Dialectical Phenomenolgy (Routledge Revivals)

Marx's Method

Roslyn Bologh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135162979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this inquiry into Marx's method of theorising, originally published in 1979, Roslyn Bologh analyses theory in the same way that Marx analyses the production of capital, and provides a set of rules for reproducing Marx's method. The rules are developed through an examination of the Grundrisse, a text by Marx that combines his technical critique of political economy with his humanistic, philosophical concerns and his historical perspective. Dr Bologh concludes that Marx's method, as dialectical phenomenology, offers a way of analysing language, knowledge and the social relations and practices of everyday life, as well as the more obvious phenomena of capitalism.

CHAPTER 1

From a reading of Marx to dialectical phenomenology

This work analyzes Marx’s method of theorizing. It focuses on the Grundrisse, a work considered by many to be the most important of Marx’s texts. The complete text has been available in translation only since 1973, although a volume of excerpts edited by David McLellan was published in 1971. The Grundrisse combines the humanist concerns of Marx’s earlier philosophical work with the technical concerns of political economy that dominate his later work in Capital. Because it appears to be the most comprehensive of his works in certain respects, it provides an opportune place to find how Marx links the different aspects of his concerns.

Martin Nicolaus (1968, 1973), the translator of the Grundrisse, stresses the importance of understanding Marx’s method. Other readers (e.g. Appelbaum, 1978; Piccone, 1975; Postone and Reinicke, 1975) have agreed with his assessment that the eighthundred-page set of notebooks that comprise the Grundrisse offer a unique opportunity and fertile ground for analyzing Marx’s method. In fact Nicolaus’s reading of the Grundrisse enables him to make reference to the ‘unknown Marx’ (1968).

The usual formulation of Marx’s method, dialectical materialism, stresses the anti-idealistic aspect of his work. This emphasis made sense in light of the philosophical developments in Marx’s time. However, given developments in the social sciences, a stress on the anti-positivistic, phenomenological aspect of his work makes more sense today. Dialectical phenomenology provides a comprehensive analysis of this aspect of Marx’s theorizing.

This work treats Marx’s analysis of capitalism as exemplifying a phenomenological mode of theorizing, one that is characterized by inquiry into grounds or presuppositions of our knowledge of social life. Marx’s version of phenomenology differs from others in certain specifiable ways. The pages that follow present the distinguishing aspects of my reading of Marx’s method, the method of dialectical phenomenology.

Dialectical phenomenology: unity of subject and object

This method of theorizing deals with the separation of subject and object. Instead of assuming that an object’s meaning or sense is inherent or given with the object, phenomenology claims that we can know the meaning or sense of an object only in its relation to a knowing subject. The meaning is grounded in or internal to the relation of subject and object. It is not internal to the object, nor is it internal to the subject. This approach is in its nature dialectical.

A subject or purpose presupposes the existence of some object or objects necessary for accomplishing that purpose. The qualities of the object inhere in the object; they do not originate with the mind (Schmidt, 1971, pp. 69–71). However, the object and its qualities are known only in terms of their meaning for purposive activity. The object takes on its meaning from, that is, its salience to a knower derives from, a form of life within which the knower stands.

The term, ‘form of life,’ comes from Wittgenstein (1967), who uses it in order to stress that language must be understood actively as a form of life and not passively as a totality of names for things that exist independently of subjects. A form of life- or languagegame may be understood in terms of unspoken rules or presuppositions for knowing an object. These rules constitute a ‘game,’ a purposive activity, within which acts and words, like moves in a game, come to make sense. Only within the game are the moves or words intelligible as such. Hence forms of life ground objects of knowledge.

I use the term, ‘form of life,’ to refer to the productive relation of subject to object, the incorporation of an object into the life of a subject. The term, ‘form of life,’ avoids the narrow economic meaning that the term, ‘production,’ tends to have. Dialectical phenomenology inquires into the form of life in which an object of knowledge is embedded, its active relation to a subject. From this form of life or relation, the object derives its sense. Dialectical phenomenology treats the object as grounded in a form of life and, therefore, as a social object rather than an object given with nature. In other words, it treats an object as a thing-for-a-subject rather than a thing-in-itself.

