An exchange-based system has, then, a logic which leads all human labor to seem equivalent, or at least 'equivalentisable'. All. But then, does Marx's account of exchange-value as "congealed quantities of homogenous human labor" pose as a true theoretical construct, or as something much more fantastical and absurd? David Andrews writes:
"Is value the expression of socially necessary abstract labor or is this simply an illusion? Marx's use of the religious metaphor to describe commodity fetishism connotes some type of illusion, suggesting that there is something unreal, or at least of questionable objectivity, in exchange-values. This illusory character of value leads Cleaver to conclude that Marx's notion of commodity fetishism amounts to "denouncing28 the analysis he has just undertaken."...
But while the objective character of value does have an illusory aspect to it, it is a "prosaically real, and by no means imaginary, mystification". Marx points out that the idea that there can be social relations between things is “fantastic”, but he says that this is "what they are"." (p.6 of an unpublished draft paper.)
For again, commodity fetishism is something which people, perhaps regrettably but as yet perhaps inevitably, do.
Cleaver at least recognized that there is a serious problem of interpretation here in Capital, a problem which has been unsatisfactorily skated over or 'resolved' by many of Marx's readers, especially in Economics. But Cleaver has completely failed to see the point (as has, admittedly, almost everyone else) of what Marx was up to, even so. Marx has not given us a theoretical 'analysis' which he has then fatally undermined. He has given us a tool for description, which he hopes will enable one, among other things, eventually to leave it itself behind (In this regard, the 'labor theory of value' is then rather like the 'picture theory of meaning', or even so-called 'use theories of meaning'. It is itself a picture, one whose worth is ultimately in part to be appreciated precisely by means of our understanding of its eventual conceptual inadequacies and transitionality). Marx hopes that the fantasticness of what he is showing us about ourselves will lead us to revolt against it. He shows us the patent nonsense that in its everydayness we fail to see, the nonsense that we are latently committed to, and he hopes that we will draw the requisite conclusions -- in action, not just in mind.
In short, Marx has not given us an economic theory of capitalism -- and a good thing too. He has given us something more 'important', more 'profound' (the scare quotes indicating that the use of such words runs the risk of our re-instituting the oxymoronic category of 'profound' nonsense; something self-deconstructing cannot literally have a profound content). Marx has given us a set of tools for understanding our current social relations -- a set of tools which simultaneously may help us alter ('dismantle') those relations. (It is high time, in this age of economism and multinationalism, that philosophers understood more about 'the market'. But they can I think genuinely hope to improve their understanding through Marx, more than through what is from a philosophical point of view well-described as the bankrupt scientism of neo-classical economics (or indeed, of 'Scientific' Marxism, be it of Althusserian or of any other stripe).)
Marx's 'position' is in a sense self-deconstructing. His 'analysis' does indeed in a strong sense ultimately undermine -- dismantle -- itself. But this is its point. We need to draw the requisite conclusions eventually, against Marx's 'theory' itself (as against any 'positions' we find ouselves attributing to Wittgenstein). We don't even need Derrida to come along and do this. It really is implicit in Marx.
But this 'self-deconstruction' has to be understood in a very particular way. It is a deconstruction...which has to be actualised by us (not simply conjured in an academic treatise, such as Derrida's Specters of Marx).
What would be left to us, after a successful incorporation of Marx's simplified 'language-games' of value, his vocabulary, into our descriptions of social phenomena, and their consequent self-overcoming and self-deconstruction, would be not nothing, but perhaps some sense of the specificity of human needs and of human laborings to satsify those needs. The abstraction of general labor would no longer remain. (For it would have no contrast class.) Truly back, at last, to the rough ground, we would then be -- to the variegated uses ('use-values') of work and of things.
Andrews writes that "Marx himself drew an analogy between value and language: "the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men's social product as is their language.""29 I think that from the discussion above we can draw the following result: the internal connection between language-game and practical activity (the latter being sometimes usefully referred to as 'form of life') is an effective analogy for -- because, basically, just a general case of -- the relationship between our ordinary 'language-game' of 'value' and our ordinary practices ('form of life'). And Marx's account is an elaboration of -- a bringing to self-consciousness of -- the former. Marx's discussion of value, which perhaps now the reader can truly start to hear as 'descriptive' -- while sometimes obscurely written, and somewhat deformed by some scientistic elements of presentation, and by an only partly and (thus) insufficently 'anthropological' approach -- is thus, as Andrews says, in a vastly different relationship with value-constituting activity than is suggested by “the positivist neoclassical conception according to which theory and reality stand opposite each other as explanation and reality to be explained.”30
VI. Implications: Parasitism and inclusion
The upshot of the above? According to Marxism, everyone is a doer, a coper, a laborer. (We say this 'transitionally') But in society, and in psychology, there is 'false consciousness' and 'ideology'. So most of the privileged classes cannot see the reality of their also being...laborers. Not divinities, not privileged by right, but just (lazy!) workers.
So: we have a class or classes, capitalists (plus also managers, petit bourgeois etc.), who are parasites on the proletariat, on the workers. But there is also an important, a crucial sense in which there isn't anything other than 'the proletariat', if only we let ourselves construe the latter sufficiently broadly. We are all workers (though let us remember again that this would fail to stand, were it to be heard, as Cleaver (along with almost everyone else hears it, as a theoretical assertion, thus in conflict with Marx's account of the irreality of exchange-value (heard in turn as a theoretical assertion)):
"[T]he value of a commodity represents human labor in the abstract, the expenditure of human labor in general ... Skilled labor counts only as simple labor intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labor, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labor ... For simplicity's sake we shall henceforth account every kind of labor to be unskilled, simple labor; by this we do no more than save ourselves the trouble of making the reduction." (Capital, The Marx-Engels Reader, pp.310-1).
The logic of this could be extended up to managers etc.; and why not all the way to the capitalist? It is only the grand shared fantasy of exchange-value which distinguishes the capitalist's labor from anyone else's.
Here we have the 'democratic' levelling potential of (understanding) the effects of 'commodityism'. And the remarkable thing is how all this comes out of thinking through carefully the logic of, the social relations of, an exchange-based system (viz. in our case, 'capitalism'), not out of any theory.
Now of course, we ought to be careful about how far we take this 'parasitism' analogy. For while Marxism indeed sees capitalists as parasites, and as vampires,31 it also recognises that they are invaluable, essential to the system as it currently stands. They couldn't be simply excised.
Rather, there is a 'symbiosis' -- and some of the roles of capitalists play ('entrepreneurial', etc.), would in some sense or under some description be essential even in a radically-reconstituted society. It is not a question of simply abolishing capitalists; but nor, either, of course, of simply giving them a bit more work to do. There is a symbiotic parasitism, an ecological system involving mutual benefit -- though hardly in a desirable state of equilibrium! In a state, rather, which Marx, as we have seen, not unreasonably characterizes as deeply exploitative, highly undesirable -- and, moreover, literally absurd.
But should this useful correction of our parasitism analogy, this introduction of the idea of a symbiotic element to the parasitism, should this actually surprise us that much, and cause us to give up the basic analogy? Not at all; for, after all, this was no more than we should have expected of the multifarious possibilities offered us by the concept of 'parasite'. For, after all, it is well known that the most effective parasites do not kill their hosts, and indeed perform certain services for them...
