On the "Ahistorical Moment" of Marxist Theorizing

Marxist theory can't constantly devolve into a question about the historical basis of our conversation--this would contiue without end, and conversation would constantly be pushed back. There must be some kind of "ahistorical moment" in theory. But that ahistorical moment is not determined willy nilly. The initial "positivity" of our historical theorizing, e.g. our suppositions about future communism, must be traced back to their presuppositions, to our "starting points". The ahistorical moment on which our thought is based must be sought. This is, I think, what Chris' last point to me was at the end of our last meeting: that this is the "dialectical" nature of historical Marxist thought.

It seems to me that the "ahistorical" moment, which we ought to locate as theoreticians, is ultimately constitued by the conditions for the possibility of our asking the questions we do. I.e., while we begin with certain positive moments--for example our imaginings about the way things might be after the revolution--our ultimate duty as theoreticians is to trace what makes this imagination possible in the first place. These conditions of our possibility, our "ahistorical" moments, are constituted by our material situation in late Capitalism. While they're material, they constitute the place where we can no longer ask about the "historicality" of our conversation, because they provide the conditions for asking about it in the first place.

Therefore, this line of questioning does not devolve into constant meta-critique. Instead, it leads back to capitalism's conditions for the possibility of questioning. But it also thereby leads back into a certain kind of positivity. It leads back to an inquiry into the material movements constituting capital which make possible our lines of inquiry. This suggests that the line of questioning we pursue is actually the result of real, material movements which make possible the interrogation of the past and of the future. I.e., it leads back into the materiality of what Hegel calls in the lectures on the philos. of history the "absolute present," the material conditions for the possibility of asking about time in the first place. This materiality of capitalism can't be endlessly "historicized" because it forms the conditions for the possibility of analyzing revolution and capitalism in the first place--it forms the starting-point or "present" from which any genealogy or history can begin at all. So those capitalist, material movements are the starting-point, or the "present," of theory. But this isn't a privileged position by which to grasp the totality of history--it's not some kind of "mastery" of our "ground". Instead, this is a self-consciously fragile historical spot at which it is no longer possible or helpful to keep asking "meta" questions--theory recognizes itself within the "blind spot" of history, the "darkness of the lived moment."

So while a historical inquiry needs to ultimately acknowledge an "ahistorical" moment from which it begins, this can't be an empty gesture towards something that is beyond thought--the blind spot we can't see and therefore don't have to think about. Instead, the "ahistorical" represents the proper object of Marxist historical study, since it's the "absolute present" from which the past or future can be seen at all. What initially appeared as a negative line of questioning--the possibly unendingly "meta" level of interrogating our imagination after the revolution--actually winds up being real positivity, the means by which the past and future can finally be interrogated in the way proper to them.

It seems to me that what's required at the end of the day is a "Critique of Revolutionary Reason" in the Kantian sense--to direct our thought right at the conditions making revolutionary theory possible. It seems to me this is not only absolutely crucial, but also implied by most of what Marx does, since he constantly distinguishes himself not only from bourgeois political economists, but also from other revolutionaries.