Something is amiss in society. Many people have noticed a seemingly recent tendency of people acting in such a way in public as to disregard the very presence of other people, listening to music without headphones, having facetime conversations in coffee shops (also without headphones), and so on. Perhaps all of this started with Covid, which exasperated the already existing social distancing of modern life (in the name of saving others), or perhaps it started with smart phones, which are perhaps the greatest anti-social technology since the automobile. Personally, I think that the increased anti-social tendency is in some ways a reaction to Covid, I think that the idea that we had to treat everyone, even employees as human beings in part generated some of the massive reaction against sociality as such that we are living through, but that is a digression you can follow the links to. Whatever the causes might be, the Hobbesian war of all against all seems to have trickled down into a series of ever frustrating micro-aggressions of everyday life.
All of this raises the question, what does it mean to live in a society. For a long time, I was obsessed with this provocative, yet cryptic passage from Althusser's contribution to Lire le Capital. Althusser writes,
"The mechanism of the production of this ‘society effect’ is only complete when all the effects of the mechanism have been expounded, down to the point where they are produced in the form of the very effects that constitute the concrete, conscious or unconscious relation of the individuals to the society as a society, i.e., down to the effects of the fetishism of ideology (or 'forms of social consciousness' - Preface to A Contribution….), in which men consciously or unconsciously live their lives, their projects, their actions, their attitudes and their functions as social. In this perspective, Capital must be regarded as the theory of the mechanism of the production of the society effect in the capitalist mode of production. We are beginning to suspect, even if it is only because of the works of contemporary ethnology and history, that this society effect differs with different modes or production."
It is a strange formulation, provocative and cryptic, or perhaps provocative because it is cryptic. It is also a somewhat abandoned concept, appearing briefly in this text from 1965 only to disappear for the most part. (I have not kept up with all of the posthumous published drafts by Althusser, so I may have missed something) I have written about it before in one of my first published essays, and I distinctly remember an reviewer (probably number two), telling me to drop the concept. It was a dead end. I am not so sure. It is possible to trace a line forward from this idea to Althusser's later theory of ideology, and backward to Spinoza and Marx. It unearths one of the common critical threads of Spinoza and Marx, their critique of the tendency to treat effects as causes. This is what links Spinoza's critique of the anthropomorphic image of God and Marx's critique of the commodity form.
What does this mean when it comes to society? It means that society exists because we act as if it does, society, being social is an effect that we treat as a cause. It is a bit odd, however, especially in a book on reading Capital, that Althusser argues that Capital is a theory of the society effect in the capitalist mode of production. I can only think of a few passages where anything like a society or social relations are addressed in Capital. There is of course the famous line, that I have quoted all too often, "The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education [Erziehung], tradition, and habit [Gewohneit] looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws." This passage suggests a particular production of subjectivity, and production of society, in capitalism, capitalism functions because we treat its institutions, wage labor being central, as not something imposed, but natural. And, speaking of lines that I quote way too much, there is also Marx's comments about the sphere of circulation being one of "freedom, equality, and Bentham." Which is to say if there is a society effect in Marx it is often an anti-social one, one in which we are socialized as asocial, as isolated and separate. To end this reflection with one more passage, this time from the Grundrisse, one that I wrote a whole book as a meditation on, as Marx writes,
"Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations."
All of which is to say, that if there is a theory of the society effect in Marx, or if Marx posits a society effect in capital, it is a strangely asocial sociality, one of isolation, fragmentation, and competition. Of course this is what Althusser might mean when he says that the "society effect differs with different modes of production."
Shifting terrains somewhat abruptly, I have been following this question of what does it mean to be social in a different thread, one that follows Spinoza rather than Marx, and Macherey rather than Althusser, I was very excited to read that Macherey's latest book on Spinoza, BdS: Études Spinoziennes, had a chapter titled "Est-il Simple d'obéir." I found his remarks about obedience in Sagesse ou Ignorance: La Question de Spinoza to be quite provocative. As in that book the starting point is the discussion of obedience in Chapter 17 of the Theological Political Treatise. As Spinoza writes,
“However, for a proper understanding of the extent of the government’s right and power, it should be observed that the government’s power is not strictly confined to its power of coercion by fear, but rests on all the possible means by which it can induce men to obey its commands. It is not the motive for obedience, but the fact of obedience, that constitutes a subject. Whatever be the motives that prompt a man to carry out the commands of the sovereign power, whether it be fear of punishment, hope of reward, love of country or any other emotion, which it is he who makes the decision, he is nevertheless acting under the control of the sovereign power. From the fact, then, that a man acts from his own decision, we should not forthwith conclude that his action proceeds from his own right and not from the right of government. For whether a man is urged by love or driven by a fear of threatened evil, since in both cases his action always proceeds from his own intention and decision, either there can be no such thing as sovereignty and right over subjects or else it must include all the means that contribute to men’s willingness to obey. whenever a subject acts in accordance with the commands of the sovereign power, whether he is motivated by love, or fear, or (and this is more frequently the case) a mixture of hope and fear, or by reverence—which is an emotion compounded of fear and awe—or whatever be his motive, he acts from his ruler’s right, not from his own.”