Here is Derrida, putting much the same point quite interestingly:
"It should also be remembered that the parasite is by definition never simply external, never simply something that can be excluded from or kept outside of the body "proper"... Parasitism takes place when the parasite...comes to live off the life of the body in which it resides--and when, reciprocally, the host incorporates the parasite to an extent, willy nilly offering it hospitality: providing it with a place. The parasite then "takes place". And at bottom, whatever violently "takes place"...is always something of a parasite." (LI p.90; see also p.77)
So then, let us try another analogy, to illuminate all this further:
What happened at one of the crucial points in 1789 was that the progressive elements of the first two estates in France recognised that it was their democratic and patriotic duty to join with the Third Estate, in a meeting where the Third Estate would of course numerically dominate. This was, in a sense, an affirmation that all there was (is) is the Third Estate. That only an ideology which was real in its effects but wrong in its underpinnings was fostering the illusion that the 'Estate-boundaries' marked real differences between human beings. The nobles and clerics, parasites upon the commoners, were declaring that really they were commoners -- which as is much as to abolish the distinction between commoners and the rest, and thus to eliminate too the category of 'commoner'.32
I think the same is the logic of Marxism. Really, there is only the proletariat, in a necessarily broadened and 'bloated' sense -- in the sense of workers, by hand or by brain.33 Even if those 'workers' (be they agricultural laborers, or even managers, or even (crucially) owners) are in some cases doing extremely little -- just shuffling a few papers around or telling their subordinates where to invest their 'money' or such like. (They are still workers -- though to say so is already to take one further step toward a vision of one day being able to leave that category behind.) Capital, money, are social constructs in a more fundamental sense than are (say) people, or work.34
Perhaps then we really don't have to excise the parasites.35 We have, rather, to convince everyone, including them, and ourselves, that there can't really -- in our realization -- be any such thing as class distinctions, for people. That convincement will have the consequence that it is seen to be just ridiculous for some to live largely off the labor of others. The parasites can be integrated, once it is actively realized that they are nothing other than people, like us.
VII. Using Marx to understand Wittgenstein on (philosophical) language
And this, I think, is how we can understand Wittgenstein on philosophical language. It is not that 'philosophical language', 'metaphysical language', 'meta-language', language even of the kind that Wittgenstein himself will be heard as speaking just insofar as we do not take completely literally and seriously his injunctions against 'theses' in philosophy etc. -- it is not that this language needs to be excised, because it is the speaking of nonsense. Rather, it needs to be shown for what it is -- either nothing, in which case there is nothing to excise; or perfectly ordinary and everyday remarks which everyone will agree to, and/or which have perfectly fine homes in particular language-games. In the latter sense(s), 'philosophical language' can be integrated back in with our language-games -- it does not need to be excised, it is not genuinely parasitic. (But it is well on the road toward no longer being philosophical (language), either.)
Thus one might want to see the 'class interest' of everyday language as requiring the 'expropriation' of philosophical language -- but there is only likely to be a lasting peace if instead the 'parasitic' language is re-heard as being just more everyday language, only everyday language that we have unfortunately been 'systematically' and 'ideologically' educated to hear as magical. This is Wittgenstein's critique of alienation -- of alienated language. (This is something which he was clearer and more far-seeing than Marx on -- but further down the same track, not in opposition.36) Such language needs to be brought back to the everyday. Back to work.
Metaphysical doctrines, metaphysical language is, as Wittgenstein once said, like the magic gift in a fairy tale. In the enchanted castle, it appeared something splendid. In the cold light of day, we see that it is only a piece of old metal.37 'Philosophical language' in general is just such old metal. It is the language of every day, transposed and misunderstood. There is actually no parasitism of the kind we imagine, even we Wittgensteinians. To see 'philosophical language' as something special, to see 'it' as deep nonsense, or as language that succeeds in being pathological, is still to give it too much credit. There is, in fact, no 'it'. But this is something that we have to realize in ourselves, to see, to make (it) true. It won't be true, if it's just a theory, a thesis.
Wittgenstein's language, his own 'speaking outside language-games', is transitional -- it is intended to be part of a (probably never-ending) project of getting us to be able to be free of philosophical worries (of certain strange kinds of perplexity); even worries about the character of language being used 'outside language-games', ultimately.
So, if we return to PI 120, I think we can see a reading of it that, while not shirking the drastic consequences of Wittgenstein's uncompromising auto-critique, facilitates our not seeing that critique in the final analysis as criticism. There is only the language of everyday, Wittgenstein is saying. But in saying that -- which, if heard 'literally', would itself be a metaphysical claim -- one is perhaps less likely to be misunderstood if one makes clear that one's remark is to be heard as a suggestion, as well as or even rather than as a description. (Let us recall the following of Wittgenstein's remarks here: "What we call 'descriptions' are instruments for particular purposes" (PI 291). Again, this illustrates the constitutive absence of any proprietary language in which to conduct philosophical investigations, the non-existence even of a 'Wittgensteinian' privileged discourse for conducting philosophy, for assembling 'descriptions'. Alternatively, we might for certain purposes (!) risk saying, 'Descriptions are never just descriptions' -- and now we need to rethink somewhat my earlier remarks concerning what it means for philosophy to 'purely' describe.)
If it (e.g. PI 120) is a description, it is more like (if you like) a description of a 'program' for research and thought.38 To say that there is only the language of everyday is not to make one more philosophical super-statement. Wittgenstein's own remark, seen aright, is just an ordinary everyday remark. But the fact that we find it systemically hard to hear/see it that way suggests that we have a long way to go in ridding ourselves of the kinds of delusions that Wittgenstein takes us to be subject to. The contrast of everyday vs. philosophical may be usefully termed 'transitional' -- but let no-one be under the illusion that this will be a short transition, or a clearly-imaginable one, even. Only a transformation of our (philosophical?) community39 will potentially enable us to really rest easy with Wittgenstein's remarks -- and once we could rest easy with them, we would no longer need them. For likewise: only a transformation of our society (societies) will enable us to rest easy with the claim that "Everyone is a worker; only some people don't work hard enough, and so others have to work much too hard (etc.)"; and once we could rest easy with such a remark, again we would no longer need it.
We don't, I venture to assert, need further proof of this. Marx and Wittgenstein, as I will explicate in greater detail below, try to create the conditions for their own otioseness, even for their own incomprehensibility -- but they and their philosophies aren't necessarily needed for the creation of those conditions. In part, because they are not teaching us ordinary (or even extraordinary) facts, at all. They're teaching us ways of seeing or being; or (more precisely), ways through the ways of seeing and being that we unfortunately at present have. But such ways are accessible to anyone, in principle, from first principles. One doesn't need to be taught a body of knowledge by anyone to acquire them -- or to transcend them. ...But if we do still want philosophical 'proof' of all this (of this wholism and nonsupernaturalistic humanism, and of the first inklings of its eventual self-overcoming), at least in the sense of seeing what I am saying in (the early) Marx himself, surely it is ready for us; and indeed, though I cannot explore this further here, was arguably present already in Hegel40 (and, in embryo, in Kant41). In Marx, the relevant concept is 'species-being'. The early Marx's humanism42 is I think centered around just the kind of vision of humanity in its polity as I have sketchily depicted above.
Philosophical underpinnings of all this: Mulhall on the early Marx
Marx envisions human being -- species-being -- as follows:
"[I]ndividual men [are] microcosms of human social history and the human social present, [as Marx says]: "Though man is a unique individual -- and it is just his particularity which makes him an individual, a really individual communal being -- he is equally the whole, the ideal whole, the subjective existence of society as thought and experienced. He exists in reality as the representation and the real mind of social existence, and as the sum of human manifestations of life.""43
Thus he sees individual humans as the whole, as well as as parts of the whole, and as individuals. There is nothing outside it/us -- compare, nothing outside the everyday.
This presages, I think, a sense of integration of all persons into a society as the true vehicle for their individual autonomy.44 If there is to be real fulfilled humanity, everyone must be persuaded that their deepest interests lie in giving up the delusion that class is real, that capital is real. (Much as, likewise, if there is to be real fulfilled humanity, then we -- very generally -- must overcome alienation, and no longer be confronted by objects we produce as alien things, but rather be part of a seamless web with them, and with(in) the broader envoronment.) But let me be clear what I do not intend by using the language of reality and illusion etc., here: to see the ruling class as parasites can only be transitional -- it is not a seeing of things as they truly are in the sense in which we see things as they truly are when we clean our spectacles. Because it is rather, broadly speaking, seeing in the sense of Winch,45 and in the sense of Wittgenstein's PI, para.s 125-9: "The aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to see something -- because it is always before one's eyes.)" A blind person will no be helped, if you can their spectacles. And nor (more precise analogy) will someone be helped to see the beauty in the world around them by having their spectacles cleaned, alone.
