Of the nineteenth century’s two great pourfendeurs of metaphysics, whereas Nietzsche opposes to metaphysics a theory of the scene from which its pretended objectivity derives, Marx ignores the scene as a mere derivative of material relations. Nowhere in Marx’s writing, from his satiric rendering of Eugène Suë’s Mystères de Paris in The Holy Family
to his depiction of the 1848 French revolution and the 1871 Paris
Commune, does Marx attempt to convey a sense of the scene within which
events both occur and are represented. Events are transitions from one historical moment to another; they are never lingered on as significant in themselves.
One of Marx’s most famous sentences is the “Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach”: Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt darauf an, sie zu verändern. [Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it].
Marx’s idea of “changing the world” through thought means revealing the
truth about the world’s operations in such a way as to accelerate the
processes inherent in these operations; in particular, by making his
readers aware of the necessary demise of bourgeois society and of class
society in general in order to bring about this demise more quickly. No
genuine scene of mutual presence, if one is to take place at all, is
possible before the accession to the “realm of freedom” through the
liberation of humanity’s productive forces; until then, all figures of
scenic presence are ideological shams of the ruling class designed to
arrest the dialectical march toward freedom.
The first definitive statement of Marx’s anthropology is the section entitled “History: Fundamental Conditions” in part I A of The German Ideology
(1845). Marx first defines four “moments” that come together
synchronically in the human: 1. “the production of material life
itself”; 2. “production of new needs” derived from this basic
production; 3. “the relation between man and woman, parents and
children, the family”; 4. the combination of “a certain mode of
production, or industrial stage . . . with a certain mode of
co-operation, or social stage.”
[i.] Only now, after having considered four moments,
four aspects of the primary historical relationships do we find that man
also possesses “consciousness”, but, even so, not inherent, not “pure”
consciousness. From the start the “spirit” is afflicted with the curse
of being “burdened” with matter, which here makes its appearance in the
form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language
is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that
exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists
for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises
from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there
exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into
“relations” with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all.
For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation.
Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product,
and remains so as long as men exist at all.Language is “practical consciousness” in the sense of
material
consciousness (“‘burdened’ with matter”) that exists in the world of
human interaction. Language alone mediates “relations” between humans,
self-conscious relationships that the concerned parties apprehend
through the words that define them. There is no generative scene;
indeed, Marx does not address the origin of language at all. Although he
defines the human by “relations” designated by language rather than
simply existing in the world, language does not originate in the
spiritual realm of “pure” consciousness, but in the course of the
productive process. To quote the preceding section of
The German Ideology
(I A 4. “The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History: Social
Being and Social Consciousness”): “the production of ideas, of
conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the
material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of
real life.”
The “History” passage continues:
[ii.] Consciousness is at first, of course, merely
consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and
consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things
outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time
it is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a
completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men’s
relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts;
it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion
[Naturreligion]) just because nature is as yet hardly modified
historically. (We see here immediately: this natural religion or this
particular relation of men to nature is determined by the form of
society and vice versa. Here, as everywhere, the identity of nature and
man appears in such a way that the restricted relation of men to nature
determines their restricted relation to one another, and their
restricted relation to one another determines men’s restricted relation
to nature.) On the other hand, man’s consciousness of the necessity of
associating with the individuals around him is the beginning of the
consciousness that he is living in society at all. This beginning is as
animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere
herd-consciousness, and at this point man is only distinguished from
sheep by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of
instinct or that his instinct is a conscious one.Here, in
contrast with the previous passage, the human being is “growing
self-conscious” and as a consequence humans confront nature as “a
completely alien . . . force . . . by which they are overawed like
beasts.” This derivation of “natural religion” from the conflation of
the inherently
cultural relation of awe with the pre-cultural,
“animal” reaction to nature is typical of nineteenth-century
explanations of the origin of religion; we have already seen its classic
exposition in the work of Marx’s contemporary
Max Müller (see
Chronicle 192).
We need not dwell on the absurdity of this derivation, whose
association of religious awe with the animal’s presumably inferior
abilities to cope with natural forces makes animality itself the source
of religious feeling (“overawed like beasts”). What makes this passage
important is that Marx’s attempt to describe the genesis of his
previously-defined anthropological model obligatorily leads him, in
however perfunctory a manner, to account for the sacred. In the
parenthesis immediately following the Müller-like derivation, Marx
reassociates this worship of nature with human social relations. “We see
here immediately: this natural religion or this particular relation of
men to nature is determined by the form of society and vice versa.” But
what we see “immediately” is rather the contradiction between the
parallel drawn here between religion and social form and the earlier
derivation of religion from man’s “purely animal” relation to nature. If
indeed religion is not simply determined by “the form of society” as we
might expect the
superstructure to be determined by the
infrastructure, but “
vice versa” as
well, then there is a reciprocal homology between religious ideology
and the social order that cannot be explained by our “animal” awe before
nature.
