Parahistories of Self-Instituting Sunlight

In a conversation with Anton Vidokle published earlier this year, Hito Steyerl noted how the baroque and bombastic style of Georges Bataille and his followers has inhibited the reception of their ideas concerning planetary accumulation. What follows is an attempt to consider this reality with less in the way of “synth violins and too much death metal,” as she put it so perfectly. (See Anton Vidokle and Hito Steyerl, “Cosmic Catwalk and the Production of Time,” e-flux journal 82, May 2017 →.) Beyond Bataille & Co., I should mention also what is known as the “surplus” approach to questions of distribution and relative prices within classical economics, in contrast to the marginalist emphasis on the substitutability of factors of production and the “forces” of supply and demand. The approach developed here has significance for both schools, I hope, but cannot pretend to less sympathy for the former. Tony Aspromourgos details the history of this tradition with a rare combination of excitement and erudition in The Science of Wealth and On the Origin of Classical Economics, while the debates on capital theory for which it is known can be found in the volume of the Palgrave dictionary dedicated to the topic, as well as G.C. Harcourt's Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital.

John Bellamy Foster, among others, has done much to develop a political economy of the 'metabolic rift.'

Frequently the reasons for this overlap with the psychology of addiction: accumulation addicts over-accumulate sunlight and imperil the planet. Sometimes one can argue an accumulation-addict into recovery, sometimes one cannot. But there is good evidence that denouncing addicts as moral failures is not the most effective way of treating metabolic disorders of whatever kind.

It is interesting to think about what sort of number system different theoretical eras operate in. Is Hegel base-two or base-three? Binary or ternary? In any case it seems clear that we are, at the moment, approaching a quaternary -or base-four - era, and from a number of different directions. Badiou's four flavors of truth, which follows Lacan, is a famous example. More recently Vivian Ziherl has written of a 'fourfold articulation' while Jodi Dean offers 'Four Theses on the Comrade' in this very issue. Elizabeth Povinelli has diagnosed four fundamental axioms of contemporary critical theory the last of which, 'the impossibility of mutual thriving' I read as recovering an emphasis not at all dissimilar from the one placed on class struggle below.

Louis Althusser did the most to develop the significance of this concept as the first effectively scientific object in the history of history. Althusser's Marx would be the discoverer of the scientific “continent” of history in the way the Newton was the discoverer of the scientific “continent” of physics. However, Althusser’s commitments within a rapidly de-Stalinizing French Communist Party required him to oversell, understandably, Marx’s success on this score. Derrida noticed this immediately, and says so explicitly in an interview with Michael Sprinker in The Althusserian Legacy, and somewhat more elliptically in Specters of Marx. Happily or otherwise, we no longer need to think with respect to the internal stakes of the Communist Party (and it is interesting to read Althusser's discussion of Montesquieu's disguised critique of French absolutism, in Politics and History, as his own sly acknowledgement of this constraint) nor resist speaking directly about the limitations of Marx’s approach to production, which fails to define itself as a concept in relation to other concepts, as tradition dictates. (See LeCourt’s Marxism and Epistemology on this and much more.) Instead, Marx uses production to negate two distinctly nonconceptual or unscientific legacies: the Hegelian mystery of spirit and the anarchist fixation on circulation or exchange, or what I call “representation.” Marx’s “concept” of production is thus actually an anti-nonconcept consisting of two negations laid one on top of the other: a “political” anti-circulationism and a “philosophical” anti-spiritualism. (Discussed in Todd Hollander’s Economics of Karl Marx, Howard and King’s still-standard The Political Economy of Karl Marx, and finally in King's essay "Value and Exploitation" contained in Bradley and Howard's Classical and Marxian Political Economy.) This double negation has allowed partisans of production to shift back and forth between anti-representationalism and anti-spiritualism as needed, and so accounts (alongside the Abrahamic legacy more generally) for the incredible endurance of production as a theoretical masternode, we might say. This legacy reaches its baroque peak in the first few pages of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, when the non-concept of production reveals its theological roots by expanding to include absolutely everything. (The embrace of production is D&G's own Oedipal concession, of course, the price they must pay to Daddy Marx for his help in beating up Daddy Freud. Marx's oft cited but rarely understood refusal to identify as a 'Marxist' was a refusal of precisely this patriarchal role. The difference between science and religion may finally come down to the difference between those who identify by the proper name of some father and those who pledge allegiance instead to the name of a discipline, method or tradition considered separately from the big men who practiced it. Science might be nothing more than refusing the shelter of a proper name, even if that means squabbling over this or that neologism like deconstruction, structural causality, or agential realism. In a career marked by great titles, "Marx & Sons" Derrida's enraged reply to the petty responses to Specters of Marx might be the best of them.) My own efforts, here and elsewhere, are chiefly to give production the scientific dignity Althusser wanted for it but failed to establish: by defining it only against its peers, namely the concepts of representation, distribution, and reproduction (formerly consumption), and not against whatever mysticisms might have come before it. Be careful of battling mysticisms, Nietzsche might have added, lest you become mystical.