The point of such seeing and of persuading others so to see is, among other things, an unavoidably ethical and political one. It is a call, a call which hopes to hasten its own irrelevance.46 And here I have some sympathy with David Lamb, who has powerfully claimed that
"To Hegel's conception of philosophy as the comprehension of the world, Marx...wanted the power to change. Yet, at the same time, he held with Wittgenstein that a philosophy standing outside the world is idle. For the answer to this riddle we must appreciate that for Marx, like Hegel before him, having an adequate grasp of reality means that one has transformed both oneself and the object known in doing so. Just as an adequate understanding of the reality of smallpox is reflected in the vaccinephilosophical understanding is complete at the very moment it has transformed reality. The perfect comprehension of reality is attained at the moment philosophy breaks into a practical effort to change it. In this way the realisation of philosophy is one and the same with the abolition of philosophy."47
One of the changes I would make to this passage, which clearly has some real resonance with my aims and conclusions in the present paper, is to note that the vaccine analogy is not close enough. The combating of the parasite, of the disease, is, for Wittgenstein, coterminous with the true diagnosis of it. (The criterion of truth is not external to the conquering of the illness, in this case.) The disease is rendered harmless when it is truly seen to be nothing other than a little bundle of cells. The solution to the philosophical problem, again, is to see that the magic ring is simply a piece of old metal. The truth is that 'philosophical language' is at best just more everyday language.
The truth is that everyone is a worker -- in other words, that no-one is a worker in the sense in which we currently understand that term (as opposed to ... a capitalist, or some such.)...
But by this point, an objection may have been crystallizing in the reader's mind, an objection to the apparently non-materialist mode of my presentation of insights I am drawing from the Marxist tradition. Here is how Mulhall expresses the potential objection:
"[T]hese formulations [of Marx's conception of human practical activity] may seem like metaphysical hocus-pocus or part of the excesses of Romanticism: are we meant to mount a critique of a system of economic production or of social relations on the ground that few of its participants experience a mystical union between subject and object?"48
Mulhall goes on to argue that "Marx's characterisations of fulfilling practical activity can be interpreted as picking out a very common...human experience, and one which can be characterised in ways less reliant on Romantic articulations of the agent's experiences and attitudes." So he endeavors "to bring Marx's characterisations down to earth."49 He gives as common and ordinary examples a carpenter, or a tennis player, on days when their work, their activity, is proceeding in an observably impressive 'seamless' manner. He goes on: "Just as talk of fulfilling labor as being work in which one experienced a seamless union with one's activity and its objects could be stripped of its Romantic metaphysics and related to a perfectly comprehensible aspect of human life, so talk of human practical activity as a teleological whole can be stripped of its organicist vocabulary and related to a recognisable feature of human behaviour."
How can this be done? In part, by invoking certain key features of human behaviour as these are recognised by ... Heidegger and Wittgenstein:
"[W]hy does Marx regard the (forced or voluntary) acceptance of conditions of work whose effect is the transformation of human practical activity into mechanical motion as the negation of the worker's very humanity? Why should practical activity which manifests the fluidity and seamlessness to which Marx's notion of mechanical activity stands as a contrast be regarded as the fulfillment fo human nature -- the achievment of genuine humanity?
The answer can be stated as follows: Marx is able to regard this feature of human practical activity as fundamental to his conception of human fulfillment because it is a central aspect of our concept of human behaviour -- it is one of the central features which marks out behaviour as fully human, as the sort of behaviour to which we can respond as the field of expression of a soul...
[T]his aspect of genuinely human behaviour -- this aspect of our concept of the human is the subject matter of Heidegger's reflections on the readiness-to-hand of objects and on the way in which human existence is a matter of Being-in-the-world; and...it is also the focus of Wittgenstein's remarks on aspect-perception...
I want to suggest...that the root of Marx's conception of human nature and human fulfillment lies in a sensitivity to precisely the aspects of our concept of human behaviour with which both Wittgenstein and Heidegger are concerned... What we must remember here is Marx's fundamental guiding assumption -- namely, that human beings are a species of animal...
[T]he fluidity and seamlessness upon which Marx (as well as Heidegger and Wittgenstein) focuses can be seen as an aspect of the animality of human action, a manifestation of the fact that human beings are not so much machines as organisms."50
So now, if we have a philosophical anthropology here, it is again not one which we sensible intellectuals need to worry about if we are somewhat impressed by critiques both of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism. More generally, of humanism insofar as humanism is Essentialistic. I am advocating Marx's 'philosophical anthropology' only insofar as it is compatible, which I think is surprisingly far, with Wittgenstein and the best of Heidegger.51 Only insofar, that is, as
(1) It is not problematically 'Scientific'52 or 'Realist', it does not pretend that we are doing something quasi-biological when we give an account of species-being, and nor does it pretend that we see things as they truly are in a straightforward empirical way when we see things as the proletariat see things, when we see things from the correct historical point of view of the oppressed;
(2) It is truly open to the openess and open-endedness of 'human nature' -- it is in effect saying, among other things, that it is humanity's nature not to have a fixed nature, an essence; and, a corollary of (2);
(3) it is not used to exclude certain things from being human (such as highly diverse cultural practices) which have a claim to be human.
Point (3) is important, and indicates why perhaps we might want to play safe by thinking in terms of 'philosophical ethnography' more than philosophical anthropology. The idea of 'ethnography' inclines one more toward actual investigations of real phenomena of human being, and inclines one away from the armchair. And it doesn't hold itself hostage to as yet unimaginable possibilities of human being which may, for all we know, already exist in some part of the world today. Even the kinds of extreme possibilities, of which we mostly just don't know what to say about them, that we find in some of Wittgenstein's 'thought-experiments'.
Wittgenstein has been called by Jerry Katz a 'deflationary naturalist' -- the label seems to me apt. This is a naturalism only in being opposed to supernaturalism, not in being Scientific. Wittgenstein regards humans as animals; but as cultural,53 speaking and doing animals. Again, I think that the key features of Marx, especially the early Marx, can be seen as quite compatible with this 'picture', with these purpose-relative and historically-contextualized grammatical remarks. As Marx says: "[S]ociety is the accomplished union of man with nature...the realised naturalism of man and the realised humanism of nature."54
VIII. Wittgenstein's 'quietism' versus Marx's 'activism'?
But let us return to something I have already mentioned, for instance at the opening of this paper: don’t we still have a conflict here, even a deep and obvious conflict, between Wittgenstein's claim that "Philosophy leaves everything as it is" (PI 124), and Marx's claim that whereas philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it?
Not necessarily, no.
Let us look at the 'quietist' reading of Wittgenstein for a moment. The reading of PI 124 as though Wittgenstein is a quietist has been under threat for some time now. Gellner's gross misreadings (and Nyiri's only slightly less gross ones) are not I think taken very seriously any more; and even the degree of quietism involved in the Baker & Hacker 'official' reading of Wittgenstein has come into question. We have even seen by contrast uses of Wittgenstein by neo-Pragmatists (e.g. Rorty, also Fish) which have pushed things in completely the other direction, and claimed that Wittgenstein may be of use to radical or reformist political causes.55
My own view is that it is vital to see that Wittgenstein didn't think that philosophy could be seriously engaged in anything other than processes of description and understanding -- as opposed to explanation. That is the contrast class intended. The contrast class is not intended to be the normative.
I will come back to Wittgenstein, on 'the normative' in a moment. But at this moment we should tarry a minute with Marx on explanation and interpretation. We need not assume that, for Marx, everyone who is not thoroughly philosophically ('Scientifically') 'informed' will be a victim of some salient false-consciousness. A picture holds us captive, because our economy repeats it to us over and over -- but the picture is also, for now, true.56 "To [producers] the relations connecting the labor of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things." Capital, Marx-Engels Reader, p.321, my italics.) Further, the picture is of course perfectly useful and fine for the purposes of much day to day life (including, incidentally, that of economists). And again, no merely mental change, no mouthing of the words of an explanation of it, will change this at all: "The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labor carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labor, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value -- this fact appears to the producers...to be just as real and final, as the fact that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered."57
Explanation, for Marx, is of no real moment. (If this is right, it shows that the entire tradition of Marxism as Science is wrong.58) One needs people, rather, to be no longer metaphysically-misled in their understandings of their social relations. And this is a practical project, not necessarily one that will involve philosophy liberating us...
