Of all of the different trajectories and intersections that frame the relation of Marx to Spinoza, one recurring motif posits Spinoza as a precursor with respect to a specifically Marxist concept, that of ideology. Spinoza’s investigations of the imagination and superstition, the illusions that people are subject to, and their role in sustaining political authority and power, are the precursors if not the preconditions of Marx’s theory of ideology. If Spinoza is considered a precursor it is an odd one, because many of the thinkers who have turned to Spinoza for a theory of ideology have done so on the basis that as much as Spinoza comes before Marx chronologically, his understanding of ideology goes beyond what Marx wrote, in the way that constructs a theory that encompasses not just ideas, but affects, not just the thoughts of the mind but the striving of the body, and not just knowledge but imagination. The extent to which Spinoza goes beyond Marx has to be combined with the extent to which he falls short. There is nothing like a theory of not only the capitalist mode of production in Spinoza, but, aside from a few suggestive remarks the constitution of political bodies through common affects, there is nothing like a materialist theory of social relations in Spinoza. In some respects Spinoza goes beyond Marx, while in others Marx goes beyond Spinoza, this movement is less a back and forth, a vacillation, than it is a circle in motion because in between the proper names of Spinoza and Marx and their respective histories and conjunctures there is the question of the relation between the social order and the order of thoughts and desires, to put it in Spinoza’s terms, or the mode of production and the production of subjectivity to put it in Marxist terms. This is no stationary object of contemplation, but an ongoing transformation. We are perhaps as far from nineteenth century idea of ideology as the ruling ideas of the ruling class as Marx was from the question of superstition in the seventeenth century, but in the relation between the two we can perhaps make better sense of the world that produces us, and how it can be produced differently.
The Matrix of Every Possible Theory of Ideology
Louis Althusser was the one who perhaps went the furthest in in making Spinoza the basis for a theory of ideology. He famously claimed that it was not just Spinoza’s thought in general, but the Appendix to Part One of the Ethics, that was the “matrix of every possible theory of ideology.” The Appendix to Part One of the Ethics is a dense polemical text that functions as critical engagement with limit of the common sense of Spinoza’s time. After having critically dispensed with anthropocentric concept of God, of God that acts with an end in view, Spinoza sets himself the task of explaining where such an image comes from, and why it is so persistent. As Spinoza writes,
It will be sufficient here if I take as a foundation what everyone must acknowledge: that all men are born ignorant of the causes of things, and that they all want to seek their own advantage, and are conscious of this appetite. From these assumptions it follows, first, that men think themselves free, because they are conscious of their volitions and appetite, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes which they are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant of those causes. It follows, second, that men always act on account an end, namely, on account of their advantage, which they want.
From this combination of ignorance and desire we get an interpretive grid that views everything in terms its ends, in terms of how it affects us, with little understanding of the actual causes. We call somethings good and evil, or orderly or confused, solely in terms of how it affects us, not how it is caused. This creates an inverted world of understanding, “what is really a cause it considers as an effect, and conversely, what is an effect it considers a cause.” As Althusser writes,
The imagination is (1) to put the (human) subject at the center and origin of every perception, of every action, of every object, and of every meaning, but (2) to reverse in this way the real order of things, since the real order is explained…solely by the determination of causes, which the subjectivity of the imagination explains everything by means of ends, by the subjective illusion of the ends of its desire and its expectations. This is, strictly speaking, to reverse the order of the world, to make it walk, as Hegel and Marx will say, on its head. It is put work, as Spinoza superbly said, an entire “apparatus”…an apparatus of reversal of causes into ends.
