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-The aff’s Derridean spectrality mystifies over the materiality of oppression and turns labor into a nondialectical trope |
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-Tumino, 14 |
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-(Stephen Tumino, professor in the English department at Kingsborough Community College. “"Theory Too Becomes A Material Force": Militant Materialism or Messianic Matterism?” http://redcritique.org/WinterSpring2014/militantmaterialismordmessianicmatterism.htm) Henge |
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-1. Currently a "material turn" is underway in the humanities away from the dogma of textual immanence and the "materiality of the signifier" (De Man) in the attempt to address the growing inequalities forming in the aftermath of the crisis of global capitalism. And yet, what is taken to be "material" in the new materialisms—whether it be Derrida's "wholly other," or Deleuze's vitalist "immanence," Hardt and Negri's "multitude," or Zizek's "materiality of ideology," Haraway's "affective consubstantiality," or the "autonomy of the nonhuman" (Massumi) and, the "vibrant" (Bennett) "agency of matter" (Bolt, Iovino, Oppermann)—conforms to Derrida's call for a "materiality without materialism and even perhaps without matter" ("Typewriter Ribbon" 281), that is, the material as that which "exceeds" and "resists" the conceptual. What is material for Derrida is the priority of alterity within iteration that displaces explanation of the actual. Derrida makes "matter" and the undoing of "materiality" in its general sense as movement of the "outside" independent of the subject the focus of any inquiry on materialism. It is of course this role of matter as a spectral agency that disrupts and eludes the subject that resonates with the newly dominant formations of posthumanist theory for which, as Gerda Roelvink puts it, "the assertion that the human species is the dominant force shaping our world... fits all too easily with the modernist assumption of human mastery over nature... which has brought about our environmental crisis" (53).1 However, this posthumanist view of the material as exceeding conceptual mastery is put in question by historical materialist thinkers who read the deconstruction of materialism as a form of "matterism" (Ebert). Matterism ultimately treats matter as that which resists human thinking and control and which, in effect, ends up substituting pan-physicalism for the analysis of the historical conditions shaping the human and nonhuman world under capitalism. For historical materialism, materialism is not matterism; it is not the primacy of matter that is at issue (undoing matter as Derrida does simply confirms its primacy, it does not suspend it). Materialism, on the contrary, is, as Fredric Jameson explains, "the ultimate determination by the mode of production" (The Political Unconscious 45). On such a basis the ethical aura that the spectral agency of the inhuman other has taken on in the posthumanities represents a reification of class interests that benefits the ruling class by occulting the exploitation of labor that is central to capitalism. My argument here is that the classical Marxist theory of the material as the movement of the mode of production has been entirely abandoned in the dominant cultural theory not only because the explanatory knowledge it provides exposes the relations of exploitation on which disaster capitalism depends, but because it reveals these relations to be in the end only transformable by the agency of labor rather than a change in values or a new ethics. Taking the centrality of Derrida's undoing of materiality as my starting point, I will focus on the question of the materiality of the new materialism in cultural theory, paying especially close attention to the claim offered by Pheng Cheah that Derrida's "nondialectical materialism" offers a more "fundamental" (73) and "systemic" (72) understanding of materialism than "Marx's understanding of material existence" (71) as shaped by labor, which for Marx is the life activity of the human species. According to Cheah, because Marx's dialectical materialism is premised on "labor as a process... whereby given reality... is negated" (71) and "the radical transformation of existing social relations" (71) effected, it exhibits the "subordination of potentiality to actuality" (79) typical of humanism which always conceives matter as "negated through the imposition of a purposive form" (71). Conversely, because Derrida's "nondialectical materialism" makes the material a "weak messianic force" (80) that "resists... any purposive or end oriented action... based on rational calculations" (81) it represents a new, more fundamental form of materialism, according to Cheah. At stake in Cheah's opposition of nondialectical to dialectical materialism therefore is the question of the radical today: Is "radical," as according to Marx, to "grasp things by the root" by placing them within "the ensemble of the social relations" (what Lenin called "militant materialism"2)? Or is radical now, as according to Derrida, "a materialism without substance: a materialism of the khôra for a despairing 'messianism'" (Specters of Marx 168-9)—that is, a messianic materialism that mystifies the social as a chaotic flux of cause-less arrivals and spectral events that undoes the positive and reliable knowledge of the class totality that workers need for their emancipation from capitalist exploitation? The interest of Cheah's essay ("Nondialectical Materialism") is in part due to its inclusion in the recent New Materialisms anthology, a text which is symptomatic of the current "turn to materialism" more generally. Its inclusion there would seem to call into question the claim made by the books' editors in the introduction that the "textual approaches associated with the cultural turn are increasingly being deemed inadequate for understanding contemporary society" (Coole and Frost 3) because of their failure in "thinking about matter, materiality, and politics" as shaped by the "contemporary... global political economy" (6). After all, Cheah claims in this essay that Derrida's "figure of the text in general" (73) represents the most "fundamental" (73) and "systemic" (72) understanding of materialism to date and argues against