The consequence: I am suggesting that Marx could have endorsed PI 124, and indeed substantially more of Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, of his 'methods'. For Marx too does not, at his non-scientistic best, want to change things through explanation, but through description and action.
To return directly to Wittgenstein. Famously, Wittgenstein thought his own work to be thoroughgoingly ethical in nature, 'despite' the lack of explicit discussions of ethics. he took what he was doing to be fundamentally about providing people with tools with which they could change themselves.
This ethical aspect to Wittgenstein's work is I think deeply visible in the work of some of his greatest followers. I am thinking of Anscombe, Gaita, Winch, Diamond, Cavell, Conant. For these writers, the call to philosophy is a call to acknowledgement, to humanity, to ethics, to honesty, to inclusion. For sure, one may hope that one's philosophy may eventually become unnecessary -- but this kind of withering away is distant, and is surely not incompatible with a suitably -- and correctly -- vague (Marxian) vision of the withering away ... of the need for law, politics, etc., too.59
The consequence: I am suggesting that Wittgenstein could have endorsed Thesis 11 of the "Theses on Feuerbach", and indeed substantial amounts of the recommendations of paths toward 'utopia'60 -- of the descriptions -- that we find elsewhere in Marx!
So we see that Marx was not an explainer as people have taken him to be; and that Wittgenstein was not anti changing things (even by means of philosophy!). There really is far less of a gap between them on this score, apparently the insuperable obstacle before a bringing of them together, than has almost invariably been supposed. (The gap is mostly one perhaps of degree of social optimism.)
For, most crucially, and continuing the thought about 'withering away': Wittgenstein and Marx both tried to help create the conditions for their own irrelevance. Unlike the great system-builders of the past, and even unlike many Analytic and scientistic philosophers of today (who would like to think of their fach as involving anonymity quite centrally, but yet cannot think that human beings will ever have enough knowledge -- or, rather, sense -- not to need to read the products of their 'scientific inquiries'), they would both have been proud of a possible future in which they were no longer read, because nobody could understand what they were saying any more, because what they had said had done its job. In that sense, they may be said to have aimed at a closure61 of philosophizing even if they did not have as a project or even a coherent idea the end (the ending) of philosophy.
This is crucial: they both (especially perhaps Wittgenstein), while 'happy' with their own parasitism on the deep problems and delusions and mythologies of their own time, cautioned against thinking that it was possible clearly to imagine what would in fact come after them, what the possible future in which they were irrelevant would look like. To claim that one could imagine clearly a future beyond class conflict and alienation, or beyond philosophical confusion, would be hubristic.62 They tried to bring about the conditions for their own irrelevance, and their own overcoming; but not, thankfully, to tell us much about what the promised land after their success would look like.
I am not saying that Wittgenstein entails Marx, nor vice versa. But I think they can fit, and that suggestions to the contrary are based probably on dubious political prejudices, not on philosophical argument. Wittgenstein opposes Marx when Marx would treat a positive Scientific explanation of society (e.g.) as available, in particular as philosophically available. But the point may indeed very much be still to change the world.63 A key question is likely to be whether philosophising is well-suited to making that happen. Or would just getting out there doing good deeds or getting active not be likely to be more successful.64
In relation to this question, consider PI para.133 one more time: "The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy ... [t]he one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question." If a real philosophical discovery is chimerical, then, despite the importance of Wittgenstein's remarks on the not-necessarily-problematic character of philosophising about philosophy (there being no need for a "second-order philosophy"), there remains not only a sense in which Wittgenstein's later work must run the same risks as the Tractatus (philosophy will always be bringing itself in question65); there is also scope for the serious Pragmatist question to be raised: is this kind of activity worth the time and effort? What makes it so vital (and in what sense "vital"; or "signal", or "urgent", or "of enormous significance"?) to get Wittgenstein right, if the ethical point of his philosophy (or life) or of ours is probably achievable with more facility through other means than through pursuing philosophy?66
But these questions of course become somewhat transfigured if we recognize that there could be changes in the nature of our life which would render certain philosophical temptations and confusions otiose and powerless. And this keys in with my remarks above about Wittgenstein's and Marx's (importantly and properly limited) imaginings of (the way toward) 'utopia'. We can continually try to end philosophy through philosophy, but it would not really be ended til certain things happen in our lives, and in our societies, which are not by any means conditioned only by philosophy. Thus the only potentially non-chimerical "real discovery" (N.B. not a philosophical discovery, necessarily -- the decisive reason for the failure of Jolley's reading of 133 is that he assumes that the real discovery must be philosophical) would be an experimental discovery whose character we cannot identify, in the future of human history. As Wittgenstein put it: "I am by no means sure that I should prefer a continuation of my work by others to a change in the way people live which would make all these questions superfluous. (For this reason I could never found a school.)"
Conclusion: The point is to live differently, to change (one's/ our) way of life So, how best, exactly, to change 'things'? And what exactly to change?
Andrews argues as follows: "For Marx the objectification of labor as value is not a theoretical analysis which is imposed on commodity production from without... [S]ince people do equate their diverse labors through exchange, to say that labor is the source of exchange-value in commodity producing society is not an explanation of exchange-value, but simply a description of what people actually do." He goes on:
"Marx mocked the Young Hegelians for believing that simply recognizing that people allow their own ideas to rule over them is sufficient to overcome those ideas:
"The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude toward them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and -- existing reality will collapse."67
The reification of labor as value is connected to and informed by the activity, the form of life, of people in commodity producing society. Therefore to overcome commodity fetishism it is necessary to change the way people live; i.e., change their form of life." (Andrews, pp.6-7)
Philosophy has strict limits -- but it can help if it is truly philosophy in action, in life. This, Wittgenstein and Marx did -- provide tools for living life differently. Metaphysics, class, 'commodity-fetishism' are, unfortunately, things that we do. But not because of some innate and unalterable feature of human nature.
So my Wittgensteinian account of Marx, and then my 'Marxist' account of Wittgenstein (on 'philosophical language'), is not philosophical Idealism. It (Philosophy in the best sense, one hopes) describes, rather than explains -- but its describing not only motivates to action, it is (continuous with) action.
And perhaps now it is fairly clear to the reader, if it was not before, the kind of thing which I hope to have been doing in this paper, with its analogies etc. and its shying away from explanation. I consider us needful of real thinking, of thinking which actually enhances and transfigures our understanding, and orientation to the world, and of action; not of theories, or dry explanations. If we leave aside, then, the distortions that tend to be produced by the rhetoric of 'Scientific Socialism', we can see how Marxian thought on the nature of society, on the nature of human beings, and on the nature of classes, need not actually be incompatible with Wittgensteinian thought on the same 'topic(s)'. As Andrews holds, Marxism at its best is not a theory at all, but is part of a mind-broadening and blinders-removing social study. Marx didn't guard nearly as much as he might have against the pull toward 'objectivity', toward theory; but insofar as his 'descriptions' which we are enjoined to attempt to hear as descriptions are logically tied to their basis in ordinary people's lives and experiences, we need not condemn him any more than we would Wittgenstein.
There is a clear sense in which one can say that people are victims of false consciousness, of ideology, of alienation; but we don't have to see this in terms (for example) of some kind of psycho-analytical or cogntivist model of 'the unconscious.' People's false consciousness, which they have been involved in constructing, is continually available for deconstuction by them, by the means of their own resources. Winch et al do not contradict the Marxian insights I have endeavoured to draw from Marx, Kautsky et al. Winch makes central for us the respects in which we must understand humans, if we are serious about understanding them in all their commerce with each other and with the world, as practical understanders (which crucially involves norms, rules, and what the ethnomethodologists call 'indexicality', 'accountability' and 'reflexivity'), and as doers, not as automata, nor as intellectuals (except when they /we actually are intellectuals!). And we can perhaps begin to imagine a truly Marxian economics, an economics which, after Winch, would not try to be something other than a social study (and not disjoint from philosophy68), and which would thus, after Sraffa's (and Keynes's) critiques, be very far from Neo-Classical economics, but also, after von Mises's critiques, be far from Soviet etc. economics too.