This apparatus provided the basis for what Althusser would label the Ideological State Apparatus, providing the basis for the three fundamental thesis that Althusser puts forward. The first of these, is that ideology is an imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence; second, that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects; and third, that ideology has a material existence. The first two can be understood to be a reading of not just Spinoza’s Appendix and the whole text. In some sense imagination, or what Spinoza refers to as inadequate ideas, is our fundamental experience of the world. We perceive things in terms of how they affect us, in a confused mixture of their nature and our desires, and at the center of this imagination is the image we have of ourselves as a subject, or, as Spinoza put it, a kingdom within a kingdom. With respect to the third thesis, ideology has a material existence, here we might see the biggest point of tension between Spinoza and Althusser. For Spinoza the materiality of ideology is first and foremost the materiality of the body, of the bodies needs and desires. Ignorance of causes and consciousness of appetite becomes the basis for a universe grasped in terms of intentions and actions undertaken towards an end. Spinoza defines this initial ignorance of the causes of things, including our desire, prejudice (praejudicia) while the latter, ignorance as it is reinforced by its social dimension, by a doctrine of ignorance and a practice of belief is dubbed superstition (supersitio).
Prejudice is transformed into superstition once this belief in final causes becomes not just the basis of an individual perspective but takes on a social significance, tied to human relations and domination. The priority is less a temporal one than a logical one. It is not that anyone is ever born into a world of a natural prejudice, a world without history, without signs and interpretations, left to interpret the world on their own. We enter into a world of superstition, of organized beliefs and norms, because we are prone to prejudice, to interpreting the world in terms of our limited and partial perspective. It is hard to avoid a certain primacy to the anthropological, to the human condition, in Spinoza’s thought of superstition. It returns again in the opening passage of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus when Spinoza writes, “If men were able to exercise complete control over all their circumstances, of if continuous good fortune were always their lot, the would never be prey to superstition.” The material conditions of ideology is not just our dependency but our finitude in face of the apparent contingency of existence. Despite this opening, which grounds superstition in the anthropological fact of finitude, it is in the TTP, and not in the Ethics, that one can find an account of something of an ideological apparatus, Spinoza’s account of the ancient Hebrew state is one in which the prescription of diet, harvesting, and other aspects of life, created its own conditions for obedience. As Spinoza writes, “Therefore to men so habituated to it obedience must have appeared no longer as bondage, but freedom.” It is perhaps for this reason that as much as Althusser drew his schema for ideology from the Ethics, he argued that "the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is the Capital of Spinoza, because Spinoza is preoccupied above all with history and politics." Any attempt to divide between the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologic-Politicus with respect to theories of superstition necessarily fails, just as any attempt to draw a strong line of demarcation between the anthropological and institutional basis of ideology fails. Actually existing ideologies are always a combination of the limitation of our knowledge and the institutional organization of that limitation. Ideology is always at once grounded in our finitude, in our ignorance of the causes of things, and in the way that ignorance is produced and reproduced in the practices and habits that limit and curtail our understanding. Spinoza’s question, the question that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari understood to be the fundamental question of not just of ideology but of all of politics, “why do people fight for their servitude as if it was their salvation,” is at once a question of the finite and limited nature of human understanding, and a question of politics, of the organization of social life. The question of subjection is neither that of our ignorance and fear, of our natural finitude, nor is it a question of political control, but the point of intersection of both.
What appears in Spinoza as a division between prejudice and superstition, between the original consciousness of desires and ignorance of the causes of things, and its institution in superstition takes on a vexed and complex trajectory in Althusser’s thought. Sometimes it underlies a distinction between ideology in general, and specific ideologies. The former is abstract, defined only by the subject, while the latter are specific, the ideologies of this or that particular practice, legal, political, work, etc. It also underlies another distinction in Althusser’s thought, between a “spontaneous ideology,” and a more explicit and organized ideology. There is a spontaneous philosophy to every practice, scientist, philosopher, writer, etc. all have a particular conception that stems from their particular practice. Spontaneity is the immediate determination of thought by a particular practice or action. Its immediacy is the effect of relations and mediations that are obscured. As Pierre Macherey writes, “The spontaneous is never but spontaneous in scare quotes, that is to say a false spontaneity which is in reality the result of a manipulation, an artifice, an editing.” To take an example, there is an ideology of work which posits wage labor as natural, necessary, and individual activity, working for living, is made possible by its framing that occludes its collective and contingent nature. Spontaneity is thus shifted away from anthropology, from a specific human nature and human finitude, to the basic ideas and conceptions tied to a specific practice. Spontaneity is not an effect of the fundamental finitude of human nature, but of the fact that every practice carries with it is own conceptual dimension, produces its own theory, which reflects it activity and partiality. As Althusser writes,
Their own ideology, the spontaneous ideology of their practice (their ideology of science or the arts) does not depend solely on their own practice: it depends mainly and in the last instance on the dominant ideological system of the society in which they live. Ultimately, it is this ideological system especially that governs the very forms of their ideology of science and of the arts. What seems to happen before their eyes happens, in reality, behind their backs.
