life; that labor, production, is always from conditions already humanly ..... After Engels's death in 1895 Eleanor Marx gained possession of many of Marx' papers.
Marx and the Meter of Nature*
As an ideology counterposed to the ideology of capitalism, Marxism has imploded. 1 The promissory note issued with any project of "rethinking Marxism" may seem now, in the wake of autumn 1989, mostly beside the point. And yet one can argue, as Meister (1990) has, that the relevance of Marx has never been greater. I share in the conviction. But the difficulty with it is not only that the claim must be made good at a time when the politics of credibility could hardly be less favorable. One must also contend with the circumstance that a text named Marx is, like any monumental text, notoriously far short of univocity. Which Marx, if any, has undiminished relevance? Readers, Marxist or not, have waged combat for the body throughout this century, and the legacy of that combat includes a series of traps which arrest efforts to think anew. Perhaps the biggest of the traps stems from the intermittent, often ambivalent efforts "to make Marx useful" to the prevailing framework of social science. Once within the normalizing circuits of that framework, the aim of rethinking Marx tends to be realized in conclusions that look very much like premises of the prevailing framework. Or as Lyotard (1984 [1979], 63) observed in a less specific context, "The stronger the 'move' [to think anew], the more likely it is to be denied the minimum consensus, precisely because it changes the rules of the game upon which consensus had been based." But if Marx's thinking does retain relevance at the close of this century, it must be chiefly because important constructions not otherwise currently available can be made of his thinking. I shall try to make the case for one particular and rather fundamental set of constructions-fundamental in the sense that the constructions ramify throughout the entirety of Marx's work and make of it an argument quite unlike others. The apparent centerpiece of these constructions is the category "nature," which conventionally serves as a contrast term to "society" and to *
This is the prepublication text of a paper published in the journal, Rethinking Marxism, volume 6 (Summer 1993), pp. 104-122.
1
In a paper prepared for a symposium of the Tenth World Congress of Sociology, Mexico City, 1982, I expressed the hope that Marx’ works would not be forgotten once the form of the Russian empire then existing as the USSR had collapsed (see Hazelrigg 1986, although at Andrei Zdravomyslov’s request I removed that statement from the paper’s conclusion). Perhaps that hope will yet be fulfilled.
"culture" at the same time that it names a purportedly necessary condition to the existence of any society or culture whatsoever. According to Lukács' reading of Marx, Nature is a societal category. That is to say, whatever is held to be natural at any given stage of social development, however this nature is related to man and whatever form his involvement with it takes, i.e., nature's form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all socially conditioned (Lukács 1971 [1923], 234). Is that Marx's argument, and if so what does it mean? Since the passage from Lukács is somewhat ambiguous, 2 let me formulate the question more precisely: Did Marx argue that nature, nature "all the way down," is wholly a human production, wholly within history? This is the question to be considered here. I shall try to demonstrate the importance of the question, and even more the importance of the difference in answers. By way of preview, I should note that I claim no special insight into Marx's intentions. Rather, my principal concern is with the logical structure of an argument. In broad outline, that argument holds that human realities are humanly made; that the concrete existence of human beings, their practices, their knowledges, their actualities and potentialities, possibilities and necessities, are products of labor (or "labor power"), by which I mean most generally the historically determinant activity of making human life; that labor, production, is always from conditions already humanly produced; that no condition (or precondition) of human existence can escape the orbit of the already humanly produced; that while presuppositions such as the Kantian category of "alien causes," or causes that cannot be known "in themselves" but only inferred from their effects, may be (indeed, are) practiced with real consequences, those practices (the "alien causes," etc.) are themselves humanly produced, and the practices are not "just language," "just thoughts," but concrete practices of life, world, self-being. The coherence of this argument accommodates naturalism's nature-nature as the genetic origin and logical precondition of any possible society, any possible culture-but only as a production within history.
2
Indeed, for Lukács it proves to say less than one might suppose. Nature may be a "societal category"; nevertheless "it is clear that Copernican astronorny was true before Copernicus but had not been recognized as such" (Lukács 1971 [1923), 237). Kolakowski's view probably accords with Lukács' position: human being "is acquainted with nature not as it is in itself but through the medium of a socially created system of needs" (Kolakowski 1978, I: 266; see also Schmidt 1971 [1965], 167).