To see all this is, I think, to take a step beyond the recognition (e.g. in Rubinstein) of the profound commonality between Marx (and Hegel, and indeed Heidegger in Division 1 of Being and Time) and Wittgenstein on sociality, on the fundamental sense in which the very existence of human beings can in a certain important context be usefully said to be a social phenomenon, a social activity.69 For while this (again Winchian) thought is surely right, understood aright, I have tried in this paper to sketch a perhaps more controversial but in a sense even more far-reaching connection between Marx and Wittgenstein. Let me try now to sum up what that is, and sum up thus my conclusions in this paper:
There is a sense in which what we have in language is a parasitism of some small set of aberrant propositions upon the rest. And another sense in which there cannot be any such thing as such aberrant propositions. We are called upon by Wittgenstein -- early and late -- to actualize, to realize, this non-being of metaphysics. There is a sense in which we have in society a set of stratified classes, with (to simplify!) one class parasitic upon the other, much larger class. And another sense in which there cannot be any such thing as this parasitism; that it deconstucts itself, through us. We are called upon by Marx --early and late -- to actualize, to realize, this non-being of social metaphysics, of mental metaphysics, this unnecessary (although not scientifically-mistaken) way of thinking and being.
The calls upon us that Marx and Wittgenstein make, I am claiming, have this great feature in common. And the understanding of the mutual illumination we can attain between Wittgenstein's 'critique' of 'philosophical language' and a truly Marxian critique of ideology, alienation and class division can, I hope to have shown, bring this starkly and strikingly into relief. For if one wants to know, for instance, where in Wittgenstein one finds notions which directly correspond to the Marxian notions of 'alienation' or 'estrangement', one need look no further than the notion of 'philosophical language'. And thus it is the concepts of the ordinary and the everyday, in Marx as in Wittgenstein, which offer us, if anything does, keys to 'philosophical enlightenment', and (thus) to the closure of philosophy.
Appendix: Derrida's Marx.
In the main body of the paper, above, I have given a Wittgensteinian reading of Marx. Elsewhere,70 I have attempted the same with regard to a more recent great Leftist, Noam Chomsky; specifically, to his political and historical work, where he brings words like "American" and "national interest" and "Communist" and "conservative"71 and "victory" and "freedom fighter" and "truth" back from their metaphysical to their everyday uses.72 But again, does Wittgenstein's talk, in PI 116, of the "original homes" of words, and of their everyday uses as opposed to their metaphysical uses ... does this talk imply that there actually is such a thing as the metaphysical use of a word? Is this, contrary to what I argued earlier, Wittgenstein's real 'position'?
Well, as usual, it doesn't much matter what you say, so long as you are clear about it. But I think it will be most useful to continue to say, with Cavell, that 'metaphysical use' is a fantasy, albeit a deeply-attractive one. As Martin Stone puts it:
"Wittgenstein identifies philosophy's metaphysical voice as his critical target. But this alone would hardly distinguish him from any number of other philosophers within the huge Kantian wake of philosophy's self-criticism. So it would be a mistake to infer, from such a metaphysical target, that the contrast Wittgenstein wishes to draw [in PI 116] (between himself and others) should not embrace -- or even refer most especially to -- those philosophers who set their face against metaphysics. "We bring words back" -- Wittgensetein is to be read as saying -- "in contrast to the way other philosophers critcize metaphysics; in their form of criticism, words remain metaphysically astray.""73
In, for example, Derrida. For, while there is indeed a powerful deconstructive voice in Wittgenstein's text it is not, as I stressed earlier, any more his view than is the metaphysical voice (or even, to be precise, the 'official voice').
Here is a relevant quotation from Derrida's Limited Inc., in a passage strikingly suggestive of the views he has enunciated recently in Spectres of Marx:
"If conventions are, in fact, never entirely adequate; if the opposition of “normal”and “abnormal” will always be lacking in rigor and purity; if language can always “normally” become its own abnormal object, does not this derive from the structural iterability of the mark? The graft, by definition, and herein no different from the parasite, is never simply alien to and separable from the body to which it has been transplanted or which it already haunts." (Ltd. Inc., p.82)
And again,
"The "standard" cases of promises or of statements would never occur as such without its "normal" effects, were it not, from its very inception on, parasited, harboring and haunted by the possibility of being repeated in all kinds of ways, of which the theater, poetry, or soliloquy are only examples... From this iterability -- recognized in principle by Austin and [Searle] -- [I seek] to draw the consequences: the first and most general of which being that one neither can nor ought to exclude even "strategically" the very roots of what one purports to analyze. For these roots are two-fold: you cannot root-out the parasite without rooting out the "standard" ["le propre"] at the same time." (LI, p.90).
But the suggestions I have made in the main body of the paper deflate Derrida's claim here: there are perfectly good methods for and reasons for "strategically" focussing one's attention on certain things, for the purpose of assembling reminders, not of generating a set of theoretical assertions. When one at a different moment re-integrates the parasites, and understands that in a certain sense they were never separate from one in the first place, and then, the hope is, one leaves behind the means by which one effected the re-intergration -- then one can truly root out the standard and the parasite together. Because one is simply leaving behind that binary opposition, no longer using it ('circumventing' it, to use Rorty's useful term74). All Derrida's sniping and drama will one day, if one follows Wittgenstein (and, I am suggesting, strong strands in Austin, and in Marx, and even in Chomsky), be simply unnecessary. In a possible half-imaginable future beyond philosophy, there would literally be no need to call stage-promising, stage-thunder, etc. 'parasitic', no calling for the deconstructive drama of 'hauntology'.
It is appropriate at this point then to say a few words more about the leading deconstuctive reading of Marx himself: namely, Derrida's. Let me start by noting that there is in Specters of Marx -- and this is a refreshing change from some deconstructive writing, including even some of Derrida's own -- a fairly clear-headed avoidance of modishly neutralizing Marx through being 'post-Marxian', not allowing oneself to be dismissive of the politics and thought of this living icon: "People would be ready to accept the return of Marx...on the condition that a silence is maintained about Marx's injunction not to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering into a transformation that “changes the world". ...[S]uch an ongoing neutralization would attempt to conjure away a danger: ...now that Marxism seems to be in rapid decomposition, some people seem to say, we are going to be able to concern ourselves with Marx without being bother -- by the Marxists and, why not, by Marx himself, by a ghost that goes on speaking. We'll do it systematically, by respecting the norms of hermeneutical, philological, philosophical exegesis." (Specters, p.32. Cf. also pp.51-52, and p.89.) I unite with Derrida in rejecting this deadening, appropriative, coldly-scholarly version of Marx as simply a philosopher, in a narrow sense of that word. And in thinking that the question is 'Whither Marxism?', not 'What to do, now that Marxism is dead?'
Invoking the figure of the 'specter', Derrida essays an understanding of the irreality, for Marx, of the very phenomena whose reality he (Marx) is perhaps showing us clearly for the first time. And Derrida is also very much onto the plurality and spectrality -- the pastness, presentness and (most important) the futurity of Marx's ideas.75 He is talking, in a way, then, about just what I am talking about in my analogisations of Marx and Wittgenstein.
For, incidentally, what my argument above suggests is I think a productive way of reading Derrida's 'Specters of Marx', and thus of reading Marx a little more naturalistically than Derrida does. We go from parapsychology to parasitology -- we would have to drop most of the Shakespeare stuff in Derrida's text, but that would not be any great loss, -- we 'supplement' the notion of haunting with that of parastism ... we perhaps rename the book, 'Parasites of Marx'. We are living off and in Marx. And, more important still, Marx's notion of class is a notion of parasitism -- with all the complexities we have noted in that notion -- more than it is of haunting; and what makes class possible and real (as well as irreal) is the way that commodities live off us. Our alienation consists in the fact that they should be our servants -- but they are, instead, parasites powerful to the point of ruling our lives.