A spontaneous ideology is the way any practice produces its own perspective, but this particular ideology has to be related to the general ideology, in the same way every practice is related to the social totality. The relation between the two ideologies can be considered a variation of the between prejudice and superstition, between the generic ground of any ideology as emerging from the finite nature of a specific practice and its limitations and an ideological system that organizes and subsumes spontaneous ideologies in order to reproduce the relations of production. The spontaneous ideology is determined in the last instance by the dominant ideology. The determination by the dominant ideology is also the primacy of the totality, the mode of production to each specific practice.
These two different distinctions, between ideology in general and specific ideologies and between the spontaneous ideology and the dominant ideology, maintain the fundamental divide between prejudice and superstition that Spinoza articulates, but they displace it from any anthropological basis, from any theory of the human condition. Althusser endeavors to make Spinoza consistently anti-humanist, rejecting not just the ontology of humanity as a “kingdom within a kingdom” but an epistemology that would start from human intentions and understanding as the basis for understanding the imagination. For Althusser, ideology must be indexed not to any specific problem of the human condition, but to the different practices of social relations, the tensions and divisions of ideology, relate not to a natural ignorance and its social organization, but to different practices and the determination by different practices. It is a matter of the primacy of the specific practice or the determination of the specific practice by the social totality.
Part Two: A History of Striving
A certain dimension of the anthropological question returns in Frédéric Lordon’s turn to Spinoza. Lordon argues that it is Proposition Twelve of Part III of the Ethics which ought to be read as the proposition par excellence concerning ideology. The Proposition states, “The mind as far as it an, strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the body’s power of acting.” There is a fundamental ambivalence to this Proposition, one that is reflected in its Demonstration. On the one hand this proposition asserts the very basis of our activity, an increase in our capacity to act, it is the core of rationality. At the same time, it relates this striving to the imagination, we strive to what we imagine will increase our power and activity. To imagine is to treat an effect as a cause, something absent as present, necessary as contingent. Spinoza’s Ethics is filled with examples of people who strive to increase their power, their capacity to act, under what they imagine will increase their power. To take one example, the drunk thinks that he or she is increasing their capacity to act, taking a drink as a bit of courage, but alcohol is at best an unstable object of desire, whose negative effects are just as pertinent as its positive effects. This leads to a fundamentally ambivalent relation to what one strives towards. Second, any joys, any courage it can bring is necessarily passive, not at all caused by us. The more one drinks to find courage, the more one makes drink a controlling force in their life. In striving to be active one increases passivity. Imagination and reason do not have different goals, they both strive to increase the body’s capacity to act, but they do so from fundamentally different premises with different effects.
Lordon would seem to return ideology to not only a philosophical anthropology, but a classic one at that; our perspective is skewed to the extent that desire, or an inadequate understanding of the object of our desires distorts our perspective. However, Spinoza does not just work from a standard opposition between desire and reason, but rethinks what it means to desire. Desire is not some deviation from the putative rational nature of humanity, but it is what it means to be human. As Spinoza writes, “‘Desire is the very essence of man in so far as his essence is conceived as determined to any action from any given affection of itself’ (EIIIDI). As much as desire determines our actions, and orients our thoughts, desire itself is determined by the affects, which is to say the history of our relations. Desire, is as Lordon stresses, intransitive, lacking a specific object or orientation. It is not oriented towards the good, at least in any teleological sense, but only towards that which it calls good. It is not even a brute desire for survival. How we define survival is always determined by the ways that one has been affected. However, Spinoza primarily understood this history in individual terms, it is a history of the way that we have been affected by different things, a biography. Lordon adds a history which exceeds this individual history to encompass the major transformations of the nature of desire in capitalism.