the transformative force of labor or indeed any concept of the material as a force of negation that might lead to theory becoming a guide for social praxis. Certainly, Cheah is quick to distance his defense of Derrida's textual materialism from the taint of De Manian "literariness," arguing that it is a "mistake" to take the "materialist understanding of text as... a self-interiority without an outside" (73). Rather, he understands the textual in Derrida's writings to be a defense of materialism as a "philosophy of the outside" (73) opposed to all "metaphysics" that deny the "force of materiality," which he takes to be "a limitless weave of forces or an endless process or movement of referral" (73) instantiated by our "contemporary technomediated reality" (78). And yet the equation of the material with the virtual real shows that what Cheah takes to be material is not the "outside" (the class structure) but rather the "inside" (the cultural superstructure). What is material on this view is how techno-culture reveals the power of a virtually "inappropriable other" over the actual such as to normalize an "experience of an incalculable justice that escapes all rule" (80), or, in other words, a sense of "urgency" that "forces us to act" (80) without reason. For Cheah, the "force of materiality" is "nothing other than the constitutive exposure of (the subject of) power to the other" (81), which, citing Derrida (Politics of Friendship, 68-9), means "the absolute other in me... that decides on me in me" (80). In other words, the material is an opacity that defies understanding, as in Kant's view of the noumenal thing-in-itself which can only be known at the level of its phenomenal effects in consciousness; however, in Cheah's view, rather than being made available to reason as in Enlightenment thought it can only be experienced from within as an emotional plenitude that eludes analysis or explanation and consequently makes individuals feel weak and vulnerable. Not only does this translate the use of technology under capitalism to increase the rate of accumulation of surplus value into the force of technology itself, to which the subject must learn to willingly submit herself. It also turns the material into the intensity of feeling (weak in the face of an overwhelming and anonymous power) rather than the determination of the cause of this feeling of disempowerment in the social totality. This is significant for two reasons. On the one hand, by treating technology as both inappropriable and as that which forces humans to act (on their beliefs), Cheah of course re-situates the technological non-human not as passive and inert relative to the human but as possessing its own agency and ability to act on and control humans. On the other hand, such an experience with the nonhuman on the part of the human is equated with an unthinking compulsion that is usually disavowed in humanist thought as proper only to animals and machines. It is the sheer affirmation of such an experience of impersonal power that is taken to be the limit of the material in posthumanist discourses and made to seem inherently ethical. Despite differences of idiom, this is the dominant presupposition underlying all of the new materialisms today, which privilege, in the words of Jane Bennett, the material as "an excess that escapes quantification, prediction and control" (Khan 46) and who claim this as the basis of ethical action because it reveals the co-dependency of the human with the non-human and inhuman. What is elided, however, by this affirmative matterism which contests the domination over nature is the question of the function of the ethical to obscure and thus maintain the systemic class inequality inscribed in the daily exploitation of labor, which is what in the end alone explains the capitalist mis-use of nature for profit. It turns out that what Cheah means by "nondialectical materialism" is a kind of technological determinism in which technology functions not as the social mediation between humans and the natural world under specific historical conditions (class relations) but, rather, aesthetically, as what inscribes bodies with moving experiences that he maintains are to be always ethically affirmed so as to change "the very idea of political organization" (89), especially "in terms of creative labor qua negativity... embodied in the proletariat as a sociohistorical subject" (89). Marx's dialectical materialism of course requires that the apparent singularities of our experience, what Marx calls the "imagined concrete" (Grundrisse 100), be conceptually grasped as "the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse" (101) so as not to be deceived by such appearances into assuming a "chaotic conception of the whole" (100). Cheah, following Derrida, argues for "overturning organization as... the central principle of dialectical materialism" (87), because of how it assumes that "the dynamism of matter comes from the activity or process of... ordering things through... relations of interdependence such that they become parts or members of... an integrated or systemic totality" (87). In Derrida's terms, the overturning of "organization" (and therefore dialectical materialism) requires deconstruction of the binary of "organic and... inorganic" ("Typewriter Ribbon" 278) as they represent for him the "two predicates that are most often attributed without hesitation to matter or to the material body" ("Typewriter Ribbon" 278) that "carry an obvious reference... to the possibility of an internal principle that is proper and totalizing" of both, which is "precisely, organization" (278). It is in order to undo the totality of dialectical materialism—which explains why because of the organization of labor under capitalism the proletariat represents a revolutionary class—that Derrida has argued for the necessity of a "machinistic materiality without materialism and even perhaps without matter" or a "new figure of the machine" in which the binary of the organic and inorganic is dehierarchized such that technology will no longer be thought as tools impassively receiving commands in a "state of anesthesia... without affect or auto-affection, like an indifferent automaton" ("Typewriter Ribbon" 277) but would rather "articulate... events of a kind that ought to resist any mechanization, any economy of the machine, namely... acts