Logic of Alternation: Spinoza’s Prehistory of Ideology (and its Marxist History)

 

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.

What the Nose Knows: On Chantal Jaquet's Philosophie de L'Odorat

 

I am a follower of Chantal Jaquet's work. I have read her works on Spinoza with great interest, and have also been a big fan of her work on the concepts of transclass and nonreproduction. I have also read her little book on the body. In short, have read most of what she has written, but I have been very reluctant to pick up her book on smell, Philosophie de L'odorat. I met her once, and we talked about her book, her interest in the arts and aesthetics of smell, and all I could think was that I was glad that she was interested in it, but I could not imagine being interested. I just did not find smell that interesting."You do you," I thought as I listened to her explain Kôdô, the Japanese arts of scents, secretly wishing she was writing another book on Spinoza. 

Translating Transclass: Or Teaching Eribon in America

Since this is a post about class, family, and returns

I thought that I would illustrate it with pictures illustrating

the fact that I now live in the same neighborhood my mother lived in, 

but the neighborhood has changed except this old fishing/gun store

 

I have often considered teaching to be a kind of translation and not just because much of the history of philosophy is written in different languages. Part of what one does in teaching is try to take the questions and concerns of a different time and figure out some way to bridge that gap, while at the same time being faithful to its original sense and meaning (just like translation). These thoughts occurred to me again when I decided to teach Didier Eribon's Returning to Reims.

Unbecoming Saul: Reflections on the Last Season of Better Call Saul (Part Two)

 

How it Started/How it is going

The final episode of Better Call Saul is not just a finale to the series but to the entire Breaking Bad multiverse (to use the parlance of our times). While the first half of the season dealt with Better Call Saul as a separate show from Breaking Bad, dealing with the fates of characters such as Ignacio and Lalo who are named but never appear in the latter, the second half returns to its status as prequel and sequel. This is not just because of the appearances by Walt, Jesse, and Marie Schrader, but because it returns to the fundamental question of both shows and that is personal change and transformation. Was Jimmy always Saul dovetails with the question was Walt always Heisenberg. Or, as Chuck put it, can people really change?

What Does it Mean to be a Materialist: Thoughts After Spinoza after Marx

 

Of all of the zoom events, conferences, and presentations that I have attended (zoomed?) this year the one dedicated to Spinoza after Marx was the most engaging, the one most capable of breaking through the zoom screen that makes everything feel further away even as it is so close, inches away even. This is in part because of the participants, but it was also due to the work of the organizers who, in an interesting variation on organizing around a common theme, presented a common set of theses that were discussed and debated over the course of the three days. Of course as great as this was as an online event it is hard not to think about how those conversations would have continued over dinner, at bars, and coffee shops. The event did create a collective act of thought, of thinking in common, but as Spinoza and Marx both know there is no thinking together, thinking in common, without acting and feeling in common.

Logic of Alternation: From Mind and Body to Material Conditions and Ideology

Presented at McGill September 2018

This is a longer version of something I posted here, presented for a discussion of Chantal Jaquet's Affects, Actions, and Passions in Spinoza. 

I intend to approach Chantal Jaquet’s interpretation of the mind and body in Spinoza somewhat obliquely by examining its possible implications for a social theory. In doing so I am following a fairly recent tendency to view Spinoza as not just an important political thinker, but also one whose account of affects, imagination, and knowledge offers profound insight on social and political life. I am thinking here explicitly of Yves Citton and Frédérique Lordon's Spinoza et les science sociales, but also more broadly Jaquet’s own work on transclasses which uses a Spinozist anthropology and ontology to examine the reproduction and nonreproduction of social relations. That is not the book that we are here to discuss, so I would like to begin my remarks on Affects, Actions, and Passions in Spinoza by putting forward something of an axiom, every interpretation of the relation of mind and body in Spinoza necessary has profound implications for how one thinks of social and political relations. 

Wave of Mutilation: Marx and Spinoza in Fischbach's Philosophies de Marx

Nothing in the title or the structure of Franck Fischbach's Philosophies de Marx suggests a return to the Marx/Spinoza relation explored in La Production des hommes: Marx Avec Spinoza. The title plainly states that it is a consideration of Marx's philosophy, and the book is organized to consider Marx's philosophical practice through three different philosophical intersections, hence the plural, the philosophy of activity, social philosophy, and critical philosophy. Despite this focus on Marx, and Fischbach's turn away from the specificity of the Marx/Spinoza relation in later works that have broadened the considerations of questions of activity and the social to include everything from Heidegger to Dewey, the book on Marx ends up returning to the productivity of the Marx/Spinoza relation in the margins. 