I am suggesting, then, that the binary oppositions such as "normal vs. abnormal", "everyday vs. philosophical", "labor vs. capital" are indeed lacking in "rigor and purity" IF one's model for this purity is Science. If instead, contra Derrida (and Searle!), one understands these oppositions to be non-technical, transitional, part only of philosophical (grammatical) remarks, then there is no problem in principle with the methods of Austin and Wittgenstein (and Marx). In a certain sense, then, mistakes are everyday, acting and poems are everyday76 -- of course, what else could they be? But this sense is a 'bloated' sense of 'everyday', in which it has no contrast-class. Both this sense of it, and the slightly more restricted sense in which it is used methodologically to distinguish the normal from the pathological, the ordinary from the philosophical, are philosophical tools which one should not expect to be pure in the sense of 'fixed', 'part of a lasting scientific theory'. Because that is not what they are for. No more than, reading charitably and attentively, we should expect the word "labor" in Marx to have a singular technical sense. For it will do its job for us only if it is plural and ambiguous (like the words of the 'Tractatus', on my reading of that work, for example77). I.e. If it is both a pseudo-technical term referring to something abstract and generalizable, and a pseudo-technical term more narrowly referring to something which proletarians do. And we must be ready for both these senses of the word to fade, in so far as they ever succeed in ... doing their 'job'. (A strange job, whose 'work' is in a central sense purely negative, and self-annihilating. (Though I suppose there are jobs like that?...))
And we cannot say what sense we will have for the words "labor" and "everyday" which could last through the transitions which Marx and Wittgenstein attempt to facilitate. But eventually there might be no such categories for Derrida to endlessly snipe at.78
Derrida is quite right to observe that if the category of "mistaken" is logically depedent upon the category of "correct", and likewise for other important philosophical binary oppositions, then the reverse is true too. And any counter-suggestions by Searle or other mainstream philosophers are absurd. But we need not take from this Derrida's quasi-sceptical moral, his quasi-repudiation of the everyday. For I have shown what moral we can take instead. The moral that Wittgenstein (both obviously in the Tractatus and more subtly later) and, I have suggested, Marx, take. The non-theoreticistic and anti-Scientistic moral implicit in the understanding of the hoped-for temporal undermining of philosophical categories, even one's own. We don't have to say for example that use is infected through and through by mention; we can say rather that the need to distinguish use from mention is one which will only be a problem for someone who has philosophical problems, only for someone who has not (as none of us, I think, yet have) managed to understand concepts like "everyday" and "philosophical" such that Wittgenstein's descriptions can truly be seen and experienced as trivially true, such that thus we can really give up the idea of having any philosophical theses to defend. (Searle, of course, even more than Derrida wants quite straightforwardly to have theses to defend, contra PI 128.) And we can say that a binary opposition which has truly served its purpose and had its day is one the terms of which will simply be given up (as, for instance, Davidson suggests we simply ought to give up the schema of scheme and content79), not one which we will endlessly deconstruct and reconstruct.
If what I am talking about, when I say these things and when I remark that my own remarks are not intended to be exempt from their own field of force ... if what I am talking about is well characterized by the concept of using concepts "under erasure", so be it -- I would be delighted. But I think that the subtle differences I am pointing up between Wittgenstein's truly radical conception of philosophy and Derrida's in practice somewhat more traditional conception of same are important enough that we would be well advised to use Derrida's ways of describing the matter only with extreme care (...under erasure?!). Especially as Derrida makes such extravagant claims for his set of 'non-conceptual concepts'.
So I am agreeing with Stone that, in spite of their apparent closeness, we very much need to notice the differences between Wittgenstein's critique of metaphysics on the one hand, and the Derridean critique, which mostly, in the final analysis, fails to return word to their everyday uses, on the other. But I differ from Stone somewhat, in wanting to suggest ways in which certain other critiques of metaphysics, such as the Marxian, are actually significantly closer to Wittgenstein's than we have been led to believe.
Because, to recall, what I have been doing throughout is attempting to think through carefully the related status of concepts such as 'proletarian' and 'capitalist' in Marxian thought, and of 'everyday' and 'philosophical' in Wittgensteinian thought.80
Rupert Read
University of East Anglia
Notes
- 1. The Ends of Philosophy (London:
Croom Helm, 1986), p.113. Cf. also Redner's explicit
comparison (on p.116) of Marx with PI para.116, with Wittgenstein's appeal there to return the
everyday usage of words: "[T]his is exactly what Marx undertook when he advised philosophers
'to dissolve their language into ordinary language.'"
It is worth noting the actual wording of PI 116,
which is strikingly similar, though not perhaps "exactly" the same: "When philosophers use a
word...and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever
actually used in this way in the language, which is its original home? // What we do is to bring
words back from their metaphysical, to their everyday use." [I have emended the translation. The
Anscombe translation misleadingly inclines one toward the reading of PI 116 according to which
words really do have metaphysical uses, and according to which we could speak intelligibly of
'the metaphysical language-game'. Wittgenstein speaks not of language-games where words have
their original homes, but simply of the language ("der Sprache"); language in use, which is the
home of words. As opposed to words being exhibited (as they are in (too) much philosophy, and
also (but with much pleasanter effects) in much poetry, as discussed below, and in my
"Meaningful Consequences" (jt. with J. Guetti, in Philosophical Forum
XXX: 4 (Winter 1999), pp.289-316)).]
2. Philosophical Investigations 16:4 (Oct. '93)
327-332 [henceforth 'Jolley'], to which my
piece in the same journal is a reply.
3. See e.g. her The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge,
MA: M.I.T., 1991). In what follows, I follow
Diamond's (and Conant's) exemplary reading of Wittgenstein as resolutely anti-theoretical and
anti-thesis, as highly-continuous in his concerns in his philosophy early and late, and as committed
throughout to an 'austere' conception of nonsense (and thus to 'profound' nonsense being an empty
category).
4. But this is not to imply that there is something which is not statable
although it ideally would be.
5. Although 'the later Wittgenstein' found it hard to see things this way, as
evidenced for example by the toughness of his few remarks in PI on T L-P. Compare also the following: "In my
former book the solution of problems was still far too little presented in a plain manner. It still
appeared too much as though discoveries were necessary in order to solve our problems and
everything was still too little conveyed in the form of the grammatically obvious in ordinary
language. Everything still appeared too much like discoveries." MS 109, pp.212-3, cited by
Hilmy on p.211 of his The Later Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell,
1987). But it is important to
note that what Wittgenstein takes exception to here is his own manner of presentation of his
attempt to wrestle with "our" problems. And
this is exactly my thought -- that it is the manner of presentation that primarily changes between
the 'early' and the 'later' Wittgenstein, not many of the philosophical thoughts themselves (Though
this formulation may misleadingly suggest that the style and method of Wittgenstein's work can be
dissociated from its content; indeed, that it really has a content in any traditional sense.). It should
I trust be obvious that it is to some extent Wittgenstein himself, and -- much more accentuatedly --
Hilmy (compare pp.61-3 and p.211f. of his book), and many others besides, plus to some extent
Jolley, who have dichotomised Wittgenstein's later philosophy from his earlier one. I reject such
formulations of a dichotomy, again following Diamond and Conant. I am thus committed to the
claim that Wittgenstein somewhat misinterpreted his own 'early philosophy' in later years -- or at
least, that he was hard on it in the light of its massive misunderstanding in others' hands. If all this
is right then it is of course true to say among other things that "the author of the Tractatus" as later
construed by Wittgenstein (and others!) was not in fact identical with the implied author of the
Tractatus, according to the best available interpretation of that work.
6. S. Hilmy's "'Tormenting Questions' in Philosophical Investigations
section 133" (in Arrington and Glock (eds.) Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations'
(London: Routledge, 1991), pp.96-9).