Lordon offers a history of striving under three different regimes of capitalist exploitation, corresponding to the emergence of capitalism, the rise of consumer society, and contemporary neoliberalism. This history is mapped onto two axes; the first, drawn from Marx, is considered in terms of the division between production and consumption, the two separate spheres of activity. Within this, the division between abstract and concrete labor, on the generic imperative of productivity or the specific pleasures of this or that job, plays a secondary role. The second axis, drawn from Spinoza, is that of joy or sadness, understood as an increase or decrease in one’s power and capacity. From these two coordinates, it is possible to chart the history of capital. The first phase of this history corresponds to the initial formation of capitalism, what Marx called formal subsumption. The primary institutional basis for capitalism, at this stage, is the absence of any alternative to wage labor, the destruction of the commons or any sustenance economy which would provide non-commodified conditions of existence. Fear is a motive, a driving force orienting the striving, the conatus, but a limited one. People compelled by fear will work, but only as much as it is necessary to stave off the punishment they fear. Those who do not work do not eat, and it is the fear of starvation or homelessness that keeps one working. Fear is not only a limited incentive it is also a fundamentally unstable one. Fear can drive one to revolt almost as much as one can obey. From this then, Lordon maps a second stage that roughly corresponds with Fordism. For Lordon, the institutional effect of Fordism is one of the destruction of the pleasures and pride of concrete labor, the pleasures of a particular skill, in favor of a general shift of the desire for recognition or realization away from labor towards consumption. Ford’s “five-dollar day” establishes an affective economy, exchanging sadness and frustration at work for the pleasures of the newly emergent consumer society. The final, or at least most recent, change in this affective economy reorients pleasure towards work, but it is no longer the pleasure of a particular skill, job, or a result, but it is the pleasure of employment itself. It is a desire that is, as much as possible, modeled on abstract labor.
It is possible to say that Lordon’s reading hinges on a third tenet of Spinoza’s thought, and that is the opacity of desire itself. Our ignorance of the causes of things encompasses not just the causes that produce the things around us, but our own desires as well. We tend to believe that we desire things because we freely choose to, or because of the intrinsic qualities of the object in question. What we overlook is precisely the history of the way we have been affected by a thing; this determination is often the actual cause of our desires, but one that we are unaware of, and ignore. As Spinoza writes, “From all this, then, it is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it.” As much as Lordon expands this history to include the way in which we not just individually affected by objects and relations, shaping our own particular desires, but also the way in which life under capitalism can be considered a general reorientation of desire, one that structures it towards one primary activity wage labor and one object, that of the commodity. If I want to do anything, and most importantly if I want to increase my capacity to act and think, then the only avenue to pursue this is through labor, wage labor, and not political organizing or other forms of activity. Similarly, what I desire, what I strive for, primarily exists as a commodity, as something to be privately purchased and owned. Or, as Marx puts it, “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it.” All activity is subsumed under the figure of wage labor, and all objects of that activity are subsumed under the commodity form. Other activities, other relations with the world, are eclipsed.
