptual resources which were not previously available, you know, by inventing something. And I think that that's, so I think if bad analytic philosophy suffers from a kind of a surfeit of, like, technical, mechanical kind of, you know, scholastic objectivism,
you know, bad continental philosophy is excessively, you know, aestheticizing and, you know, tries to kind of, becomes a kind of a worldview, an aesthetic worldview. And I think the aim should be to fuse both or to overcome that separation so that you can actually, it's by trying to understand what has been achieved by certain thinkers and certain key texts, you can then kind of discover something or contribute something that isn't simply kind of in a way that isn't you know specifiable objectively specifiable you can invent something
that isn't entirely you know objective so but but that makes it it means you're going to have a very hard time you know getting a job unfortunately so it's and it's i'm afraid the division is not going anywhere anytime soon as far as universities go so it's probably only going to intensify as long as the capitalist university exists but i have one question i've actually been wondering this for like a couple of years now just out of sort of almost personal curiosity but our listeners asking whether teaching in lebanon has had any kind of influence or impact on the either your work or your political thinking and I've also been personally curious what brought you from
as I understand it you were born in in London to to Beirut where you now teach so I guess both those questions has it had an influence and if you don't mind I'm just a little curious it has had an influence but not in the way in which some people might think it's not in a way coming here confirmed things that I suspected but you know didn't really understand or had not experienced firsthand. So, you know, I didn't know very little about the Middle East and Lebanon before coming here, short of like reading, you know, reading stuff, you know, watching the news. But certainly, you know, becoming here has been very important. And it's led me to understand things that I don't think I could have understood had I stayed in, not just in the UK, but in Europe. I'm also very happy
to be out of Europe. I don't like Europe. I think it was bad and it's getting worse. And although, you know, Lebanon and, you know, this region is very kind of troubled and, you know, very bad things are happening, it does allow you to see, it does allow one to see things that one can't see from Europe or North America. And yes, that's, so it has been important. I very much, you know, I like living here, Although it's, you know, if you know anything about the situation in Lebanon, you'll know that things are very difficult here. But it's, yes, I've learned things here that I don't think I could ever have learned in London, for instance. So, but it hasn't directly shaped my philosophical thinking.
It doesn't, it hasn't kind of, I didn't, you know, develop a new set of interests when I moved here. And do you mind talking about what brought you there? Was it just a job offer or something? Yeah, that's it. It was Chance. I wanted to get out of London, so I applied for lots and lots of jobs, but this is the only offer I got. And I just said, yeah. And I didn't really, as I said, I knew very little about Lebanon or AUB, but I took it without hesitating because it just seemed like a really interesting place to be. So. Oh, okay. I think Adam's got a question now to round things out. I mean, at the, yeah, I mean, at the last departmental meeting, we realized a lot of the good, especially in a very, my department for a heavy continental, that the best thing
I'll do is to get out, get off the island, maybe, maybe escape Europe entirely for the positions. But just returning to the philosophy in a personal trajectory level, I guess, I mean, I guess I had a question to summarize some of our questions from our listeners in terms of just how do you think your philosophical development has tracked from say the early spectative realist conferences towards this kind of marcusian maybe it's more rationalist disposition in more recent works i mean yes there's been a movement i mean i've tried to explain i've been asked a couple of times about what's the what's the link between you know my interest now in my interest then. And I mean, there's a link, or to me, there's an evident link. There's a net, you know, it's kind of a development.
But I realize it may not be at all kind of evidence to others. I mean, I think I understand, you know, I mean, basically, first of all, well, it was actually kind of, you know, I worked on Sellers for a long time after finishing, you know, this book, which I wrote a long time ago. And it was Sellers who led me to Marx. Sellers led me back to Kant and Hegel and ultimately to Marx. And then I immediately, I was able to reread these critical theorists, some of whose works I'd read a long time ago without properly appreciating them because I didn't have a philosophical context
to really understand what they were doing and why it was important. so now you know it's actually you know I think Marcuse's work but also Adorno's work you know Forkheimer's work is actually remarkably timely I mean a lot of it was written almost a hundred years ago but like it's really remarkable how the you know the predicament that these thinkers were describing in the 1930s you know the rise of fascism you know the you know fascist totalitarianism, unbridled capitalism, really, in a way, the situation in which we find ourselves now is simply the result, the historical, the long-term historical results
of what started to unfold 90 or so years ago, which is why I don't think that there, I mean, some of the finer, I mean, the occasional detail is perhaps kind of, you know, marked by its time, but really the broad cultures of their accounts are remarkably still relevant. You know, things have only gotten worse. You know, the things that were bad then have only gotten much, much worse. And now I kind of, you know, it's, I think, in a way this, I'm able to integrate. I had these interests, you know, some of these epistemological and kind of, you know, ontological interests, which I was always trying to find a kind of, you know, to thread together. I tried to thread them together in one way about like my first book.
But now I've found a kind of, I think, more cohesive framework in which to integrate. So I think that, you know, this, you know, Marx, understanding Marx's achievements and understanding from the kind of cognitive transformation that I was interested in, in kind of investigating in the work on nihilism I did a whole time ago, entails radical social transformation, basically. So that's the kind of connecting thread. Ray, I just want to say thank you for taking time out of what I'm sure is your very busy schedule as a teacher, as a writer, and you've done a great service to the Zero Books channel, not only by bringing this work back into focus. So I just want to say thank you for supporting not only the imprint,
but also our show. And we would love to have you back in the future if you'd like to talk about something new that you're working on. Thanks very much. Thanks for inviting me and thanks for your questions and for a really interesting discussion. material support helps us to promote a variety of perspectives on the left. Also, discover the many titles new and old that Xero has curated. Navigate to any of the links in the show notes to extend your support.