Just as the salience of an object presupposes its subject, the subject would not be possible as such without the object and its distinctive qualities. Although a subject might exist, it would not be the same subject if its object were not the same or if its relation to the object changed. Thus objects should be thought of as objective conditions for the accomplishment of some subject. Instead of conceiving of subjects and objects as separate, selfsufficient things, we should think in terms of the activity that links them and makes them possible as subjects and objects, their form of life. For example, the object, tillable land, which seems to be an objective thing in the world, only exists as such for a subject that conceives tilling as a useful activity and distinguishes types of land to this end. Similarly, the subject, tiller of the land, is only possible as such where land may be tilled. This unity of subject and object constitutes the purposive activity of tilling.

If we use the analogy of a game, the subjective aspect would be the players of the game, the objective aspect the material of the game. However, neither the players nor the equipment are possible as subjects and objects of the game without the rules. The rules constitute the purposive activity of the game. They link the player to the means of playing and in so doing make possible the game as a unity of subject and object. The players are possible as players only because of the game that they play. That is, the individual’s acts or moves, the very concept of player, is made intelligible by the game, the relation of players and material known as the rules of the game.

Furthermore, to the extent that a game or activity appears to be external to the selfconstituting relations of players and material, there will be some sense in which the game denies the social character of its accomplishment. In other words, it will appear as natural rather than historical. This denial of the social or historical brings with it a denial of the self-constituting character of the players. This means that the players appear as natural beings instead of as historical ones who (re)create themselves as such in the course of carrying out the rules of that specific game. Or the players may appear as things, objects that are moved about by an externality. The appearance of a reality as external to the subjects that know and (re)produce that reality belies that reality as a historical and social form of life and denies its subjects as historical social beings.

A form of life in which the rules and objects appear to be separate from and independent of the actors, an unself-conscious form of life, must be distinguished from a self-conscious form of life in which the individuals are not merely passive players, but active re-creators of the game. To the extent that the rules and equipment are consciously re-worked by the players themselves, the players become free subjects of the process, free social individuals. Such individuals would be self-conscious as they would be conscious that their co-operation and their moves were (re)creating the game and that the game was creating the very possibility of their moves. The distinction between active and passive, united and separated, self-conscious and unself-conscious, parallels the distinction between dialectical phenomenology and positivism and between socialism and capitalism. This work addresses itself to these distinctions and the relations between them.

Dialectical phenomenology treats objects as objective conditions for the accomplishment of some activity. Conversely, it treats the activity as a condition for the knowledge of the object. For this type of analysis, no object exists as an abstraction, a meaning that is removed from all purposive activity, all history. Rather, every object is seen as grounded in its form of life. Thus a subject’s activity presupposes objective conditions for its accomplishment and those objective conditions presuppose a subject for which they have salience. This active unity of subject and object constitutes a purposive activity, a form of life or subjectivity.

Positivism: separation of subject and object

The distinguishing features of dialectical phenomenology are: 1 its treatment of subjects and objects as united; 2 its treatment of this unity of subject and object as purposive activity or form of life; 3 therefore, its treatment of subjects and objects as grounded in their form of life. In contrast, a concrete or positivistic consciousness presupposes a separation of subject from object—a divided subjectivity. Positivism, in this sense, treats subjects and objects as separate and knowable in that separation, as if the sense of an object could be taken for granted as emanating from the object independently of any relation to a subject. In this way, the object as it is known, that is, the knowledge or meaning of the object, appears to be natural and eternal, rather than social and grounded in a historically specific form of life.

Positivism, as intended in this book, is the treatment of subjects and objects as they appear, separate and independent of each other. This separation makes it possible for positivism to speak of being subjective as a problem of bias, as a distortion of consciousness or observation by the intrusion of a subject. Positivism conceives of the subject not as a social subject in terms of membership in a community, but as a private subject in terms of purposes and attitudes that originate with the individual rather than with a language community, an ongoing form of life. Positivism can also talk of objectivity—letting facts speak for themselves—as if social reality was not a process of dialectical re-creation, a relation of subject to object.