We could call this an ideology, but what Lordon stresses is that this ideology is less an explicit formulated belief system but a reflection of the material conditions of existence. Wage labor and the commodity form reorient desire not because of some kind of representation, some kind of ruling idea, but because they first and foremost reorganize bodies by affecting them and orienting desires. For Lordon the salient distinction is not between prejudice and superstition, spontaneity and its formulation, but between appetite and desire. In Spinoza appetite is “nothing but the very essence of man, from whose nature necessarily follow those things that promote his preservation” (EIIIP9). The difference between appetite and desire is that in the latter one is conscious of this striving, desire is appetite plus consciousness. Spinoza’s division, and its role in Lordon’s thought returns us to a problem in Marx’s own thought, that of the reproduction of the relations of production. Althusser, like many thinkers of the twentieth century have stressed ideology as the conditions of the relations of production. Workers return to work each day because they take wage labor as a natural given, rather than a social institution, or believe in the fundamentally just and fair nature of the system. Ideology is a necessary condition of the reproduction of the relations of production. Marx, especially the Marx of Capital, seemed less interested in the ideological reproduction of capitalism. For Marx the fundamental condition of the reproduction of capitalism is the destruction of any alternative economic relation, any commons or conditions for existence. Once that is gone then it is enough to leave the reproduction of capitalism to “worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation.” In other words, capitalism reproduces itself through the mute compulsion of appetite and not the conscious striving of desire. Marx remains divided on this point, and even in Capital, the theory of commodity fetishism and the invocation of a working class that treats capital’s requirements as “self-evident natural laws,” suggest an ideological dimension. André Tosel has argued that what one finds in the late Marx is theory of capital as “the religion of daily life” that is similar to the analysis that Spinoza takes on in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In each case religion, is less a matter of a theological doctrine than it is in the way in which the basic habits of living cohere and hold together to produce or reproduce a particular character or way of looking at the world. If the ancient Hebrew’s lived a life of obedience inscribed in their clothes, hair, and diet, the capitalist imperatives to sell labor and buy commodities is inscribed in our daily activities. A commute to work in an automobile is more of a lesson in the supposed virtues competition and struggle than a million lectures on micro-economics.
Marx’s division on this point has given rise to various splits within the Marxist tradition, between mute compulsion and ideology critique. This split can be found divided across various divisions, from the split between Marxist-Leninism and so called Western Marxism. Lordon to some extent historicizes this division. In the early period of capitalism, the one directly following primitive accumulation, the destruction of any alternative was sufficient. One works because one has to eat. Such an imperative was sufficient for the work of the industrial revolution. Motivation by fear was both inadequate and unstable: it can only compel people to do just enough to not get fired and fear can easily give rise to hatred or indignation. It kept people showing up at the factory gates, and the pace of the machinery took it from there. Fear was entirely inadequate to producing the kind of workers, the kind of subjectivities, that are demanded by an increasingly service based economy. The more the economy relies on affects, on service with a smile, the more it must produce those affects by creating more motivated workers. It is for this reason that the history of capitalism can be understood, as Lordon argues, as a history of the formation of a different affective economy, one predicated on hope as much as fear, love as much as hatred. However, Lordon primarily considers this transformation to be one oriented through the basic structure of work and consumption. It is primarily a transformation of appetites, of the way that we strive and what we strive for, and not so much of what we think and how we think. Lordon writes that we live in a capitalist society, not just a capitalist economy. By this he means that capitalism is not just relegated to the way goods are produced and circulated, but the way that we live and desire. However, he primarily considers this in terms of the way that capital restructures desire through the wage relation, the way that mute compulsion produces desire. Of course capital is never mute, never quiet, since its formation it has layered over its necessity with justifications of its existence. There is no primitive accumulation without so-called primitive accumulation, the story capital tells itself about its origins framed in terms of a moral of thrift and waste. Capital has not ceased to tell stories about itself, stories about the virtues of work, and the moral difference between rich and poor.