Refutation of a Legend? Norman Geras (1983, 11) has disputed the claim that Marx denied "the idea of a universal human nature:" Various scholars have contributed to this "legend," as Geras calls it, by endorsing one or another version of the claim either in approval or in skeptical notice of it (e.g., Tucker 1961,165-66; Bottomore 1973,435; Soper 1979, 75, 99). The endorsements were not necessarily meant to be also about "nature," as distinguished from the more particular "human nature"; most likely they were not. But the extension can be brought into the picture at least to this extent: if the claim that Marx denied "a universal human nature" must be rejected, then the extension of that claim to the more general category, "nature," must also be rejected insofar as "human nature" is a member of the general category. What is Geras' case? First of all, one should not make too much of his choice of vocabulary when he contends (1983, 14-15) that Marx did not deny "the idea of a universal human nature," or when he says that while Marx did dismiss "certain conceptions of human nature" he did not reject "all conceptions of a human nature." What is at issue for Geras is not merely one or another "idea" or "conception" of a human nature but the actual existence of "a universal human nature." So the issue is: did Marx deny the existence of a universal human nature, or did he question in what that existence consists? Certainly human beings produce themselves and in the process produce a human nature. And, manifestly, human beings have, in producing themselves, produced a nature—not just an idea of nature, not just an idea of the existence of nature, but a concrete nature, a concrete practice of what nature is. Geras' position is that there is a universal human nature (and, by implication at least, nature), that it is genetically and logically prior to, and necessary condition to, human production as such, regardless of whether anyone has got the conception of it right. That, too, is a human production, of course— except that Geras rejects its status as such. The question is, then, did Marx "believe in" that existence as an existence not of human production? Geras builds his "refutation of a legend" primarily through a reading of the sixth of Marx' "Theses on Feuerbach." The choice is recommended, Geras says, by the fact that it contains the one passage most often pointed to as evidence of Marx' rejection of a universal human nature: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations" (Marx 1976 [1924), 4). Does this mean that "human nature," whatever else it may be, is simply an effect of "the ensemble of social relations"? Geras (1983, 35) argues that it does
not: "That there are general human characteristics inherent in each individual, irrespective of the ensemble of social relations (or the 'particular form of society'), is not only true but obviously so. The denial of this is not just, equally obviously, false. It is absurd." That Marx would have argued anything so absurd is itself absurd. In Geras' estimation, the proposition that "the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual" but is instead "the ensemble of the social relations" is a peculiar statement, marked by "logical incoherence," and should be dismissed. 3 This estimation sets the terms of Geras' subsequent evaluation of the sixth thesis. The dismissal neglects the fact that Marx' claim of "an identity where none seems possible" is fundamental to the radically different character of his entire project. 4 For Geras, one has no choice but to begin with the individual human being as a condition necessary to the existence of any social relations whatsoever. Geras imagines an ontologic of origin and genesis, according to which any human being is first of all an individual creature of organic needs and dispositions. Therefore, as beginning point to a "purely logical analysis," the individual human being must be an identity, a self-identity, that does not, simply cannot, derive from social relations. For Marx, however, the individual human being is an effect, a product, of the existing ensemble of social relations. And contrary to Geras' reading, the allegedly peculiar proposition does not occur only in the "Theses on Feuerbach"; it is repeated in the Grundrisse and in Capital, and indeed is integral to the logical structure of Marx' unravelling of "the mystery of capital," his indictment of "the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes the historical process," and much else (see, e.g., Marx 1986 [1953], 28: 17-18, 195; 29: 98, 210; Marx 1967 [1867], 72-73, 372 n.3). Geras presses his case by arguing that when Marx referred "the essence of man" to the ensemble of social relations he meant only the social character of the individual human being, not nature's composition of an organic creature. In support of that conviction Geras cites the following: "The peculiarity of [Marx'] proposition has often been remarked upon. Marx asserts an identity where none seems possible: between a totality of relations on the one hand, and the make-up of entities that are related by and within it on the other" (Geras 1983, 35). 4 Judging from one statement in his book, Geras does in some sense "see" the point but cannot accept it. In that statement Geras (1983,52) is disputing Althusser and his students for uttering "such assertions, 'structuralist,' sociologically reductionist, in truth historicist, as that ... 'individuals' are merely the effects' of the structure" or social relations (see Althusser and Balibar 1970 [1968], 253). Clearly Geras and Althusser have not been kindred spirits in the family history of Marxisms. But while manifestly disagreeing on this matter of "human nature," as on much else, they apparently agree on at least one point: that Marx did not believe that nature, nature pure and simple, is a human production (see Althusser 1976 [1973], 55; cf. Benton 1984, xii; Geras 1990). 3
The only reason why Christianity wanted to free us from the domination of the flesh and "desires as a driving force" was because it regarded our flesh, our drives, as something foreign to us; it wanted to free us from determination by nature only because it regarded our own nature as not belonging to us. For if I myself am not nature, if my natural desires, my whole natural character, do not belong to myself—and this is the doctrine of Christianity—then all determination by nature—whether due to my own natural character or to what is known as external nature—seems to me a determination by something foreign, a fetter, compulsion used against me, heteronomy as opposed to autonomy of the spirit (Marx and Engels 1976 (1932), 254). Marx was there contending with Max Stirner's acceptance of "this Christian dialectic," which accounts for some of the passage's attitude (including the italicized phrase). What is of interest, according to Geras (1983, 62), is the affirmation of "a 'nature' human beings possess in virtue precisely of nature, not on 'the particular form of society'." But let's consider the key sentence: if I myself am not nature, if my whole natural character, including those traits called natural desires, does not belong to myself, then anything counted as a determination by nature must be a determination by something that is foreign to me, outside me; and as such that determinative "something" is a compulsion used against me. In short, the power of a determinative nature, whether qualified as "external nature" or as "internal nature," is either integral to me or foreign, outside, alien to me (cf. Castoriadis 1988 [1987], 161-62). Now, recall the basic claim, uttered by "the late Marx" as well as "the early Marx," and deemed "peculiar" by Geras: the individual human being is an ensemble of social relations. The "I" of "I am" is an effect of an ensemble of social relations. Thus, if I myself am nature, nature (whether "external" or "internal") is an effect of an ensemble of social relations. That is not quite Marx' argument, however, insofar as we read the copula as a simple identity. As Marx (1986 [1953], 28: 23) stated the point in a discussion of production, the connection is one of unity, "the unity which stems from the very fact that the subject, mankind, and the object, nature, are the same." Under the false consciousness (the false conscious-being) of nature as a separate force, any process that counts as "determination by nature" becomes a foreign agent and a compulsion used against me. Agency is attributed to "a being other than me,"
