Interpretation or Innovation: On Macherey's La Chose Philosophique

Photos from Galarie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie comparée

in Paris

I am going with these pictures in honor of Macherey's Histoires de Dinosaurs 

Last March I visited Paris for the first time in years. I had a great time, presenting my book The Double Shift at Chantal Jaquet's Spinoza Seminar at the Sorbonne, and discussed Marx, Spinoza, and Deleuze with Etienne Balibar at the American University of Paris. I also looked for books, and while I did find a few good ones at Librarie Vrin, I also learned that Pierre Macherey had recently uploaded his recent book La Chose Philosophique to his website, La Philosophie au sens large.  I am a huge fan of Macherey's site, for those who can read French it is the best site for learning about contemporary philosophy, basically the lectures from all from Macherey's classes for free. 

The books I brought back from Paris.

I suppose that it is great the Macherey's latest book is also available as a free download. Although I must admit that I would prefer to have it as a book, instead of a print out in binder. Sadder still, is that was told that he did this because he had trouble having a publisher. Pierre Macherey might just be the most underrated living philosopher. So what then is the book about? It is an attempt to think through exactly what this "philosophy" that we are engaged in is. As Macherey says at the outset, philosophy is subject to a particular kind of malaise, it seems to not make a difference, on the world and even on itself. Science has a history with definite breaks and a progression. Philosophy never really seems to move forward, old ideas and figures are constantly returning. Macherey turns that negative aspect of philosophy into a question,  and a provocation, what is the history of philosophy? As Macherey writes, 

"Hence an uncertainty, which is due to the double use, subjective and objective, of the genitive: should we speak of a history of philosophy, therefore of a history which envelops philosophy and holds the keys to it, or of a history of philosophy, of a history which philosophy articulates and directs in the direction which suits it? It is not at all the same thing: in the first case, it is its history which maintains and detains philosophy over which it exercises a total hold, to the point in certain cases of leading it astray; in the second, it is philosophy which has a history over which it has mastery since it has engendered it, and this history, being derived from it, is no more than an occasional, incidental manifestation of it, from which it follows that it must not be able to explain it or to account for it, but can only provide an illustration of it. To speak of a "history of philosophy" is therefore from the outset, without even realizing it, to expose oneself to the risk, or the temptation, of amphibology which, under the pretext of combining these two options without sacrificing one to the other, and by ignoring their reciprocal tension, confuses them and ultimately harms both: this ultimately amounts to passing off the negation of the problem as its resolution."

My homemade copy of La Chose Philosophique 

Macherey attempts to turn a negative, a source of malaise, into a positive by asking if philosophy cannot be understood as a linear progression then how are we to make sense of its particular circles of readings and rereadings. In other words, how are we to make sense of philosophy as a particular practice. In For Marx, Althusser burrowed Marx's schema of labor, of an activity that works on an object by means of an instrument, to construct a schema of theoretical practice. All theory works on raw material, the given ideology, with concepts in order to transform it into knowledge. As Althusser writes, 

"So a practice of theory does exist; theory is a specific practice which acts on its own object and ends in its own product: a knowledge. Considered in itself, any theoretical work presupposes a given raw material and some ‘means of production’ (the concepts of the ‘theory’ and the way they are used: the method). The raw material worked by theoretical labour may be very ‘ideological’ if the science is just coming into being; where an already constituted and developed science is concerned, it may be material that has already been elaborated theoretically, concepts which have already been formed. Very schematically, we may say that the means of theoretical labour, which are an absolute condition of its existence – ‘theory’ and method – represent the ‘active side’ of theoretical practice, the determinant moment of the process. The knowledge of the process of this theoretical practice in its generality, that is, as the specified form or real difference of the practice, itself a specified form of the general process of transformation, of the ‘development of things’, constitutes a first theoretical elaboration of Theory, that is, of the materialist dialectic."

Macherey complicates this by pointing out that works of philosophy are at once products, they are produced by an act of thought and reflection, and instruments, they are ways that we might think or rethink something. Philosophy is constantly crossing the line, from something interpreted to being interpreted. Macherey turns to Augustine and the medieval distinction between actus exercitus and actus signatus, the text and its intepretation, but any contemporary student of philosophy is aware of the way in which explication slides into interpretation and interpretation becomes its own production. I feel like this division is articulated whenever I rearrange my bookshelf, Negri and Deleuze's books on Spinoza would seem to be better shelved with the rest of their books, but it is less clear where a book by Macherey goes. Secondary sources have a way of becoming primary texts. Macherey is perhaps particularly aware of this division because for decades he was known as an Althusserian, as a pupil, but has increasingly forged his own philosophical path. 

I am not able to chart the entirety of the book here, which includes its own innovative readings of Spinoza, Marx, Rousseau, Heidegger, Epictetus, and Kant. I am going to focus on the fourth chapter of the book, a chapter which deals in its own way on that border between interpretation and innovation, reproduction and production. It is the chapter on symptomatic reading. I have mentioned before on this blog that I think of symptomatic reading as one of the important methodological contributions of Althusser  and Macherey has recently contributed to this discussion.  Macherey understands symptomatic reading to be situated at exactly the point where explication becomes interpretation, where the text says not something other than what it says, but says what it did not say, revealing the history in the history of philosophy. It is a break in the seemingly infinite conversation where every text makes possible another interpretation, and so on. As Macherey writes,

"Does this circle, which proceeds from the return of texts to texts, from angle to angle, and from detour to detour, turn perfectly round? Precisely not. This is what the concept of "symptomatic reading" is intended to make clear. This is inserted into a textual dynamic, not by taking it as it is at face value, as might an outsider who claims to see it squarely, exactly, faithfully, as a whole, but by insinuating itself into its flaws, and by bringing their articulations into play in order to detect in the discursive apparatus at work imbalances, failures, inadequacies and "blunders" that bear the mark of the event, and push one to go further, following a trajectory that continues without having begun or ever managing to reach a definitive end. Symptomatic reading, for which the givens of representation documented in a text are always, as Epictetus would say, too "short," presents the pace and tempo of an infinite process, which moves forward from its weak links, as is also the case for any historical situation, once it is recognized that it cannot be reduced to a simple state of affairs currently giving rise to an observation that claims to cover it once and for all. Reading is an operation of adjustment, in search of a precarious balance that it never achieves.