7. I argue against Malcolmian and other 'use-theory' versions of
Wittgenstein (construed as giving us substantive accounts of how everyday language works) in "Meaningful Consequences"
(op.cit.). (See also n.55, below)
8. And even if, per impossibile, one could, this would still not amount to
there being such a thing as "the [singular] real philosophical discovery", only lots of little such 'discoveries' (and
again, we should note that it is the dissolution of various particular confusions and problems that
Wittgenstein mentions with approval at the close of para.133.). In this connection, it is worth
noting the earlier format of 133, in the 'Big Typescript': "Problems are solved (difficulties
eliminated), not a single problem. . . 'But then we will never come to the end of our job!' Of
course not, because it has no end." (quoted on p.165 of David Antin's "Wittgenstein among the
poets", Modernism/Modernity 5:1 (Jan. '98), 149-166).
9. To be more precise: I shall distinguish later between the project of
ending philosophy (itself conceptually confused, according to Wittgenstein as I have expounded him) and the aim of
closing philosophy (perhaps also mired in nonsense, but at least in ways which are of interest and
moment).
10. For detailed critique of Baker and Hacker along these lines, consult
the essays by Conant and E. Witherspoon in Read and Crary (eds) The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2000);
and Read and Guetti, "Acting from Rules: 'Internal Relations' versus 'Logical Existentialism'"
(International Studies in Philosophy XXVIII/2 (1996), pp.43-62).
11. I suspect that there is the same flatness when it comes to 'base' and
'superstructure' in Marxism. My quasi-Gramscian thought here is that one should put all of society's productions and
reproductions potentially on a level, not privileging one set of relations (as in economic
determinism), if one is to understand society in a non-impositional way -- and if one is to avoid
self-refutation, by privileging philosophy / social theory / 'science' above (e.g.) economic factors,
in the very gesture of supposedly privileging economic factors! Philosophy cannot intelligibly
understand itself to be merely superstructural. (Though it can perhaps understand itself to be
parasitic and aim at being dispensable, in the special sense for these ideas elucidated in this
paper.)
12. There is of course a problem specifically with my likening of Marx
to Wittgenstein on this score of conception of philosophy: Marx quite often self-identifies as a scientist. As a Truth
teller.This is completely contrary to the tenor of Wittgenstein's philosophy and Wittgenstein's
self-identification. Allow me to return to this in the closing Sections of this paper; for now, let me
merely mention that I think and hope that this self-identification of Marx's is, surprisngly, quite
largely removable in favour of an alternative, more coherent and less troubling philosophical
identification.
13. Though here we should note the absence of effective technical terms
from philosophy -- this is very important. See my "On the eliminability of technical terms from philosophical
enquiries" (paper given to the Human Sciences Seminar, Manchester Metro. U., Oct. 31 1996;
and to the Philosophy Seminar, Humanities, Exeter University, Dec. 4 1998).
14. Cf. Wittgenstein's RFM II 6; and my remarks below on a certain
sense in which it is intelligible to aim at the closure of philosophy, at the closure of established traditions and the
continual self-deconstruction of one's own efforts at closure. Cf. also the following vital remark
from p.61 of Culture and Value(ed. von Wright, Chicago: U. Chicago
Press, 1960): "I am by no means sure that I should prefer a continuation of my work by others to a change in the way people
live which would make all these questions superfluous. (For this reason I could never found a
school)". We will return to the spirit of this crucial thought later.
15. This is what I call elsewhere (see my Ph.D, Practices
Without Foundations?: Sceptical Readings of Wittgenstein and Goodman; Rutgers, 1995) 'philosophical ethnography'. One describes -- and people may be affected / persuaded by one's descriptions. One perhaps hopes that they will be. (See below, for connection of this with the more venerable notion of 'philosophical
anthropology'.)
16. And it tends to be discussed a lot by recent French philosophers --
see below. Guetti grasps the nettle that Derrida (on p.98 of Limited Inc. (Evanston IL:
NorthWestern, 1988 (henceforth LI))) shies away from -- he (Guetti) is prepared to risk saying that there is a sense in which the novelist or poet truly has truck with a general citationality. That, in short, we could do worse than
to hear all literature as being defined by its being quotation, or reported speech.
17. See our "Meaningful Consequences" (op. cit.).
18. See Conant's recent work. And compare p.56 of
Culture and Value: "Don't for heaven's sake be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense."
19. See for instance Wittgenstein's On Certainty
(New York: Blackwell, 1969) (henceforth OC), para.501.
20. Among other reasons, perhaps, because (as we have noted above)
Wittgenstein elsewhere joins Pragmatism in saying that 'pure description' can only ever be an idealisation out of the
instrumentality which is language in action, language being used to do things in the world.
21. Cf. Winch's strategy in The Idea of a Social Science
(London: Routledge, 1990 (1958):
"[F]irst, a criticism of some prevalent ideas about the nature of philosophy; second, a criticism of
some prevalent contemporary ideas about the nature of the social studies... . [M]y main war aim
will be to demonstrate that the two apparently diverse fronts on which the war is being waged are
not in reality diverse at all; that to be clear about the nature of philosophy and to be clear about the
nature of the social studies amount to the same thing. For any worthwhile study of society must be
philosophical in character and any worthwhile philosophy must be concerned with the nature of
human society." (p.3). Winch is proclaiming here the inevitability of a certain connection between
philosophy and (the understanding of) social relations. From which the possible tenability of the
analogies I am hunting for can be deduced.
22. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
(ed. Baltimore; New York: McGraw-Hill,
1963), pp.189-193. "[It functions] in a way which contradicts the inherent potential, the natural
purposes, of human drives." (S. Mulhall, "Species-being, teleology and individuality"
( Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
3:1, 1998), p.91) Here, of course, we see also one particular older-fashioned completely
pre-Existentialist and pre-Post-Modern element of Marx's philosophical anthropology that would
probably be disagreed with by Wittgenstein, and by many of the rest of us: a rather too Innatist
picture of drives etc. as pre-given. See n.34 below, for more agreeable aspects of what Marx is up
to hereabouts, though nevertheless we shall not give below -- for reasons of space -- more than
extremely tentative hints as to whether one can make sense of the notion of something (namely
money, in this case) distorting what it is so much a part of (namely, society).)
23. See e.g. para.s 96 and 110 of PI. And also Louis Sass's
The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind (Ithaca, NY: Cornell,
1994).
24. I leave aside for now complications consequent upon the respects in
which 'use-value' for Marx is arguably a pre-social concept, and thus arguably not as alike to [linguistic] use as one
might desire.
25. See the Section on "Mulhall on the early Marx", below, for more on
the perfectly everyday -- Heideggerian -- sense in which Marx is speaking of objects being for us useful-objects, rather
than objects of contemplation. Marx is reminding us that the monetary value of something cannot
be deduced from its appearance -- and nor even from its practical usefulness to us.
26. Though there are versions of psychotherapy which resist much more
strongly than Freud
Theoreticistic and Scientistic impulses, and which work toward their own eventual diminution --
for example, Gestalt, and Co-Counselling.
27. For example, there are (later) parts of that book that it is hard to
avoid reading as,
unfortunately, a quasi-empirical '(economic) theory of history', past and future -- though see
below, where I suggest that if we understand the contemporary point of 'Scientific' Socialism (in
any case more Engels's creature than Marx's), we will be less hard on Marx's sometime
'scientism'; and that we can then look to a Socialism between Science and Utopia,
and stress that Marx's 'prophesying' was actually intelligently and almost rigorously deliberately
low-key and thin on the ground. (See n.56, below)
28. One thinks perhaps of the Tractatus here, of its supposed (and in a sense quite actual and indeed thorough-going) denunciation of its own analyses. . . See the closing Sections of this
paper.
29. Andrews, unpublished, p.1. Nested quote from
Capital.
30. Andrews, op. cit., p.1.
31. See also p.193 of Specters of Marx.
32. See Lenin against Kautsky on the French Revolution (p.472 of his
Selected Works (NY: International, 1971). But first, see Kautsky on the Paris Commune (pp.43-45 of his The Dictatorship of the Proletariat): "If in 1875 Marx did not explain in detail what
he understood by the dictatorship of the proletariat, it might well have been because he had expressed himself on
this matter a few years before, in his study of the Civil War in France. In that work he wrote: "The
Commune was essentially a government of the working class..." Thus the Paris Commune was,
as Engels expressly declared in his introduction to the third edition of Marx's book, 'The
Dictatorship of the Proletariat.' "It was, however, at the same time not the suspension of
democracy, but was founded on its most thoroughgoing use, on the basis of universal suffrage.