that is, other than an ensemble of social relations. "Who is this being? The gods? ... Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man" (Marx 1975 [1932], 278). Still, Geras would persist that Marx did not intend to deny the existence of a universal human nature (and thus also a nature that is not-human because logically and genetically prior to human being). Not only can Geras continue to argue that the preceding references to "nature" and to "human nature" are only to that part or aspect of each that has already been "worked on" within history; he can and does point to a number of passages in Marx that seem quite clearly to support his "refutation of a legend." For instance: The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself—geological, oro-hydrographical, climatic and so on. All historical writing must set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men (Marx and Engels 1976 [1932], 31). And from Capital Geras cites Marx' stipulation that the labor process is "a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself." 5 Labor is "the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature ... common to all forms of society" (Marx 1967 [1867), 133, 290; see also p. 351). Certainly one would be hard put to argue that such passages are necessarily not part of the very sort of abstract naturalistic materialism that Marx elsewhere rejected. Do these passages compel the conclusion that Marx did exempt a natural substrate (of "human nature" as well as of "nature") from his claims about "the ensemble of social relations"? Or do they manifest a basic inconsistency in the structure of his argument? It would be foolish to suggest that anyone who writes as voluminously as did Marx could escape the gremlins of inconsistency. Such a feat would be even more astonishing in the case of 5
Schmidt (1971 [1962], 76) says of this "metabolism of man and nature" that it "is subject to laws of nature anterior to man."
someone who wrote so sharply against the grain. I do not propose that Marx escaped the gremlins. The question is, however, do the just-cited passages evince one side of an inconsistency? One could argue as much—even after asserting that in those passages (especially the two brief passages from Capital) Marx was simply stipulating on an axiological basis his definition of the inescapable quality of human being, the activity of labor. In a great many passages spread across many years of writing (e.g., from the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 to the ethnological notebooks of 1880-82) Marx leaves no doubt that nature exists. But what sort of existence is it? In many of the passages that address the question, implicitly or explicitly, Marx says that nature is historical. Nature is the human being of life, of the productive activity of making life. Even the earth, land, exists only through labor, through agriculture. "The object of labour can only become raw material when it has already undergone a change mediated through labour" (Marx 1967 [1867], 179). And yet in Geras' example from The German Ideology Marx seems to be thinking of a naturalistic materialism of the sort that knows the existence of a nature that is entirely outside history (because the necessary condition of the start of history). If "all historical writing must set out from" the "natural bases" or "natural conditions" in which human beings find themselves ("geological, oro-hydrographical, climatic and so on"), was not Marx there intending a nonhistorical (or subhistorical) nature and a universal natural substrate to human being? 6 Likewise, Marx's initial response to Darwin's Origin, as recorded in letters to Engels (19 December 1860) and Lassalle (16 January 1861), indicates an appreciation of "Darwin's work ... in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle" (Marx and Engels 1985, 246-47, 232). However, these (and other) instances of an apparent subscription to a naturalism of "nature itself" run counter to the argumentative logic of many of the particulars of Marx' work—for example, his critique of "the origin" question (an impossible attempt to think outside history to a time of its nonexistence; see Marx 1975 [1932], 305), his critique of the abstract materialism of natural science, and his treatment of the "so-called primitive [urspriinglich: original] accumulation." With regard to natural science, for instance, it is clear that Marx was proposing "a new science" (Marcuse 1973 [1932],5), one not conceived on the model of then-
6
Or consider this sentence: "Pebbles are of no value, relatively speaking [i.e., cannot be used as unit of exchange], because they are available without production (they do not even need looking for)" (Marx 1986 [1953], 28: 112). But what is it that is not produced? Scarcity. And yet what discriminates "the scarce" from "the adequate" and "the plentiful," if not human being, the ensemble of social relations (cf. Sartre 1976 [1960], 125; Tabora 1983, 373-74).
existing science, which exhibited the same one-sided, abstract materialism Marx attacked in Feuerbach: "We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be contemplated from two sides ... the history of nature and the history of mankind. But the two sides are not to be separated. As long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned," for nature and history are not "two separate 'things' " (Marx and Engels 1932, 567; Marx and Engels 1976 [1932], 39-40). With regard to Darwin's work, moreover, Marx concluded after "taking another look" that Darwin rediscovered, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, "inventions" and Malthusian "struggle for existence." It is Hobbes' bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegel's Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an "intellectual animal kingdom," whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society (Marx and Engels 1985,381). 7 For Marx' new science, the truth of reality consists not in abstract principles to be discovered, contemplated, and then, in their truth, applied to reality; truth does not reside either in some givenness of facts or in faithful representations of pregiven thingness but in the activity of labor, of making worlds. Truth is historical, contingent, axiologic in its conditions. There are other passages in Marx that, like Geras' selection from The German Ideology, appear to be based on an abstract naturalism. The following is a case in point: The original conditions of production cannot initially be themselves produced, cannot be the results of production. (Instead of original conditions of production we might also say: the conditions for the reproduction of an increasing number of human beings by means of the natural process of the two sexes. For if this reproduction appears on the one side as the appropriation of the objects by the subjects, it equally appears on the other as the shaping and the subjection of the objects by and to a subjective
7
A strange story which has circulated in and out of the Marx literature has it that Marx sought to dedicate a volume of Capital to Darwin, who declined by return letter. The letter from Darwin was not to Marx, however. but to his daughter Eleanor's companion. Edward Aveling , who had sought to dedicate to Darwin his book, The Students' Darwin. After Engels's death in 1895 Eleanor Marx gained possession of many of Marx' papers. The letter to Aveling from Darwin (which contained only a "Dear Sir" salutation) got mixed in with those papers; it was "found" again in 1931, and from there the strange story began. Margaret Fay (1980) has sorted through the pieces of this history.