Logic of Alternation
As much as one can find the conditions for a thought of ideology in various aspects of Spinoza’s writing, from the Appendix to the Ethics to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, from the meditations on superstition to the discussion of the limitations of knowledge, any theory of ideology starting from Spinoza must ultimately wrestle with the fundamental question of the relation between, bodies and minds, ideas and things. Which is to say that every theory of ideology from Spinoza must ultimately wrestle with Part II Proposition Seven, “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” This proposition can first of all be understood as a statement of identity, ideas and things, bodies and minds are two different sides of the same fundamental reality. Franck Fischbach argues that following Marx’s own statement regarding the identity of consciousness and life we need to think of ideology as the same social reality grasped differently. As Marx stresses one of the fundamental conditions of ideology, one of the things that makes the ruling ideas the ideas of the ruling class is division of labor itself, especially as it is divided between mental and manual labor. This division of labor extends and deepens the fragmentary and isolated perspective that is in some sense our natural condition, placing an artificial, or instituted finitude on top of that which comes by nature, as bodies and minds isolated and exhausted find themselves unable to contemplate or make sense of the world around them. As Frank Fischbach argues, it is possible to see the fragmentary, isolated and limited understanding of the world as nothing other than the fragmented and alienated nature of capitalist social existence. These are two sides of the same reality. As Fischbach writes, ”It is not that consciousness expresses the social order or that consciousness is determined by the social order: it is that social being and consciousness are two different expressions of the same reality.” The defining characteristics of capitalist social reality, most notably according to Fischbach, isolation, fragmentation, and alienation from our individual and collective abilities are also the defining characteristics of its intellectual reality.
Fischbach’s assertion on this point stresses that one of the common points of reference for Marx and Spinoza is that they both consider thought to be first and foremost a collective activity; we think, not the isolated I think is the basis for thought as a species activity. Individual thought, just as an individual that takes itself as a kingdom within a kingdom, has to be understood as product of the fragmentation and division of social life. Isolation and separation are at once a relation of bodies and of minds. The identity of thought and being is only part of the relation. There is also the matter of their fundamental difference as two different attributes. Spinoza also stresses that only a thought can determine thought, only bodies can determine bodies. Spinoza’s assertion is against a kind of idealism, the idealism of philosophers who claim that the mind can completely determine the body. There is, as Spinoza argues, a limited efficacy of the true insofar as it is true. A true idea by itself cannot dispel falsity. As Spinoza stressed the images that affect us, the appearance of the sun, are not dispensed with by rational knowledge. Astronomers even talk of sunrise and sunset. The mind cannot determine the body, thought cannot dispel affects, they can only be displaced by another affect. While the assertion that only ideas effect ideas and only bodies effect bodies was written against a particular idealism that claimed the omnipotence of thought, of the mind over the body, it also would stand against what is generally understood to be materialism, the materialism that we associate with Marx. Fundamental to such materialism is the idea that material conditions can determine and shape ideas. The ideas of the ruling class become the dominant ideas precisely because of the material conditions which allow one class to control the conditions of material production. For Spinoza such a crossing of the material into the ideal would seem to be impossible. Such an idea is not alien from Marx, as Marx wrote in the Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right “Clearly the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons, and material force must be overthrown by material force.” Marx too was a critic of the omnipotence of ideas, of those critical critics who believed it was enough to critique the state for the state to wither away. However, Marx was quick to add that “theory becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses.” What is presented to us as dense metaphysical knot in which ideas and things, minds and bodies, are at once two different ways of grasping the same reality and two fundamentally different orders, is perhaps better approached from a practical angle, from social reality. Sometimes we are confronted with a situation in which what exists at the level of ideas is only a transposition of material existence. Much of what we call “ideology” in the everyday pejorative sense, the pages and pages of pontificating pundits and hours and hours of commentary, is nothing other than the existing material conditions transposed into ideas: here is why we need bosses, class hierarchy, and so on. The order and connection of ideology is the same as the order and connection of exploitation. At other times, however, we are confronted with the fundamental difference between ideas and bodies as the material world is indifferent to criticism, and what happens in the world of theory cannot cross over into the world of practice.