of... faith" (292). Cheah clarifies that what is at stake in Derrida's call for "a certain materiality, which is not necessarily a corporeality but a certain technicity" "Typewriter Ribbon" 136 (77) is the kind of "creative appropriation" (89) of technology found in the writings of Hardt and Negri, which attempt to construct "a sociohistorical subject that replaces the proletariat in contemporary globalization" (89). For Cheah this is the subject open to the "experience of an incalculable justice that escapes all rule" (80) which acts as a "weak messianic force" in individuals that defies "any purposive or end-oriented action...based on rational calculations or the projection of an ideal end" (81)—such as the end of class exploitation and the emancipation of the proletariat. The subject is thus reified from its insertion in class relations and taken to be a ghost in the machine or a body without organs that spontaneously resists explanation in terms of a causal material outside. In short, it is the subject as imagined in bourgeois ideology that is required to naturalize the exploitation of the workers as a voluntary act rather than the necessary consequence of the means of production being owned as private property. Cheah rejects Marx's dialectical materialism premised on the agency of labor by turning labor into a nondialectical trope for "the vital body of the organism" (71) whose agency consists in the negation of matter through "the imposition of purposive form" (71). Implicit here of course is the familiar (De Manian) poststructuralist critique of romantic organicism—an argument which is used to reject such Marxist categories as labor and class for being essentialist and homogenizing, so as to oppose Marxism on epistemological grounds as a "metaphysical... humanism of the hand" (de Fontenay 48, 49), for instance. But the point I want to emphasize here is that labor for Marx is not a "thing," such as the body or the physical activity of individuals. Although Marx makes labor the "essence of man" (Theses on Feuerbach 619) he clarifies that this is not in the sense of "an abstraction inherent in each single individual" (619), as the purposive actor found in Aristotle's writings for example, or the conception of "society as the subject" (The German Ideology 59) found in Hegel, for instance 3. For Marx, labor is "the ensemble of social relations" (619). It is this that distinguishes humans from animals: Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence... This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production. (The German Ideology 37) Marx contrasts labor with both the purposive concrete activity of individuals (what he calls "work"), the homo-economicus of bourgeois political economy, as well as the animal life-activity required by all species for their immediate physical survival. Cheah's failure to understand Marx's labor theory, which attributes to Marx the very bourgeois ideology he in fact opposes, is not simply a cognitive failure on his part, however, because it represents a mystification of labor as physical "work" that is typical of "the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities" (Marx Capital 164) that Marx's labor theory critiques so as to produce a materialist understanding of the social totality. The fetish of the vital body that negates matter that Cheah attributes to Marx is in actuality the object of Marx's critique of bourgeois political economy, which, as he demonstrates, fails in theory to get beyond the limits imposed by the capitalist mode of production in practice. The fetish of labor as concrete physical work in bourgeois theory is an ideological reflection of the actual reduction of the life-activity of human beings to animal life activity undertaken for mere survival (wage-labor). Marx of course recognizes that, "the life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature" (Economic Manuscripts 67). This physical life-activity or reproductive activity is what for Marx defines a "species-being". The difference between the life-activity of the human species (labor) from that of other animals, however, is that it produces a surplus over and above what is required for immediate physical existence and in the process transforms the environment, and thereby, not only transforms humanity but also all life on Earth. It is this all-round transformative life activity of the human species that Marx calls "labor" in distinction to "work". Finally, it is because of labor that humans can in turn be distinguished from other animals by their "consciousness": The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. (Economic Manuscripts 68) The "wholly other" that arises out of techno-mediated culture which Cheah thinks constitutes an ethical subjectivity in the daily that disrupts Marx's theory of labor as an organizational basis for social change is simply a mystification of the way human life-activity is dominated by capital and undertaken merely to profit a few over meeting people's all-round needs, including the need to live in a safe and healthy environment. In this way, by only seeing in labor the alienated capitalist form of it (work), Cheah naturalizes the exploitation of labor at the center of capitalism. In doing so he cannot accept the dialectical self-negation of the working class as a class-in-itself—that is required to submit to being exploited in order to live—into a revolutionary class-for-itself—that must of material necessity become conscious of its alienation from its own life-activity and thereby undertakes to emancipate itself from the regime of wage-labor. He therefore mystifies agency as a mysterious movement of the "wholly other" and thus helps maintain bourgeois rule. |
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-THE DETERMINISM OF CAPITAL IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF ALL LIFE—IT IS THIS LOGIC THAT MOBILIZES AND ALLOWS FOR THE OPPRESSIONS HIGHLIGHTED BY THE 1AC |
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-DYER-WITHERFORD (professor of Library and Info. Sciences at the U of Western Ontario) 1999 |
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-Nick. Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. |