Tortorici points out that 'ether' is probably not the best example here, and that something like 'the four humors' might be clearer. I keep ether because Einstein's discussion of it in "Ether and Relativity" hews so closely to the difficulty I am trying to capture with this idea of parahistory, even as he concludes the ether might not be destined for the dustbin of history after all! Still, the reader comes away with a palapable sense of a parahistorical question, namely, "will there have always been ether?" Reckoning with the strange reality of the 'will-there-have-always-been' has been the issue since the beggining. Not only this, but ether also allows me to cite the term's recent resurrection as the name for a cryptocurrency designed for the automated dissemination of 'smart contracts' which is a perfect example of a revolutionary development in what, further down, I call 'the value-process.'

The triplicate “syntax-experience-principle” (as well as the progression of the first four philosophical logics further down) is Laruelle’s in Philosophies of Difference, though I don’t know his project well enough yet to say with any certainty how my deployment differs, or doesn’t, from his own.

The emphasis on recognition and recording is from Grace Lee Boggs, Cornelius Castoriadis & C. L. R. James, who write, in Facing Reality, that the essential task is to "recognize and record.”

A subgenre of metaphysics, philosophy demands that its phenomena settle their accounts with history one way or another. When philosophy recognizes metaphysical desire at work in itself, it begins to negate its own name, if not always transcend it, and this is finally what sends it tumbling into the pit of anxiety to which it had fallen by the end of the twentieth century, when even the exponents of what-would-have-been-philosophy felt the need to identify themselves by its negation: Derrida’s deconstruction, Groys’s anti-philosophy, Laruelle’s non-philosophy, Badiou’s delicate and reactive “philosophy” that is already less than art, politics, science, love, mathematics, theater, and maybe even less than the anti-philosophy he diagnoses in Deleuze and Lacan.

This proximity or intimacy between class struggle and philosophy is what led Althusser to remark that philosophy is class struggle in theory, by which he meant that philosophy is class struggle by other means. This is often true, but it is for this reason that political economy is summoned to describe how this could be the case.

In the Reply to John Lewis, Althusser at last recognized the priority of class struggle, but was prevented from developing the significance of this priority. It was Harry Cleaver in Reading Capital Politically who showed in detail how the relative commodification of labor-power refers not to some kind of postlapsarian totality of alienation or reification as the Romanticists would have it, but to the relative status of class struggle at the point of production. I think we can say something similar for class struggle at the point of representation, reproduction, and distribution as well.

Some of the relevant works include Judith Butler, Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain and Thermonuclear Monarchy, and Hito Steyerl, the Wretched of the Screen and Duty Free Art. The significance of counting and re-counting sets is from Badiou, of course, whose beautiful revival of idealist metaphysics finds him reading the four parahistorical processes of representation, production, reproduction, and distribution as a sequence of truth-events called art, science, love, and politics, respectively.

All of these processes have been theoretically recorded and developed across a huge range of works, such that the claim here is that most everything can be shown to concern them, singly or in combination, consciously or otherwise. As a result the only piece of theoretical originality I am prepared to claim is the insistence on a distinction between the sex-process and the body-process - between the mode of reproduction and the mode of distribution - which does so much to untangle the limitations left us by the legacy of Foucault, it seems to me, in particular. The inspiration for this separation is the surgery performed by Kozo Uno on Marx's Capital, in his Principles of Political Economy, where he similarly insists on conceptually separating the value-process from the labor-process, which Marx's residual Hegelianism had confused in the first chapter of Capital. After living with this confusion for most of my intellectual life, I am afraid I must agree with Althusser that anyone reading Marx's big book for the first time should skip this first chapter on the commodity and begin directly with the process of exchange.

The division into forces and relations is necessary to explain the division between this or that politics and this or that economics but in no way corresponds to it, any more than “the circulation of the blood” corresponds to this or that specific blood type or condition, healthful, maleficent, or otherwise.

The significance of diffraction is developed in Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway. Little in the new century has contained as much genius, insight and possibility as Barad's book, which also includes a much more detailed and concrete description of what I mean by the division of forces from relations. Following Castoriadis, I call this process iinstitutionalization, while Barad follows Foucault, via Hacking et al., in describing it in terms of the apparatus. But this difference is, pardon the pun, immaterial. What matters (!) is her development, from Niels Bohr, of the concept of complementarity which describes also what I mean by the coexistence of politics and economics. Nor is political economy itself left unconsidered in Barad's masterpiece, as her sixth chapter offers a reading of Leela Fernandes' Producing Workers which is probably a better example of what I am talking about then anything I've managed to include here. Forced to dissent from Barad's framework, I might question her reliance of Foucault's idea of power, which to my mind is still a question-begging non-concept with a suspiciously mystical pedigree, and then also ask about the prevalence of 'production' throughout her text, which does not, I don't think, immediately escape the objections to this concept detailed above in note three.

Mario Tronti develops the importance of refusal in his essay the “Strategy of Refusal.” Somewhat heretically, one can see via the crucial work of Suzanne de Brunhoff in Marx on Money that bankers’ refusal to lend in a credit crisis helps constitute the concept of value-power in a way that parallels how the refusal of work during a strike constitutes the concept of labor-power.

This is Cornelius Castoriadis, in particular in “Socialism and Autonomous Society.”