purpose; the transformation of the objects into results and repositories of subjective activity.) What requires explanation is not the unity of living and active human beings with the natural, inorganic conditions of their exchange of matter with nature, and therefore their appropriation of nature; nor of course is this the result of an historical process. What we must explain is the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active being, a separation which is posited in its complete form only in the relationship between wage labour and capital (Marx 1986 [1953], 28: 413). This seems to confirm Geras in his conviction. However, the whole of the passage and its surroundings repay careful consideration. First, let us consider the initial sentence, which on its face appears to say what Geras wants it to say. In the next paragraph but one, Marx adds by way of clarification this: In other words: the original conditions of production appear as natural presuppositions, natural conditions of the existence of the producer, just as his living body, even though he reproduces and develops it, is not originally posited by himself, but appears as his own presupposition; his own (corporeal) being is a natural presupposition not posited by himself. These natural conditions of existence, to which he relates as to his own inorganic body, have a dual character: they are (1) subjective and (2) objective (Marx 1986 [1953]. 28: 413-14). As the passage continues it is clear that Marx is there thinking of some early period of human existence, although just as clearly it is not "the primitive" (or "original") period even by standards of nineteenth-century ethnography. The producer is a "natural member of the community," a "member of a family, a tribe, a clan," and so forth; thus, the period in question is clearly of history, even if of capitalism's prehistory. Of course, Geras's point is not directly about a nature-before-history; rather, his concern is about a natural substrate of human being. But even in that regard this clarifying paragraph is not quite supportive of what he wants to say. The key is the repeated presence of two words: "appear" and "presupposition." That is, "the original conditions of production" have the appearance of being "natural conditions of existence," and they appear as natural presuppositions.
Second, we should ask why "the unity" does not require explanation. One answer is: "Because that is just what reality is." And yet one could still ask for an explanation of why "reality is just that way." Still more to the point, how can Marx or any other historical being know that "the original conditions of production" consist in "the unity of living and active human beings with the natural, inorganic conditions of their exchange of matter with nature"? For Marx to claim such knowledge—that is, knowledge as defined by the existing model of science—he would have to claim the personal privilege of an extra-historical, Archimedean point of reference that he castigates others for claiming. But Marx does not claim such knowledge. The existence of "the unity" does not require explanation, because it is not a fact (as the existing model of science defines "fact"). It is an axiologic posit, a value assertion, on which the whole of Marx's project rests. It stipulates the "natural" condition of human being. 8 That condition is one in which "living and active human beings" and "the natural, inorganic conditions" are a unity and, as such, are in/of history, the history of labor, the production of human being. It is this axiologic posit that provides the moral basis from which Marx launches his critique of "the separation," of the alienated condition of human existence. One might describe the moral basis as "counterfactual,' in Habermasian terms, insofar as the actual condition of human existence is alienated (e.g., insofar as nature is, in practical conception, an alien figure which determines us, a "compulsion used against us"). But the moral basis, Marx's axiologic posit, nonetheless inheres as potential in the actual condition of human existence; it is a potential not merely to be contemplated but to be actualized in a world to be made. The Aufhebung of human being's alienated condition of existence is not a re-unification of what was once unitary but then separated (cf. Kolakowski 1978, I: 267). Rather, it is the realization of a potential already existent in human laboring; for the alien power that looms over us as our determination (e.g., nature) is itself a product of human labor, albeit an alienated product. Granted, the foregoing construction can still be forced into the cage of a naturalistic materialism. Aronowitz does so, for example, when he says (1981, 48) that the "task of emancipatory theory must be to restore nature in its autonomy, recognizing that nature remains congealed within production, but must be released from it. To the degree that nature obeys its
8
Granted, "the early Marx"—that is, the Marx of 1844, for example—sometimes did write of "the essence of man" and of "species essence" as if he had knowledge of it on the inherited model of idealist philosophy and science.