In reacting against a positivistic interpretation of social phenomena, some versions of phenomenology become subjective or idealist. A subjective phenomenology takes two forms. It can be the view that reality is whatever people think of it (instead of whatever social life makes of it) and, therefore, that reality is mind or concepts. It can also be the view that behavior must be understood in terms of individuals’ meanings and intentions. Instead of reifying society, this view advocates studying individuals as they go about their activities of constructing reality. Both of these approaches are subjective in that they explain social phenomena as originating with the mind (its categories or concepts) or the individual’s mind (his or her intentions or perceptions).

Instead of this subjective version of phenomenology, the analysis that follows derives from a tradition that stresses a reciprocal relation of subject and object which I call dialectical phenomenology. The latter approach rejects the subjectivistic and objectivistic versions of the theory of reflection: the view that objects reflect either subjective meaning or mental concepts and the view that subjective meaning or mental concepts reflect the reality of objects. In agreement with Lukács, dialectical phenomenology sees objectivism and subjectivism as two sides of the same problem:

In the theory of ‘reflection’ we find the theoretical embodiment of the duality of thought and existence, consciousness and reality, that is so intractable to the reified consciousness. And from that point of view it is immaterial whether things are to be regarded as reflections of concepts or whether concepts are reflections of things. In both cases the duality is firmly established (Lukács, 1971, p. 200).

The problem is the duality of thought and existence, consciousness and reality. Instead of a duality, dialectical phenomenology posits a unity. However, this unity is not the result of reducing the objective to the subjective or the reverse. The object does not lose its distinction from the subject. Rather, both are united in a process, an active relation of subject to object. This relation may be understood as production in the sense of a subject’s appropriation of an object, the incorporation of an object into the life or intentional activities of a subject:

Thus thought and existence are not identical in the sense that they ‘correspond’ to each other, or ‘reflect’ each other, that they ‘run parallel’ to each other or ‘coincide’ with each other (all expressions that conceal a rigid duality). Their identity is that they are aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process (Lukács, 1971, p. 204).

Socialism, capitalism and fetishism

This distinction between dialectical phenomenology and positivism corresponds to a distinction between self-conscious socialism and capitalism. The correspondence can be seen in Marx’s treatment of subject and object. As noted above, a form of life refers to an active, purposive relation of subject and object. This is also what we mean by mode of production—the subject (re)produces itself in the appropriation and production of its object. The form of life that constitutes capitalism, for Marx, separates subject (labor) from object (objective conditions of its production). This separation occurs with the mediation of capital between labor and its object. In a self-conscious form of life (socialism) there would be no mediation and no separation. Subject and object would be united. Labor would directly realize itself as social in the relation to its objective conditions, the social activity of production. It would not have to convert itself into wage labor or exchange value before it could appropriate its object.

Because of the separation of subject from object in capitalism, the subject, labor, appears as an independent thing separate from its object, which takes the form of the commodity, gold or money. The object appears not as socially produced human wealth, but as a separate natural thing that has value in itself, a thing without grounds. Marx refers to this appearance and treatment of objects as the fetishism of commodities. In fetishism, the meaning or value of the object seems to reside exclusively with the object, rather than with the subject’s active relation to the object.

A comparison with Freud’s work (1959) may help us better to understand the similarity between a positivistic treatment of objects and Marx’s notion of fetishism. Reciprocally, Marx’s notion of fetishism may help us better to understand Freud’s work. According to Freud, the meaning or salience of an object resides in the subject’s relationship to the object. A fetish develops when the subject becomes divided. This means that the subject becomes of two minds, possessed of opposing tendencies toward the object. Given the internal conflict, the subject denies (represses) one side of itself. Or the object may appear as a divided object such that in one aspect, the object attracts while in its other aspect, it repels. Because of the opposing aspects, one side of the object becomes repressed.