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-For capitalism, the use of machines as organs of “will over nature” is an imperative. The great insight of the Frankfurt School—an insight subsequently improved and amplified by feminists and ecologists—was that capital’s dual project of dominating both humanity and nature was intimately tied to the cultivation of “instrumental reason” that systematically objectifies, reduces, quantifies and fragments the world for the purposes of technological control. Business’s systemic need to cheapen labor, cut the costs of raw materials, and expand consumer markets gives it an inherent bias toward the piling-up of technological power. This priority—enshrined in phrases such as “progress,” “efficiency,” “productivity,” “modernization,” and “growth”—assumes an automatism that is used to override any objection or alternative, regardless of the environmental and social consequences. Today, we witness global vistas of toxification, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, disappearing ozone layers, and disintegrating immune systems, all interacting in ways that perhaps threaten the very existence of humanity and are undeniably inflicting social collapse, disease, and immiseration across the planet. The degree to which this project of mastery has backfired is all too obvious. |
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-Vote negative to endorse a structural historical analysis of the material conditions underlying nuclear energy |
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-METHOD IS THE FOREMOST POLITICAL QUESTION—GROUNDING SITES OF POLITICAL CONTESTATION OUTSIDE OF LABOR MERELY SERVE TO HUMANIZE CAPITAL AND PREVENT A TRANSITION TO A SOCIETY BEYOND OPPRESSION |
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-TUMINO (Prof. English @ Pitt) 2001 |
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-Stephen, “What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than Ever”, Red Critique, p. online //wyo-tjc |
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- Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and provide lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contested—not just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that to know contemporary society—and to be able to act on such knowledge—one has to first of all know what makes the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequality—not just inequality of power but inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This systematic inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing so—and this is my main argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalism—a capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois left—whether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is based on the fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human labor. That is, wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that shape the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory. |
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-Hauntology treats revolution as spectral and not material~-~--even if that’s useful in the abstract, it’s inaccessible to the masses~-~--means they abjure universal revolution against class |
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-Miller, ND |
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-(Nchamah Miller. “Hauntology and History in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx” http://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/taller/miller_100304.pdf) Henge |
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-Derrida is intent on deconstructing the dichotomy of bourgeois and proletariat class relations and what he considers its limiting essentializing discourse. However, Derrida does not give us an alternative vantage point for critical analysis (apart from stating that there are ghosts and spectres all over the place) through a new political articulation for social disparities produced by economic and political inequality. Instead Derrida implies a new antinomy – spectres and proletariat. I argue that if Marx had not articulated class antagonisms in the terms that he did, given the limitations of language which Derrida concedes, how else could he (Marx) have articulated this part of his radical social critique? The ghost of the bourgeois in the worker, spirit of the worker in the bourgeois? Why not their blood types as type “O” flows in both their veins? That cuts across all gender, racial, ethnic, age and disability borders, which the neutrality of spectralization effaces. The fact is that Marx detected the unemployed beggar (she or he, young or old, disabled or not) knows the difference, and, Marx given the prevalence of unemployed beggars, employed living in dire poverty, wanted to seek the socio-politicoeconomic causes of this phenomenon, not its spirits or spectres. In Derrida’s defence, he shares Marx’s commitment to a determined effort to question the world of appearances. Derrida questions the synchronicity of time and history; he has the benefit of being of a generation post the relativity of science55. His indeterminateness allows him to move anachronously and uncommitted, he can at any time plead the spectral ‘amendment.’ For Derrida everything is spectral because he argues nothing is fully present, unlike Marx who argues for emergence of presence and co-existence. . I conclude Marx clearly hopes the proletariat will progress from being a spectre to being a real revolutionary force, but this does not require that the proletariat must be fully present in Derrida’s metaphysical sense. Since Derrida’s future is ephemeral and evanescent he does not contemplate that the spectral can become a reality. It is precisely this contention that limits hauntology and hardly marks it as an over-determining category. Marx, on the other hand, contemplates co-existence and the emergence of new “spectres” to reinforce the real content of the revolution, as opposed to being withheld by the traps of old modes of thoughts and action. I believe the reason Marx rejects the synchronicity of a Hegelian essential section lies in the acuity of his perception of “relative autonomous practices” which develop unevenly, a-synchronically while overdetermining each other.56 I believe it more plausible to contemplate these overdeterminations of co-existents and emerging or diminishing forces as opposed to Derrida’s version of over-determination through spectralized absences. |