own rhythms, it cannot be subsumed under labor/history." 9 But consider: if nature does obey its own rhythms, where does that self-obedience take place? Only one answer is possible: in history, in the activity of human labor. How otherwise could those rhythms, and obedience to them, exist? One might contend that only our awareness of them exists in history. But it is not "mere" awareness that is at issue here (rather, awareness, knowledge, is an effect of labor). Our practice of nature, of nature's rhythms and self-obedience, whether named as our awareness or as thingrepresented-in-awareness, is at issue, and it can exist only in history. Aronowitz (1981,48) concedes that "the concept of 'nature' is an historical creation." However, he wants to think the thing "behind the concept" without use of concept. Or perhaps he would proclaim success in the long representationalist quest by having at hand the one true concept of nature, which therefore in that privilege no longer need be counted as a mere (i.e., historically variable) concept. And consider, too, the daunting "task of emancipatory theory." If nature were indeed autonomous—that is, if the "thing" behind the properly representational concept were autonomous—and therefore truly self-obedient in its rhythms, what would require restoration? Even if restoration were needed, how would we know restoration of the "thing" behind the concept? Or is it instead that human being, in its peculiar halfway status "between nature and history," has somehow managed to rob an autonomous nature of some part of its autonomy and must now give it back? If so, which of its rhythms does this thing-nature no longer obey? That is, how can we know what they were (since they are no longer manifest in thing-nature)? And how do we know that this thing-nature did not, before "losing" some part of its autonomy, "will" a self-change which now appears (somehow) to us as its failure to obey those erstwhile rhythms? Such a puzzle. Of course, it might clarify matters if we "introduced" concepts. But that would be to subsume the whole of it under labor, under history.
9
This is an instance of the "domination of nature" thesis. Leiss responds to Marx' statement about the appropriation of nature--"For the first time [i.e., the advent of capitalism], nature becomes purely an object for men, nothing more than a matter of utility [and] ceases to be acknowledged as a power for itself, and even the theoretical cognition of its autonomous laws appears merely as a strategem for its subjection to human needs" (Marx 1986 [1953], 28: 337) --by describing the event as the "extrusion of all except human purpose from the cosmos." This "meant that for the first time nature could be approached by man from a purely utilitarian perspective," that is, by "some kind of conscious organization of activity undertaken for the satisfaction of needs" (Leiss 1999 [1976], 40; see also Leiss 1972, 178-90). Marx' statement, it may be recalled, occurs in the context of his celebration of the benefits of capitalism: "Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; hence its production of a stage of society compared to which all previous stages seem merely local developments of humanity and idolatry of nature."
Marx's Enthymemics Geras may be correct in his claim that Marx did not reject "the idea of a universal human nature" (nor, therefore, a nonhistorical or subhistorical nature)—at least to the extent that various passages written by Marx can be easily (i.e., conventionally) read to that effect. I have suggested that those passages (i.e., those readings) may mark an inconsistency on Marx's part. Insofar as this suggestion is defensible, the defense can be made only through "another" reading which, while perhaps inevitable as a sort of necromancy of "Marx's real meaning," should better have to do with the logical coherence of a living argument (cf. Arthur 1986, 135-39). The character of this logical coherence (and thus of Marx's "new science") is crucial to the sort of assessment one can make, of course. It is easy by conventional reading to arrive at a conclusion of inconsistency. Likewise, it is easy to conclude (as Geras does in part) that, had Marx really intended to argue anything so radically different as that nature (thing-nature) is wholly a human production, he would have stated the point clearly, forcefully, repeatedly, and at length. He would have taken great care to maintain consistency on the point, precisely because of its radical difference. (Perhaps so, although consistency can be especially elusive precisely when one attempts to argue the radically different.) 10 Then, too, one can read special significance in the fact that Marx says nothing specific about "reality before history," just as he has very little to say specifically about "reality after alienation." But what exactly is that "special significance"? Just as in the latter case Marx could not do much more than argue a potential, lest he invoke the authority of extra-historical formulae of history that he had railed against, so in the former case there is nothing a historical being can say, except as a bare posit (or myth) in history (see Axelos 1976 [1969], 217-28; cf. Veyne 1988 [1983]). The coherence of Marx's "new science" is articulated within the moves of his "critique of culture" (Dupre 1983), which scathingly interrogates the idealist convention of a profound separation between "culture" (postulated as the realm of symbolic contents, meanings, moralities, etc.) and "society" (postulated as the realm of material structures, organizational forms, etc.). By this convention, culture ("high culture") is elevated as the school of personal development and freedom of thought, the promise of transcendence and salvation, the balm for all slings and 10
More to the point: whereas the ruling tradition of "authoritative writing" is centered by the heroic figure of the masterful writer, who works in an integrated and integrating unilogic, the productivity of writing, especially a writing against the grain, involves a struggle of voices, a not altogether reflexive dialogic, a contest for the shape of a coherence. To see "inconsistency," then, may be to see, against the backdrop of traditional expectations of a masterly, unilogic writing, outcroppings of this dialogic struggle (cf. Woolgar and Ashmore 1988, 6).
