Another reply to FD

FD:

Thanks for your latest response.

A leap is just what we need. But of course this would need to be a leap neither away from Marx nor into Marx. Only that kind of a leap—neither away from a traditional framework, nor into one— could really be a leap into “something else” at all, i.e. escape its anchor. In the space of a radical leap Marx would appear as neither the glorious champion of orthodoxy nor as the boogeyman of imprisoning theoretical strictures. He would reveal himself instead in transfigured, perhaps unrecognizable forms—new Marxes whose tasks are neither to guide nor to be rejected but to function as the sites of constant theoretical violence. (We’d meet him only after his crucifixion and resurrection, not as a ghost to be laid to rest but as liberated repetition. This would be a mysticism of an entirely different order in which all the figures of the past could appear in endlessly unrecognizable forms.) This is the kind of leap I’ve been trying to indicate—neither towards Marx nor away from Marx—though you seem intent upon reading me as a traditional Marxist operating within a traditional framework (e.g., in your many encouragements regarding my personal growth).

Your thesis is an exciting and thought-provoking one: change can happen only where change is impossible. Thus we’re in a “room with no exits” but in the position of looking for one, and corollary to this is the following: the future cannot be captured from the present and so therefore there’s nothing to “predict” in a standard sense. We’re left looking for a future which would be unpredictable. What we’ve been calling “grace” lies within this paradox. This is a thesis you verify with the very interesting systems-analyses that follow and I think this is exactly the place to start if we’re going to achieve a real leap.

But it’s interesting that throughout your discussion the ghost of a certain temporality remains: a “past” with a particular relation to the “present”. The conjunction of the two appears in the form of a complex set of systems of self-preservation interacting in all sorts of ways in conservative directions. This in turn determines what counts as the “future”; i.e., the particular conjunction between past and present dominates the future in a conservative way in a system like capital. What’s more, you note that systems like capital thrive on innovation. As a result, change itself, and so the “future” too, become co-opted. Real change therefore cannot be located in some uncomplicated way within the systems of capital in which we find ourselves (in the past/present); we require some kind of radical break with those systems for a really new future to come about at all. Something like this is, I think, presupposed in NC as well: there the problem of revolution is framed as a problem of the relation of what is/has been to what can be.

It’s in this sense, as I read you, that you provide a certain kind of schema (no matter how serious you are when you present it) that identifies the conditions for the possibility of something like real change: 1.) a catastrophic transformation of the environing-systems which determine the nexus “past/present” in its movement into the “future”; and 2.) the emergence of some latency or “left-over” of the systems’ operations which is capable of doing something else in that breach. Your thoughts can therefore be put in terms of the above temporality: the change from the nexus “past/present” into a radically different “future” is possible only where the nexus “past/present” breaks down and therefore does not dominate that change.

This ghost of temporality, however, isn’t some irreducible remainder of your discussion but instead more like a forgotten soul pointing us someplace else. We need to ask: “In what sense does capital have a past, a present, or a future at all?” I’m thinking in particular about those terrific Camatte quotes at the beginning of your post, as well as of the way dead labor dominates capital through and through. Capital’s reproduction requires, of course, a great deal of “speculation” about the “future,” and constant preparation for it. So in a certain sense capital (as Camatte notes) is dominated by a future into which it is always rushing headlong. But it rushes onward in a particular fashion: only by way of the dominating dead labor which returns interminably. In this way capital’s reproductions are utterly repetitive, and so are a “series” of relentless resurrections. The content of whatever counts as “future” is in fact only the “past”: it’s the recreation (in endlessly variable iterations which might even count as “qualitative” change) of the same old stuff by way of all the dead we have materially inherited, in the same old relations of domination. We therefore have to complete the sentiment you refract through Camatte in your post by turning it into its opposite: capitalism has no future at all. And so there’s also no “present” to capital—no now at all. Instead, capital is the perfect realization of the eternal return. The question then must be asked, “Where do the concepts of ‘future’ and ‘present’ come from in capitalism, as well as the concept of a 'past' defined in differential relation to the former two concepts?” An interrogation of this would, I think, reveal that both concepts come from capital itself—in its discourse by itself about itself. It is possible—and I think this could be shown—that these concepts are rooted in capital’s ideological occlusion of its own practices and its own temporality—a discourse about the eternal return, about the planning of that return, in a way that occludes it. The concept “future” (and the related concepts “present” and a differential “past”) therefore require interrogation in whatever form they appear, even in theorization of an unthinkable or unpredictable future. Even the attempt to think an unthinkable future would itself still be employing –in an attenuated form—a temporal framework (which includes attenuated but still operative distinctions between the past/present and the future) by which capital ideologically relates itself to itself. Yet these temporal, possibly ideological concepts are reproduced—in admittedly strained form—in NC as well as below. We see this in the deployment of terms like “change” in the first place—a change from something to something else (“a change is possible only where change is impossible”). This is especially clear in the framework of NC, which asks: “Where could the revolution come from, when and if it comes?”, which inevitably contains certain unquestioned temporal presuppositions.