The only coherent explanation of “natural religion” is that our sense
of a “completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force” proceeds
not from our experience of nature but from the mimetic violence from
which religion preserves the human social order. For the homology to be a
functional relationship, this force must become the basis of an order
that it constitutes by remaining outside it in the transcendental
relation of the sacred that is nowhere to be found in nature. Marx’s
materialist disdain for the scene of representation reduces its
originary manifestation to an animal act–that is, one that cannot by
definition characterize the human. As soon as we are forced to cease our
diachronically-oriented productive activities in order to attend to the
scene of our experience, we act as beasts. In terms of the historical
dialectic, the fearful apprehension of nature as an alien force is the
first stage of the process by which we harness this force to our
productive enterprise, but the natural religion that results from the
appearance of this force on the scene of representation exceeds this
dialectic in both directions at once, as at one and the same time a
prehuman reaction and an ideological figuration of the productive
relations by which the dialectic is presumably constituted.
It might appear curious that nature provides Marx with the original
resistance against which his human dialectic can operate; the
theoretician of the class struggle passes up the opportunity to derive
human self-consciousness from the scene of human conflict on the example
of Hegel’s lord-bondsman dialectic. In this, Marx betrays the Rousseauian roots of socialist thought: a humanity born in Hobbesian
internal conflict would lack an originary guarantee of the
eschatological communist paradise in which class conflict is abolished;
in other terms, it would be beholden to a scene.
[iii.] This sheep-like or tribal consciousness receives
its further development and extension through increased productivity,
the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the
increase of population. With these there develops the division of labor,
which was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual
act, then that division of labor which develops spontaneously or
“naturally” by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g.,physical
strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc. Division of labor only becomes
truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor
appears. [Marx’s marginal note:] (The first form of ideologists,
priests, is concurrent.) From this moment onward consciousness can
really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of
existing practice, that it really represents something without
representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position
to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of
“pure” theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.Once again,
Marx hints at the originary significance of the transcendental
dichotomy between signs and things: the moment of the division of labor
that gives rise to a self-reflective human consciousness that “can
really flatter itself [sich einbilden]” is that between “material” and
“mental” labor, the latter, as if in anticipation of
Durkheim,
being attributed to the sacred functions of priestly “ideology.” Thus
the material progress that can be attributed to human labor produces
human consciousness only through the mediation of this sacred ideology
that exists detached from “existing practice” on the scene of its own
“pure” representations.
This is as far as Marx ever goes in the thematization of the scene of
representation. Yet it is far enough to reveal that Marx’s materialist
anthropology cannot coherently explain the scene’s dependency on the
sacred, which, although described as originating in our animal fear of
nature, gives rise not only to a homologous representation of the system
of social relations but to human self-consciousness itself as distinct
from the unreflective consciousness of the here-and-now.
[iv.] But even if this theory, theology, philosophy,
ethics, etc. comes into contradiction with the existing relations, this
can only occur because existing social relations have come into
contradiction with existing forces of production; this, moreover, can
also occur in a particular national sphere of relations through the
appearance of the contradiction, not within the national orbit, but
between this national consciousness and the practice of other nations, i.e., between the national and the general consciousness of a nation (as we see it now in Germany).
Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on
its own: out of all such muck [Dreck] we get only the one inference that
these three moments, the forces of production, the state of society,
and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one
another, because the division of labor implies the possibility, nay the
fact that intellectual and material activity–enjoyment and labor,
production and consumption–devolve on different individuals, and that
the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the
negation in its turn of the division of labor. It is self-evident,
moreover, that “specters,” “bonds,” “the higher being,” “concept,”
“scruple,” are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the
conception apparently of the isolated individual, the image of very
empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode of production
of life and the form of intercourse coupled with it move.
In conclusion, Marx reminds us that the
above-mentioned “emancipation” of consciousness is in fact an illusion;
consciousness reflects “social relations” and its liberation from
“existing practice” is merely a reflection of the “contradiction”
between these relations and the “forces of production.” Moreover, such a
contradiction
must occur, presumably because (the text is
allusive on this point) the emancipated consciousness is that of a
privileged class defined by “intellectual activity” and “consumption” of
the material goods produced by those engaged in the “material activity”
of “production.”
Here is the germ of post-metaphysical thought that changes the world
not by reflecting the ideology of the privileged consumers but by
elaborating that implicit in the productive activity of the proletariat,
which not merely opposes them to the bourgeois possessors of the means
of production but has the potential to render the bourgeoisie, and all
“division of labor” in the sense of class difference, superfluous.
Consciousness “on its own” produces only “muck”; its “idealistic,
spiritual” contents are merely fanciful representations of the “very
empirical fetters and limitations” of the production process, as seen
through the distorting lens of class (“social relations”). The
justification for the socialist ideology that Marx would subsequently
elaborate is that the “fetters” of the current mode of production had
become so clearly the effect of current “social relations” that the
proletarian ideologist could envisage a world in which, at last, social
relations would reflect production relations without conflict–the
classless society in which the division of labor would be “negated.” (I
will deal with Marx’s concept of the communist revolution in a later Chronicle.)
In class society, contradiction is inevitable because of the
ideological mystification brought about by the division of labor. Yet
the origin of this mystification, Marx tells us, is the sacred ideology
first promulgated by priests, which itself derives from animal fear
before the forces of nature. Which is to say that, however much these
priests take advantage of their flock’s credulousness to impose on them
an ideology that justifies their own and their allies’ class privileges,
this credulousness itself, this willingness to grant authority to those
who speak in the name of the sacred, has its origins prior to the
division of labor in an “ideological” imperative that is nonetheless
independent of humanity’s ideological divisions. The originary role of
the sacred in the constitution of the human is one that no confounder of
priestly ideology, be he Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche, could
account for.