arrows suffered in the material world of drudgery and structural coercions, the alibi for domination (cf. Marcuse 1968 [1937]). By this convention, culture rises above society to unite humankind in the fine arts of cultivation and in high moral principles of dignity, freedom, and equality before God, Nature, and/or the Law. But in addition it is the abode of science itself, the science for which this convention of separation and duality is conventional. This science, which proclaims itself to be materialist but is actually idealist, must "divide society into two parts, one of which [culture, and science in particular] is superior to society" (Marx 1976 [1924], 4). In short, Marx's response to nineteenth-century enactments of the "culture versus society" separation is to develop a critique the principal moves of which are somewhat like those recently associated with Derrida as "deconstructive." Marx interrogates the asymmetric valuation of terms in the dualities of mental versus manual, ideal versus material, art versus industry, theory versus practice, culture versus society, and so forth. The interrogation proceeds by pursuing immanently the logic of separation and asymmetric valuation to its full extension (often ending in ridicule, parody, or satire), by switching polarities, and thus by undermining the presumed naturalness or matter-of-factness not only of the dualities as such but also of the practical logic that "yields" them. 11 Brenkman has described this critical aspect of Marx' general argumentation as an "enthymemic discourse"—that is, a discourse that "argues from values to conclusions about reality; it advocates action within the reality so understood; and it promotes new values to orient that action and change those real circumstances" (Brenkman 1987,68; cf. MacKinnon 1989,1078; Boyne 1990,125-35). Whether strictly enthymemic or not (at least in an Aristotelian sense), Marx does proceed from "critical-utopian values," not only in the argument of the Paris Manuscripts (on which Brenkman mainly focuses) but in the later works as well. Brenkman (1987, 68, 69) also detects in Marx a second sort of discourse, which he calls "epistemic." Whereas the enthymemic concentrates on "rhetorical strategies of persuasion," the epistemic concentrates on "a systematic account of the social totality" and "argues from a philosophically grounded account of the historical movement of society and identifies the 11
Is this to ascribe to Marx a wholly unprepared thought, a descendant's gift wholly unfathomable to its recipient? Hardly. A hundred years earlier Rousseau had written in the introductory paragraphs of his Second Discourse this: "0 man, whatever country you may come from, whatever your opinions may be, listen: here is your history as I believed it to read, not in the books of your fellowmen, which are liars, but in nature, which never lies. Everything that comes from nature will be true; there will be nothing false except what I have involuntarily put in of my own" (Rousseau 1964 [1755], 103-4).
political actions Marx supports as the completion of a process already in motion." The point of chief interest here is Brenkman's conclusion: "the contrasting registers [of the enthymemic and the epistemic] indicate a significant ambivalence, even confusion," in the structure of Marx's general argumentation. I think I understand this "difference of register" as Brenkman describes it, and why he discerns there a confusion. It relates directly to the question of whether Marx is inconsistent in what he had to say on the existence of nature. Since Brenkman's chief concern is with "the problem of culture," let us proceed accordingly in order to understand his diagnosis of confusion as he comes to it in his reading of how "the question of culture is taken up by [Marx'] epistemic discourse." Brenkman (1987, 71) cites as an exemplary text this passage from the Paris Manuscripts: Moving in the realm of estrangement, people could only think of man's general mode of being—religion or history in its abstract-general character as politics, art, literature, etc.—as the reality of man's essential powers and as man's speciesactivity (Marx 1975 [1932], 302). 12 Brenkman understands this passage as part of Marx's critique of "idealist historiography" or, more specifically, his critique of human self-estrangement as manifested in dualities of theory and practice, subject and object, the private and the social, and so forth. But he understands something more: [Marx] is certainly right to indict the tendency to equate the history of humanity with the "history ... of politics, art, literature, etc.," and to charge that such a conception is "abstract and universal," in that it suppresses both the concrete social relationships in history and, more specifically, the history of laboring classes and popular masses. That is, however, not all that Marx is saying. He is also saying that "politics, art, literature, etc.," are themselves the abstraction and universalization of human history. It is this proposition which is wholly at odds with his own reconceptualization of art and culture as a complex of materialsocial practices [i.e., the thread of his "enthymemic discourse"]. The proposition 12
Brenkman cites the slightly different translation by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, published as Quinton Hoare's edition of Marx' Early Writings.
is, on the other hand, wholly consistent with the philosophic-scientific register [of his "epistemic discourse"], and spawns the conception of culture which will eventually fit the base vs. superstructure model (Brenkman 1987,71). Were that the case, it would indeed amount to an inconsistency. However, this is where Brenkmari's separation of "enthymemic" and "epistemic discourses" leads him astray. He fails to appreciate that the double register in the structure of Marx' argumentation is an articulation of the immanent categories of human self-estrangement under capitalism, on the one hand, with his own value-critical (or "critical-utopian") categories, on the other. 13 Under conditions of alienation people think and practice the reality of their "essential being," their existence, as the "abstract-general character" of principles of a world history, a world religion, an art and literature, a politics and an ethics, and so on, which speak universal messages from noncontingency in the "material-social" conditions of "concrete social relationships." This is the reality of "the realm of estrangement"; within it, politics, art, literature, philosophy—in short, all that is given separate status as "culture"—are the "abstraction and universalization of human history." Although tangibly, palpably, even essentially real, however, it is an apparent reality. The judgment of appearance is constituted not from within the abstractness of conventional science's facticity but from Marx' value-critical categories, the very same categories by which he achieves his diagnosis of human self-estrangement or alienation in the first place. In terms of these categories—the unity of subject-object relations, of praxis, and so on—politics, art, literature, religion, philosophy, science, or the "specialties" of culture ("high culture") are "material-social practices," wholly contingent in circumstances of concrete human activity, just as is "industry" or "work" or "manual labor." In sum, Brenkrnan's concern that Marx' "epistemic discourse" uncritically adopts the standpoint of culture conceived as "the abstraction and universalization of human history" is the result of a confusion stemming from Brenkman's own tendency to understand "the epistemic" (and "the philosophical-scientific") from that very same standpoint. Where in his immanent 13
By Marx' own account, the crucial locus of the operation of this double register ("the whole secret" of his "critical conception" and "fundamental to all understanding of the facts") is "the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value" (Marx and Engels 1987,407, 514). Baudrillard, quite rightly noting that "the structure of the sign is at the very heart of the commodity form," has argued that whereas the sign function sets use-value and exchange-value in a mutually referring reciprocity, Marx privileged a priority of usevalue to exchange-value by naturalistic assumption (Baudrillard 1981 [1972], 146). On the contrary: the privileging was by Marx' value-critical conception, which was fundamental to all understanding of what the facts were.