Chantal Jaquet has suggested that the relationship between ideas and things be considered a “logic of alternation.” In other words, sometimes in order to grasp the order and connection of ideas it is necessary to look into the order and connection of things, and vice versa. Jaquet is thus giving a name to what is already in some sense at work in Spinoza’s thought. When Spinoza describes how we form the inaccurate ideas of things through universal notions he does not refer to the mind and its limitations, but to the body and the limits of the imagination. Universals are formed when “so many images…are formed at one time in the human body that the surpass the power of imaging. Ideas like “man,” “horse” or “dog” are the products of a kind of sensory overload, unable to comprehend the plethora of singular instances a vague generality is formed; one that is always tinged by a particular image. In order to grasp the order and connection of ideas it is sometimes necessary to turn to the body and its limitations. The converse is also true. Spinoza’s lengthy enumeration of the various affects beginning with the basic joy and sadness and expanding to incorporate all of the various jealousies, fears, sorrows and hopes necessarily encompasses a mental dimension. As Spinoza states in his definition of the affects, “Love is a joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause.” The same is true of hatred. As the genesis of different affects expands beyond the primary geometric elements of love and sadness to encompass all of the conflicts vacillations and jealousy of life, the dimension of thought or imagination increases. There is a lot of thought, a lot of connections and associations, underlying even the most immediate affects. Affects, even the most fundamental ones cannot be separated from the imagination or the interconnection of ideas. As much as ideas only cause or influence other ideas, and bodies only affect other bodies, the fundamental difference is undercut by the fact that they are two different ways of grasping the same thing. As Jaquet writes,
Consequently, although the order and connection of the ideas of the affections is the same as the order and connection of the body’s affections, this does not mean that all affects concern the mind and body in the same way. Each of them has a specificity to that one can be more involved than the other. Although an affect has two sides, they are not uniform; its physical and mental aspects do not always have the same importance and do not overlap on a one-to-one basis according to a correspondence.
Affects and imagination are both bodily and mental, are both the bodies capacity to affect and be affected and the minds ability to form and connect ideas, but they are not always equally so. In some situations it is going to be the connection of bodies that is necessarily most pertinent, and in others it is the connection of ideas.
Jaquet’s interpretation not only offers insight to a reading of Spinoza, in pointing out that there is a lot of thought in the affects, and a lot of affective intensity in thinking, but also an insight to contemporary ideology. First, what appears to be visceral and immediate, the fear of foreigners, the resistance to measures to protect public health, has to be understood in terms of the constitutive, but forgotten relations that constitute it. Against the fetish of the immediacy, which takes particular affects, particular hostilities towards differences, ethnic and sexual, as well as particular affections, our love of same, as given, as natural, we need to be able to perceive and construct the relations that make them possible. We need to be able to alternate from affects to ideas to find the relations underlying the former. Conversely we need to be able to move from ideas to affects, to recognize the way in which what is presented as purely rational, as facts and logic, to use the parlance of our times, has an affective dimension. The order and connection of ideas and bodies are two ways of grasping the world, of looking at things, and because of this each on its own is never sufficient.
Conclusion
Jaquet’s term for this movement from ideas to bodies, from affects to thoughts, is logic of alternation. I wonder if it might make sense to use that term more broadly to encompass also the relation between Marx and Spinoza, in which it is necessary to go from one to the other, confronting the limitations of one with the strength of the other, reading one materialism against the other. Beyond this it is possible to view the different attempts to construct a Marxist Spinozist theory of ideology, from Althusser’s focus on the subject, to Lordon’s focus on desire, and so on, as less an attempt to find the true Marxist-Spinozist line of thought, but rather different conceptualizations each of which have their focus, strength, and limitations. Less this seems too eclectic, it is important to recall Spinoza’s own injunction to conceive and consider as many different things at once. In doing so we become more active, more capable of thought. From this perspective ideology is less a singular thing, some kind of universal concept, than it is a common thread of problems that crosses Marx and Spinoza, problems of the relation of our imagination to the social order, of the fundamental affective orientation of thought, and, ultimately the intersection of our capacities and limitations to the social and political order. It is by considering this relation from multiple different angles that we can grasp both the depth of our subjection and the possibility of our liberation.
Presented online at the Composite Bodies Conference May 23rd.
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