Immanent Cause: Between Reproduction and Nonreproduction

Presented in Santiago, Chile 

Of all the various provocations in Lire le Capital there is perhaps none more provocative than structural causality. In this case the provocation can be measured in this case in the gap between the implications of the concept, its effects on social relations, subjectivity, and history, and its formulation, which is provisional and partial—mutilated as Spinoza might say. Structural or metonymic causality posits that the economy and society, base and superstructure, is neither a linear transitive cause, nor a relation of expression, but a cause which only exists in and through its effects. Or, put otherwise, the effects of the economy in the spheres of ideology must be thought of as causes as much as effects, as conditions of its reproduction. Framed in this way the concept of “structural (or immanent) causality” is not just a concept limited to its appearance in Lire le Capital, but it becomes integral to Althusser’s later examination of ideology and reproduction. Reproduction is the necessary condition for seeing ideology as not just an effect of economic structures but their necessary precondition. Reproduction is another way of viewing the immanent nature of the mode of production, how its effects in the sphere of subjectivity and social relations, become necessary conditions.  Althusser’s writing shows a different trajectory, not only did reproduction become the specific theme of Sur la Reproduction, but the manuscripts on “aleatory materialism” also return to reproduction, thinking necessity from contingency, as the becoming necessary of the encounter. It is a matter of thinking the coexistence of reproduction and non-reproduction, which is to say class struggle, without resorting to a voluntarist conception of political action. Non-reproduction must be as immanent as reproduction, the conditions of the unraveling of a given mode of production must be as integral to it as its perpetuation. It is this trajectory which has been taken up by subsequent readers of not only Althusser, but of Spinoza and Marx as well. 

Three Interpretations In Search of a Proposition: A Sketch of Spinozist Materialism

Possibly a Portrait of Spinoza 

As I have stated on this blog, and elsewhere, a materialist reading of Spinoza perhaps begins with EIIP7 and its related demonstrations and scholium. "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." In place of hierarchy and causal impact Spinoza places ideas and things in a relation of identity and non-identity. How exactly to articulate this relation has lead to multiple interpretations. I would like to highlight three, Deleuze, Macherey, and Jaquet. The selection and order of authors reflects my own encounters and reading, the seemingly contingent order of nature, and not a necessary conceptual progression. 

Kingdom within Kingdoms: Anthropological Turns in/to Spinoza

One could describe the trajectory of Marxist/Spinozism in the twentieth century as a trajectory that passes from epistemology through ontology to anthropology. With Althusser the focus was on the break between the first and second kind of knowledge, with the passage from ideological imagination to adequate scientific knowledge. As much as Althusser introduced immanent causality to Marxism it was primarily an epistemological matter, of grasping the cause in and through its various effects. Negri turned to ontology, or as he often put it, metaphysics, understanding immanence as the immanence of potentia, of power. The autonomist hypothesis becomes not just a way to make sense of capital, but all of reality. Everywhere Potestas, God's power or transcendence is asserted, we must find potentia, the immanent power of social relations and the human imagination. The last, and most recent turn, found in the works of Lordon, Citton, and, in a certain sense, Jaquet could be called "anthropological." The focus is less on the problem of inadequate and adequate ideas, understood as the problem of ideology, or the self organization of power, but on desire, affects, and imagination. 

Hobbes Versus Spinoza: This Time It's Anthropological

This morning I received an email that had the following sentence in it: "A demographic note for this week is that we have almost three times as many applicants to online programs as we did this time last year, confirming a trend we are all aware of --- that students want online degree offerings." Maybe it was the lack of coffee, or the fact that I was woken up in the night by a barfing dog (don't worry, Bento is fine. He just eats garbage sometimes), but I thought for a minute about responding to this email, pointing out that the premise did not support the conclusion. There are multiple reasons why people take online classes. They are ways of dealing with jobs that demand increased flexibility from employees, ways of finishing school around the demands of families and work. Negotiating these demands is not the same as wanting something, as desiring it or choosing it. 

Affective Reproduction: Thinking Transindividuality in an Age of Individualism

Paper Presented at the Affect Theory Conference

One of the many theoretical and practical promises of the so-called “affective turn” in social and political thought is that it makes it possible to conceptualize the social and political dimensions of the most intimate aspects of experience. Or, put differently, it makes it possible to think of the way in which political and economic structures can only exist, can only reproduce themselves, if they do so at the level of affects and desire. The reconceptualization that I am referring to here is not to be confused with a reduction of the individual to the mere effects of structural conditions and relations, in which individuals become simply bearers of economic and political functions, nor is it a reduction of politics and economics to individual experiences and intentions, a kind of intimate theatre of micro-politics that never becomes macro. It is a matter of thinking the mutual implication of the individual and the collective, or in a word, transindividuality. 

Exceptions that Prove Rules: Lordon and Jaquet on Reproduction

The Working Class Goes to Heaven

Years ago, during my final year of graduate school, I taught a class at SUNY Cortland called "Race, Class, and Gender," or something to that effect. It was a required course meant to teach kids from Long Island and upstate New York about the reality of racial domination, capitalist exploitation, and sexist oppression. One student who hated the class turned in a paper that was just a list of names, everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Ellen Degeneres; her point was that this list, a list of prominent African Americans, women, and gays and lesbians, proved that racism, sexism, and class did not exist. It was not even a paper, just a list, but it reflects a way of thinking that is all too common. Anecdotal exceptions negate the reality of structures of domination and marginalization. 

The Class Struggle at Home: Jaquet's Les Transclasses

Perhaps the best way to approach Chantal Jaquet's Les Transclasses: ou la non-reproduction is by situating it between two caricatures of intellectual positions. On the one hand, the left one, we have studies of the "reproduction of the relations of production," the work of Bourdieu most importantly, but also Althusser, that stresses how the classes endlessly reproduce themselves, or are reproduced by the institutions of schools, media, and so on. On the other hand, the right one, we have the various theories of the culture of poverty, and more importantly, various "pulled up by bootstraps" narratives, all of which stress that individual will and fortitude can overcome all socio-economic barriers. On the one hand there is a theory of the necessary reproduction of the relations of production, while on the other there is the entire anecdotal history of exceptions.