As with the essay referred to above, Macherey's task with respect to symptomatic reading is to expand it by narrowing it. The concept refers initially to how Marx reads political economy, and, more specifically, to the opening of Part Six of Capital where Marx introduces the concept of labor power. It is labor power and not labor that the worker sells, a capacity to work, a capacity that must be put to work. The concept of labor power resolves the inability to reconcile two contradictory theses fundamental to the representation of capitalism in political economy. The first is that labor relation, like all contractual relations, is a relation between equals entering into a contract. The second, which is equally important in the works of Smith and Ricardo, is the idea that labor is the source of value. These statements not only contradict each other, if labor is the source of value then the relation between buyer and seller cannot be a relation of equals, but they also reveal what capitalism as a system must necessarily conceal, and that is power, hierarchy, and domination at the core of the relationship between worker and capitalist. As Macherey writes, 

"Marx's true discovery is therefore that capitalism takes advantage of an ambivalence of the kind on which the concept of "force" is predicated on; to create value, this system of production based on the establishment of wage labor uses the equivocal status given to a "force," "labor power," capable of existing both potentially, or as a potentially, and an actuality, and from which it has found the means to extract maximum of profit in the two forms, the extraction of absolute surplus value (by extension of the working day) and relative surplus value (by increasing the productivity of labor power). This ultimately lies the secret of wage labor: its exploitation is based on the sleight of hand performed, at the time the employment contract is entered into, between what is purchased, namely the right to employ labor power in the form of a maximum amount of work actually performed, and what is actually paid to the worker, the cost of reproducing his labor power treated as a commodity in its own right. So, when Marx refers in passing to the relationship between essence and appearance, he is speaking without realizing it – for in fact he does not speak of it, while speaking of it, without however speaking of it,...--of the relationship between potentiality and action, the key to the material exploitation of labor power by the capitalist: the latter pretends to buy "labor" and to remunerate it at its value – this is what Ricardo maintains – while in reality he rents the right to use in a certain place and for a certain time, under the guise of making it pass from potentiality to action, "labor power", by playing on the double value with which the notion of "force" is credited...This tour de force, a true exercise in sleight of hand, consisted of drawing effects that could not be more real, and what is more, countable in hard cash, from an ambiguity put in place on the level of philosophical ideas which initially constitutes his playing field: the capitalist, past master in the art of passing off shadows as lanterns, is an experienced philosopher, a "speculator", and a most devious one!"

A few things about this paragraph; first, I apologize for the rough translation. Second, Macherey ends this paragraph with a point that he also stresses in his short essay on Foucault and Marx (which actually has been given an excellent translation), and that is there is a kind of quotidian metaphysics to capitalism. In order for capitalism to function as a mode of production, potentiality, the capacity to work must be rendered actual, must be made productive. When the boss, or manager, tells you "if you have time to lean you have time to clean" or other bromides to hurry up and get back to work, these little admonishments, not to mention the entire apparatuses of surveillance and management, are nothing less than an attempt to address one of the oldest questions of metaphysics, how does a potential become actualized, how does possibility become reality. Secondly, this metaphysics must necessarily be obscured, not recognized. This is because at its center there is a particular intersection and confusion about the nature of potentiality, of power. Labor power can only exist as power, as an abstract capacity, because of the power relations that are obscured. As Marx stresses again and again, it takes a lot of power to make workers into workers, but much of that history is forgotten. As Etienne Balibar stresses, the critique of political economy is at once about recognizing the politics that are integral to the economy, the power relations that make it possible, and the economic relations, and interests, underlying politics. This misrecognition includes Marx, as Macherey stresses, Marx refers to the misrecognition, the constitutive not seeing, at the center of political economy, he refers to it as an appearance, as the confusion between appearance and essence. These terms, and the philosophical distinction that they entail fail to adequately capture the very thing that they are supposed to grasp.

This returns us to the fundamental point of Althusser's argument, and what it meant to read Capital, Marx does not see the difference he is making at the exact moment he makes it, using old terms to characterize new problems. Marx is not alone in this, and this is where symptomatic reading expands beyond the specific problem of labor power, of capitalism, to the general problem of philosophy. Every philosophy attempts to make sense of the world with the tools at hand, tools, which Marx argues, are like the fossils of some lost world, and these tools have limitations and possibilities, as do all tools. No philosopher sees their own limitations, and the changing nature of history, which is another way of saying that every philosopher is going to look different at a different moment in history. If philosophy fails to live up to an image of linear progression, of new discoveries and theories displacing old ones, an image which is less science than a particular ideology of science, it is because it gives us another one, one more fitting our condition as finite and historical beings, one in which all we can do is confront the limitations of the past with our own activity, and hope that future generations will do the same. The paradox of philosophy, that it is at once a discourse that is perpetually beginning again and never done with the past, is the condition of being human, of being finite.