The power of the government was subjected to universal suffrage... Universal suffrage was to
serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every employer in the
search for the workmen and managers in his business..." Marx speaks constantly here of the
general suffrage of the whole people, and not of the votes of a specially privileged class. The
dictatorship of the proletariat was for him a condition which necessarily arose in a real
democracy, because of the overwhelming numbers of the proletariat." We might
risk speaking here not just of the idea of democracy as a profound and important one, but as one
mirroring a fundamental insight concerning the nature of society and equality -- and perhaps as
more, then, than just a strategy. If Kautsky is right (and see p.29 of his text), then the logic of the
dictatorship of the proletariat in democracy leads of its own accord to the dictatorship of all --
which of course is not dictatorship at all (see n.46, below). Though considerations of strategy
might impel us to the propaganda of 'Science', or even to violence and dictatorship in its more
obvious sense, the idea of democracy could be argued to be intrinsically linked to the notion of a
whole people, of a community, and indeed of species-being -- on which, see below.
'But ... doesn't the (notion of the) proletariat still necessarily exclude? Surely, it is defined in opposition to the
capitalist class?' Well, here is an intriguing comment on this matter, made by Kautsky: "[The
proletariat's] great historical mission consists in the fact that the collective interests of society fall
into line with its permanent class interests, which are not always the same thing as special
sectional interests. It is a symptom of the maturity of the proletariat when its class consciousness
is raised to the highest point by its grasp of large social relations and ends. This understanding is
only made completely clear...not only by theoretical teaching, but by the habit of regarding things
as a whole instead of looking at special interests which are furthered and extended by engaging in
political action." (Kautsky pp.29-30. One of the ellipses contains an unfortunate
reference to 'Scientific Socialism', which I think distracts from the argument as, after Kautsky, I
am (re-) making it here). The collective interests of society coincide with the proletariat's interests,
Kautsky claims. A fascinating idea for our purposes in this paper; but how can this be? It can be, but surely only if it turns out that, in the end, everyone is in a certain crucial sense a proletarian. If, once false consciousness and ideology are overcome -- or as the means of their overcoming --, all can be persuaded to see themselves as
workers, then we will, for Marx, truly be human beings. ...We see in the debate over 'the
dictatorship of the proletariat', albeit through a glass darkly, thoughts about human beings and
society which are importantly to be found in more abstract form in Marx's philosophy. And
crucially, I think, these thoughts actually can shed still a little more light on the problem of
parasitism and idleness and illusion which is our main topic.
33. See p.170 of Derrida's Specters of Marx
(London: Routledge, 1994) for his effort at
deconstructing the class divisions within labour consequent upon distinguishing between hand and
brain. Let me remark again that the irony of this deconstruction, unnoticed by Derrida, is that it
must be to the end of clearing the ground for the recognition of different types of labour in all their
specificity -- in such specificity that they may not even be called 'labor' any longer.
34. One might think here of the similar sense in which the recent work of
Ian Hacking has
endeavoured to establish different versions of 'social constructivism', and to suggest that, in any
sense of those words which is not deeply-confused, one ought to see (say) Multiple Personality
Disorder as 'more deeply' socially constructed than mind, and mind as in turn more socially
constructed than a table.
35. For support, see e.g. pp.77-78 of Derrida's LI.
36. See the close of David Lamb's "The philosophy of praxis in Marx
and Wittgenstein" (Phil.
Forum XI:3, Spring 1980).
37. Culture and Value, p.11.
38. Compare Garfinkel's otherwise paradoxical remarks, involving
treating what can appear to
be factual statements as "recommendations", etc., in his "Preface" to Studies in
Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity, 167, 1984).
39. See n.54, below.
40. See A.Sivaramakrishnan's "Living with alienation: a response to
Stephen Mulhall", in
Angelaki 3:1. He (like Derrida -- see p.159-160 of
Specters of Marx, and my Appendix, above)
queries whether use-value can intelligibly be said to pre-exist sociality. See p.104 of
Sivaramakrishnan: "[Consider] the master-slave dialectic. ...[T]he master on triumphing over the
slave ceases to be a true self-consciousness, because the recognition the master needs in order to
be a self-consciousness now comes...from a subordinate consciousness. This consequence may
render Hegel even more radically egalitarian than Marx... . Two directly political implications
follow. One is that if species being -- that is, being intelligibly human -- is a form of dependency
of all upon all ... then it is not clear that we can tolerate the continued existence of a system in
which profit- or comfort- driven exchange is the sole engine of human teleology; such a system
has among other results the consequence that the very creation of a dominant and a subordinate
class deprives all members of both classes of their humanity. The second directly political
implication is that there is no need to exalt, say, the industrial working class (or any other class) as
a revolutionary class who will lead us out of enslavement by capital...; that fiction, with all its
elisions of the impact and persistence of colonialism, racism, and sexism in human thought and
action, has had disastrous consequences whenever it has been adopted by political movements
anywhere in the world." The first consequence is consonant with my discussion of the
sense in which we must understand the dominant parasitic class to be in reality simply a part of the
''subordinate'' class, a part of humanity; and the second consequence to be an admirable
contemporary extension of Kautsky's concern that we understand 'the proletariat' as widely as
possible, and that to do so will be democratic and non-exclusionary -- see n.22 above. See also
p.202f. of S.Avineri's "Labor, Alienation and Social Classes in Hegel's Realphilosophie", in
The
Legacy of Hegel (eds. O'Malley, Algozin, Kainz and Rice; The Hague: Nijhoff,
1973); and pp.51-53 of J.McCarney's "Shaping ends: Reflections of Fukuyama", New Left
Review 202 (1993), 37-53.
41. See Stephen Mulhall, "Species-Being, Teleology and Individuality
II: Kant on human
nature", in Angelaki 3:1.
42. Let us be human, as Wittgenstein once remarked. Let us also be
clear: this humanism is, at its best (contrast n.17, above), not a limited Essentialist picture of what is human. It is rather an expansive, non-constrained vision, akin to that that we find in Pragmatist-Wittgensteinianism (cf.
the Pragmatist emphasis on growth). Here is Stephen Mulhall on the topic (on pp.18-19 of his
"Species-Being, Teleology and Individuality I: Marx on species being", in Angelaki:
3:1 (April 1998): "[I]t cannot be said that human beings have a fixed or
given life-activity or species-nature. Rather...human nature is... a constantly receding goal towards
which each member of the human species must aim, not something conferred upon each person
simply by virtue of his membership of the species. Marx makes this point [as follows]: "[M]an is
not merely a natural being; he is a human natural being. he is a being for himself, and therefore, a
species-being... . Consequently, human objects are not natural objects as they present themselves
directly, nor is human sense, as it is immediately and objectively given, human sensibility and
human objectivity."" And this again buttresses the thought that thinking of Marxism as a
quasi-natural-science must be a mistake. Rather, what Marx says here is remarkably compatible
with (e.g.) a Winchian approach to 'human science'.
43. Mulhall, p.25; nested quote from the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts (ed. Baltimore. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1963). Marx goes on: "The manifestation of [the individuals'] life -- even when it
does not appear directly in the form of a communal manifestation, accomplished in association
with other men -- is, therefore, a manifestation and affirmation of social life. Individual human life
and species-life are not different things, even though the mode of existence of individual life is
necessarily either a more specific or a more general mode of species-life...".
44. Which is present, as already noted (n.30), both in Hegel, and in
Kautsky! And once its political
controversiality and potential danger is admitted, I think we can see (see n.33, above) clearly its
philosophical importance and reasonableness, when it is taken aright, too.
45. See below. It is 'also' seeing in the sense of the Wittgensteinian
Marxist 'descriptivising' of Andrews (see above) and of Nigel Pleasants's forthcoming (in History of the Human Sciences) Wittgensteinian work on the commodity.
46. Thus I am speaking in this paper of the aims and ends of philosophy
(and politics) -- I am
in a sense looking forward to the end, or at least toward the 'close', to how one hopes to overcome
or expurgate (one