Macherey focuses on the way that Spinoza effectively inverts Kant's categorical imperative. As anyone who has taken an intro to ethics class will remember, Kant stresses that it is not enough to have one's actions be in accordance with morality, a shopkeeper might be honest because they think it is good for business, a person might be kind because they want to be liked, and so on, but one must be determined by it, by the categorical imperative. It is our inner motivation, and not the actions themselves that are most important. What Spinoza describes here is the exact opposite. As Macherey writes,
"Nevertheless, if one follows this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, the result is that obedience is not at all natural—at least not in the sense of that positive, and so to speak causal, self-evidence to which reason has access. Not only does the cultivation of justice and charity have no need to appeal to such evidence in order to assert itself, but it succeeds in doing so only by grounding its practice on entirely different terrain—thus, if not by radically ignoring such evidence, then at least by bypassing it. From the standpoint adopted by Spinoza, the notion of a categorical imperative—or the strict sense of the word "imperative" as referring to an imperium—would therefore be tainted by a certain ambiguity, and indeed, in the final analysis, would be contradictory: the only true imperative would be the conditional one, linked to the criterion of utility as it operates on the plane of the mediate infinite mode—a concept that, conversely, would be utterly devoid of meaning on the plane of the immediate infinite mode."
These two concepts, mediate infinite mode and immediate infinite mode, play an important role in this book, they refer to the two causalities that define every mode, every finite thing, which is at once situated in a causal series effected by this or that thing, which is turn affected by another, and so on, that is "mediate infinity," but at the same time everything that exists is an expression of the infinite power of god or nature, an immediate infinity. This is similar to André Tosel's reflections on (in)finite in Spinoza. The point here is that obedience relates only to the former, to the infinite mediated, to be affected by others, and not to the immediate infinite, the tendency to perservere in one's being. As Macherey goes onto write,
"Consequently, obedience pertains exclusively to action undertaken under the scrutiny and control of a sovereign power—specifically regarding its effects, and not its inner motivations. These motivations are of no concern whatsoever to the authority wielded by such a power, for they ultimately stem from an irrepressible impulse—unlimited in its original principle—namely, the innate tendency to persevere in one’s being to the fullest extent; this tendency, being naturally inherent in every individual, constitutes their natural right and cannot be stripped away without causing that individual to cease to exist."
This opposition between Kant and Spinoza could be more productively be understood as a difference between ethics and politics, or ethics and social life more broadly. In ethics intentions matter, but in politics, or social life, only the actions matter. In political or social life it does not matter on some level, why people conform to the law, out of fear of punishment or sense of social responsibility, what matters that they do, and any existing state probably utilizes multiple means, means for different people and even for the same people at different times.
Of course this heterogeneity of means and methods disappears in the very "society effect" it produces, to draw on another common point of intersection of Spinoza and Marx, what we see is obedience, not its causes. The causes disappear in the effect they produce. I think that this offers another way to make sense of the social breakdown that I referred to at the beginning. I think many of us, believe we live in a society (to quote Seinfeld), and think that others do so as well. That there actions, all of those little acts of deference and accommodation, were due to a shared understanding of social belonging and commitment to shared social space. As Spinoza argues, we judge others from our own temperament, and thus when we act in a social manner, aware of the presence of others, and taking it into account, silencing our phone at the movie theater, holding open doors for others, saying "excuse me" to get by people and so on, we assume that others do so for the same reasons. However, it seems we are learning that many of these people were doing such things because they were afraid that they would be caught, shamed, or harassed, if they violated social norms. This motivation, acting out of social acceptance, is the most volatile and unstable. As soon as one person violates the norm without consequences, has a zoom meeting in a café without headphones, then everyone around them feels like that is possible as well. On a broader level, part of the appeal, and effect of Trump, is that his very existence in the highest office of US politics has been in undermining the very standards for acting, he has let everyone feel that it is okay to be crude, cruel, racist, and sexist.
I do not want to end talking about Trump, but in thinking about all of this I am reminded of a passage from one of Marx's first published pieces, "On the Jewish Question" he writes the following,
"The state abolishes, after its fashion, the distinctions established by birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it decrees that birth, social rank, education, occupation are non-political distinctions; when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that every member of society is an equal partner in popular sovereignty, and treats all the elements which compose the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. But the state, none the less, allows private property, education, occupation, to act after their own fashion, namely as private property, education, occupation, and to manifest their particular nature . Far from abolishing these effective differences, it only exists so far as they are presupposed; it is conscious of being a political state and it manifests its universality only in opposition to these elements."
There are a lot of ways to make sense of this passage, and like all things in Marx's essay, it is overdetermined, provocative and problematic ideas dwell side by side, but I have always understood it as a statement of the limitations of the law as a social force. Declaring that property, social rank, or birth make no difference politically, to legally declare them to be irrelevant, has its effects, anyone can run for office, but it does not eliminate the existence of these hierarchies. They continue to have their effects, effects not just in the private life of individuals, but in political life as well.
Marx was drawing his distinction from the US, from the American revolution, which abolished certain claims of title or property as necessary to political life (while keeping others in place). He is referring to the eighteenth century. However, I think that his point can be extended to the nineteenth and twentieth, to the trajectory that moves through the abolition of slavery to the civil rights act and beyond, actions which have made distinctions of race, gender, and sexuality "non-political" distinctions. In other words, the process by which certain kinds of discrimination were rendered illegal and socially unacceptable. To make certain actions of discrimination illegal, unprofitable, or even socially unacceptable, is not the same as eliminating them, they continue to exist and have their effects. (I am reminded of Spinoza on the limits of power over speech and thought). We are learning now, the hard way, how incomplete those revolutions were, how much they affected actions and not thoughts, and how much further we need to go if we really want to live in a society.
No comments:
Post a Comment