The repressed subject may (re)present itself as a bodily symptom or its repressed object may (re)present itself as a fetish. Which form it takes, bodily symptom or fetish, may depend on which aspect of the relationship is denied more strongly, which side involves greater conflict. A bodily symptom may be due to repressing more strongly the subjective side, the desiring itself. A fetish may be the result of more strongly repressing the object of the desire. A conflictual relationship or form of life may (re)produce itself one-sidedly as a compulsion in which the active desiring appears to control the subject, or as an obsession in which the passive object seems to take possession of the subject.

In either case, a divided subject-object (re)presents itself one-sidedly as pure subject (physical impulse or bodily symptom) or pure object (a fetish or obsession), rather than as a relation. According to Freud, actively re-membering or self-consciously reliving in relation to the therapist the conflict that represses and separates the relation of subject and object enables the patient to become self-conscious, to reconstitute itself as a self-conscious relation of subject and object.

Similarly, for Marx, actively re-membering the separation of subject and object provides the solution to the problem of the split between subjectivity and objectivity, idealism and materialism, mind and body. Marx’s theorizing founds itself in this disunity and in the active struggle that the disunity produces. This ongoing tension or conflict does not end except by overcoming the disunity, thereby making possible a self-conscious mode of self-production, socialism, as opposed to the repressed mode of production, the divided subjectivity that we have with capitalism.

A self-conscious subject is one that (re)produces itself and knows itself in its relation to its object and knows and produces (the meaning of) its object in relation to itself. Capitalism, an unself-conscious form of life, represses unity by separating subject from object. The separation entails a divided object, the exchange value and use value of the commodity form, which in turn presupposes a divided subject, proletariat and bourgeoisie. A divided objectivity (re)presents itself as a fetish, an object whose value seems to be independent of a subject. A divided subjectivity (re)presents itself as internal conflict, class struggle.

It is important to recognize that the struggle of which I speak does not impose itself, from some large external entity conceived as society, capitalism, social structure or form of life, on passive individuals as if struggle and opposition were independent of persons and their strivings, as if individuals were passive objects moved about by external forces of society. To say, as I do, that the strivings and struggles are made possible by a form of life and that individuals are not the authors of their acts, therefore, needs some clarifying.

A form of life that appears as external to its members, and denies itself as a self-constituting process, also denies its members as self-constituting, and therefore free, social individuals. This denial contradicts its positing of individuals as free and equal. This selfcontradictory character of the form of life puts individuals in an untenable position. They presume themselves to be free yet they seem not to be free; they presume themselves to be historical, social subjects yet they appear to be ahistorical, natural things; they presume themselves to be the end to which their activity aims and yet they appear as means to some other end.

Individuals, then, find themselves internally divided. In striving to realize one side of themselves as free, social subjects, they find that they are opposing the other side of themselves, the side in which they appear as and are treated as commodities or things, means for some end that is external to themselves. In other words, the very striving to assert the self as a free, social individual which is made possible by this form of life opposes another side of this same form of life—the aspect in which the self appears as an unfree thing, a commodity or exchange value. Marx conceives of this opposition, this divided form of life, as class struggle. Although the motive force of class struggle is the individual’s striving to realize itself as a free, social individual, it must be stressed that a specific form of life grounds or makes possible class struggle and such striving. In other words, the very striving of the individual to realize itself as a free, social subject would not be possible in another form of life, another mode of social reproduction. On the other hand, this form of life that makes possible the free, social individual at the same time denies or suppresses this possibility.

The struggle engendered by a divided subjectivity makes possible the conception of history as a movement toward self-consciousness, toward self-conscious (self) (re)production. In other words, class struggle becomes understood analytically or metaphorically as a movement toward a self-conscious form of life, a mode of (re)production whereby the relation of subject and object realizes itself actively and consciously as a self-constituting unity.

Hegelian readers of Marx may refer to this struggle or movement as the history of reason that culminates in self-consciousness. But for Marx, self-consciousness is always self-conscious (re)production. Thus reason is not some abstract thing in the world, consciousness, but a rational form of life by which the human subject realizes itself as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Conclusion
• Bibliography