critique of "the realm of estrangement" Marx tells his story of capitalism, its prehistory, and its future development, Brenkman (1987, 70) sees "an account of the objective movement of the social totality." Marx' story, even as a story of "objective movement," is fueled by those same "critical-utopian values" that Brenkman understands under the separate heading of "Marx' enthymemic discourse." But Brenkman reads the account, and the "objective movement," as established by one, universal, noncontingent "epistemic" or "philosophical-scientific" practice.
One Nature or Two? What, then, is Marx' "story of nature"? As best I can judge, it is bifurcated, although not in the way Brenkman says. For the most part, nature is historical, a product of human labor. For the most part, in other words, Marx is consistent in the position from which he levelled his criticism against Feuerbach: "nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach [or anyone else] lives," for that nature "no longer exists anywhere" (Marx and Engels 1976 [1932], 40). This is the point, too, of Marx's insertion of the "so-called" in his statement in the Grundrisse about the "full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called Nature as well as of humanity's own nature" (Marx 1986 [1953], 28: 411). 14 Thus, since the nature in which human beings live is an effect of human labor, not a nature-before-history, there is good reason to conclude that existing human beings produce themselves as beings of a historical nature—even if they all have in common a necessity of labor, of parentage, of oxygenated air, and so forth, all of which necessities are themselves historical. There is, however, another part to Marx's "story of nature." It is manifest in the above-cited criticism of Feuerbach, for instance, when Marx registers his parenthetical exception: "the nature that preceded human history . . . no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin)" (cf. Smith 1984, 16, 47, 57). It is manifest in Capital, when he exempts "air, virgin soil, natural meadows, etc." from human labor (Marx 1967 [1867], 40; also pp. 42-43). And we have seen it operating in other passages, too. 14
Geras thinks the distinction there intended (i.e., between "so-called Nature" and "humanity's own nature") is between "external nature" and "internal nature" or "human nature." I read it as a distinction between an abstract category—"prehistorical nature-in-itself essentially persisting (in its lawful autonomy) subhistorically"—and a concretely human (and thus historical) nature which of course includes "human nature" but not separately.
The question is, how exactly does it operate? How are we to understand this second (and smaller) part, relative to the first part of Marx' "story of nature"? One possibility, as already suggested, is to read it as the bare posit of a factual condition (in the conventional sense of science's facts) of "reality before history." By conventional reading, this would seem to be the most obvious, the most straightforward. After all, history began with human being; there must have been something before human being; that "something" we shall call "nature" (i.e., "nature before history," nature-in-itself); and nature has been.progressively appropriated by/into history. This reading can (and does) lead to all sorts of speculation—for example, about nature giving birth to human being, and thus history, in order to gain consciousness of itself (see Schmidt 1971 [1962], 77). But, as Kolakowski notes with regard to Marx, human being cannot be acquainted with this nature "as it is in itself' (1978, 1: 266). Marx has virtually nothing to say about this nature-in-itself because nothing can be said beyond the bare posit. The moment any clothing of definition, description, explanation is added, history has been working. Conventional science, the then-existing science of nature (e.g., Darwin), was history working—and not only in its interests, its techniques and apparatus and so forth, but also in its objects. Insofar as Marx says more of this nature than the bare posit, he is being inconsistent in the logical structure of his argumentation. Of course, "even" the bare posit is historical. But let's pretend to ignore that for a moment. What good is the bare posit? What is the point/use of making it, if it must be left a naked waif? Is it necessary? Numerous scholars believe so—indeed, believe it must be a clothed posit of a sort that does not betray its historical status. According to one such conviction, for instance, without "the sense that the practices of society represent some sort of natural order instead of a set of arbitrary choices, ["people"] cannot hope to escape from the dilemma of unjustified power" (Unger 1976, 240). 15 And Poovey (1988, 52) restates the conviction in her apprehension that if "'woman' is only a social construct that has no basis in nature," we are left in an indeterminancy that "renders the experience women have of themselves and the meaning of their social relations problematic, to say the least." In formulating alternatives in that manner—between an "order of nature" or "basis in nature," on one hand, and "arbitrary choices" or "problematic experiences/meanings," on the 15
In much the same vein, Boyne (1990, 152-60) believes that practices like Derrida's "deconstruction" prevent one from asserting a "moral stand," and that a "moral stand" can be asserted only as a "foundational principle of identity."