So whatever we mean when we discuss the emergence of the new requires that we become radically suspicious of any form of discourse that talks about a future at all and in any form whatsoever—whether a radical/unpredictable/impossible future or not—as well as, of course, of discourses about the present at all, or about the past in differential relation to these two at all. This would include suspicion even of what you’ve presented as a fanciful systems-analysis which nevertheless tacitly presupposes the conceptual nexus “past/present” in order to interrogate two kinds of “futures”— a system-dominated future and (an “impossible”) change which escapes from such system-domination. This is certainly not to say we need to abandon the theorizing of revolution. But it is a challenge to do so in a resurrected way in the wake of capital’s crucifixion of time.

And this requires something else too. Your thesis is this: change is not possible where change is possible. But a radical interrogation of temporality would require a rethinking of the categories of possibility/actuality as well—of the “possible” as well as of the “impossible.” The categories of possibility and impossibility carry within themselves indicators of what “can”/”can’t” be and what “is not”—and so temporal markers of past, present, and future. Of course, “actuality” does the same in a different way. To radically question the “present” and the “future” is therefore to attempt to think “possibility” or “impossibility” in a leap outside of (not away from) what “can” be, what “is”, and what “no is longer.” This would be to develop a new vocabulary—outside of “possibility” and “impossibility”—with which to talk. In other words, what you say indicates the necessity for entirely new categories of thought—new logics of revolution to account for and describe the movement of “something else” within capitalism which are not limited by the strictures of certain notions of time and of “possibility” and "impossibility”. The attempt to think these new logics with the old vocabulary—ultimately the vocabulary of capital—results in paradox; this need not be the end, but rather the beginning of a search for better logics. (This is certainly not to say that developing a new mode of discourse about these things is somehow necessary for revolution, etc.)

I see your text straining towards something like this. The formulation of your major point is paradoxical: something new can happen only when it can’t happen. It’s here that you locate a “ghost” that haunts the peripheries of capital-systems as an irreducible remainder. But perhaps it’s no ghost in the machine but instead the symptom of a forgotten temporal framework—from the past or future we can’t say—which returns again and again and thereby also points us towards the need for a new thought altogether. In other words, what if the ghost you have found is the sign of the extreme theoretical stress which is necessary at the limits of a conceptual framework reliant upon a certain temporality—a ghost which isn’t irreducible but a guide towards the need for the resurrection of our thinking and of time itself? What if your discussions of change in NC and below are paradoxical and require a reference to a “grace” only because those discussions still rely, in one form or another, on capital’s own discourse to make their point?

To sum up, I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with what you say about the ghostly possibility of change, or about systems, etc. I’m once more asking three interlocking questions: What are the theoretical presuppositions that make thinking like you do, in NC and below, possible in the first place; where do they come from; and do we in fact need to take them as our presuppositions?