other—such statements of conviction at least perform the service of demonstrating yet again that the ways of writing nature are inherently normative and axiological. The quest for a ground (of being, of meaning, of experience, etc.) that is outside history is a justificatory move in/of history. And as Poovey appreciates, experience is always already problematic; but that in no way precludes acts of solidarity or makes them arbitrary of basis. Recognizing that the struggle to decide "foundational facts" is a struggle, typically conducted in oppositions of already achieved normative settlements, is the same as recognizing that experience, acts of solidarity, and explanation, no less than the justificatory moves of a quest for extra-historical ground or an abstract category within which a solidarity of identities is congealed, are all acts of the production and destruction of value—by which I mean the production and destruction of realities and their internal divisions between "the immutable" and "the transient" (plus, as Thompson argues it, the wormhole that connects them, "rubbish"; Thompson 1979, 8-12, 219-28). When claimed in the conventional sense of scientific fact, the "bare posit" of the factual condition from/on which history began (i.e., the "foundational fact") is merely a formalist act. Like the formalist acts (conceptions) of language, science, law, and so on, this formalist act necessarily depends, in and for its "application," on the supplement that it entails but cannot account for: a subjectivism that suffuses judgment/interpretation of the actual significance or meaning of the posit. Thus, the posit not only cannot remain bare; it comes with clothing, and the clothing gives it a long shadow of implications for any history that "follows." In its formalism the posit is without explicit means of justifying what "follows" and so must rely on a surreptitious "importation" of justificatory means. In keeping with Marx' critical interrogation of efforts to move from the abstract to the concrete, however, his apparently dualistic manner of writing nature can be understood as involving a critique of that formalist act of the "bare posit," and therefore as not dualistic at all. That is, what I have been treating separately as a second and smaller part of Marx' "story of nature" is not an instance of the bare posit, conceived formalistically in the manner of a "pure" (i.e., "value-free") factual condition, and is not separate from the "other" part of his story. Rather, it is an explicitly axiological posit, conceived in/of specific historical circumstances as the poetry of a future, and not as a costumed essence of a dead past (Marx 1979 [1852], 1979, 106; cf. Tabora 1983, 357-59). Without that axiological posit of a human futurity, nothing of Marx' critical interrogation of human being as the ensemble of social relations alienated in self-making –that is, alienated conditions of production, commodity fetishism, and so on—holds together.
Tabora (1983, 361) has said of this that, as "humanly human norm of all criticism of praxis," the axiological posit is "immune to all phenomenally based critique and remains unaffected even by failures to achieve it in revolutionary practice." I think that is right—except that the axiological posit is not extra-historical in its conditions but must be struggled for, made and remade, again and again. Labor is inescapably productive and therefore differencing; there are no guarantees, "even" of/in the axiologic posit. Conclusion Foucault (1970 [1966], 261, 262) said of Marxism that it "introduced no real discontinuity, it found its place without difficulty ... [it] existed in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water." Whatever the difference, actual and potential, of the argumentative structure of Marx' thinking, the survival of his text entailed integration in an on-going discourse the domain assumptions of which were part and parcel of the general neo-Kantian framework within which the social sciences were being formed. To the extent that a text named "Marx" (or subsequently "Marxism") maintained a standing as an alternative perspective, it was as the practice of an alternative within a discourse of common domain assumptions, object formations, subject positions, and problem constellations. The normalizing effects of this discourse in the constitution of the meaning of Marx were then extended in the intermittent efforts to convert elements of a text named "Marx" into insights useful to the mission of social science. Thus, for example, "class" became but one of three equally important, analytically distinct dimensions of a general principle of hierarchical order; "alienation" became (in one version) a social psychology of feelings of powerlessness; and in general Marx became the prototypical "conflict theorist" of social order. One of the fundamental strands of the normalizing utilities of "Marx," begun even before the social sciences commenced their incorporative efforts, was a naturalistic materialism which knew that human realities are products of material conditions (the latter typically conceived in the same one-sided manner for which Marx castigated Fcuerbach) and that those material conditions are at root the conditions of nature. The homo duplex thesis for which Durkheim is now remembered was read in Marx as well, as indeed in the whole of the regulative discourse: the human creature is first of all a biophysical organism, a natural substrate on which culture is built. Granted, it is difficult to miss the fact that Marx' critique of capitalism begins, in the first volume of Capital, with a critique of capitalism's naturalism—that is, with the proclivity for a
practical as well as theoretical conception of "capital" (land, stock, gold, etc.) as a self-identical thing, a thingness given naturally to the potential capacities of accumulation and functional utility. But it has been much less difficult, evidently, to neglect the generality of Marx' critique of the pure givenness and self-identity of "thing," of "natural thing" (i.e., the so-called external-relations conception of "thing"), and in consequence the "natural thing" could remain, for this Marx as for Darwin, Engels, and virtually everyone else, ultimately external to all social explanation (cf. Haraway 1989; Hazelrigg 1986 and 1989). A critical framework that argues that "the natural" (both in the sense of "it's only natural" and in the sense of "nature's thing") is always already thoroughly social, cultural, historical, an effect of human labor, would have been radically destabilizing of the practical discourse in and of which Marxism as well as the social sciences were constituted. But the normalizing bias of that discourse erased the site of potential destabilization by rereading what it already fundamentally knew, the bedrock priority of "nature's thing." Varieties of Marxism could be aberrant within the discourse; they could be blatantly partisan within the domain of social science's problem constellations, but they would not be aberrant to the discourse within which they were produced.
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