Praktyka Teoretyczna Numer 3(17)/2015 ISSN 2081-8130 DOI: 10.14746/prt.2015.3.9 www.praktykateoretyczna.pl ALLEGORIES OF THE INVISIBLE. OR, HOW TO ESTRANGE ECONOMY (THEOLOGICALLY)? MATEUSZ PIOTROWSKI Abstract: The paper tries to once again bring into play the classical ideas of the Marxian critique of political economy and to demonstrate how these ideas can be reactivated by an injection of theology. Special attention will be dedicated to the theologically intensified notion of alienation, treated not only as a subject but also as a method of criticism. The aim of such an estranging method is to make visible the “transcendental plane” of the capitalist historical a priori. This will be done through the production of allegories, that is figurations of the infinite movement of the capitalist totality. Starting with a critique of the disenchanted Euhumerism of Hardt and Negri, who want to demythologise political economy as nothing but relations between people, I attempt to show the limits of their approach, by exposing the constitution of capital as the creation of an inverted reality. In this process, hypostasis of human labour (i.e. capital) gets the upper hand over human beings, not only in imagination, but also in reality, making a clear-cut distinction between real and imagined entities questionable. Through the analysis of the focal points of this process, I will attempt to demonstrate a complex interplay of subsequent disenchantments and miraculations, which establish capital as something more than human, while simultaneously naturalising its phantasmic becoming as the very core of the reality principle. Alienation as method tries to break the simultaneity of miraculation/disenchantment by dividing apparently unitary semblance – fetish – into distinct and potentially conflicted layers. Potential for this conflict is produced by two estrangement effects. Firstly, by juxtaposing a finite human subject with the infinite process of capital. Secondly, by thinking of conversion, which – becoming the highest point of alienation – could enable the human being to establish itself as an autonomous subject against the gods of this world and its own worldly self. Keywords: political economy, theology, fetishism, enstrangement effects, allegory Praktyka Teoretyczna 3(17)/2015 I EXPOSITION Political economy and the invisible “We need to stop confusing politics with theology”,write Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, beginning the last part of their trilogy with “a repudiation of an apocalyptic tone adopted recently in philosophy” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 5). According to the authors of Commonwealth, many critiques of capitalism resemble “those medieval European renditions of hell: people burning in a river of fire, others being torn limb from limb, and in the centre a great devil engorging their bodies whole” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 3). But, Negri and Hardt argue, there is no great Satan. We are dealing with the powers of capital and law, both entirely of this world. What is needed is not political theology (or demonology), but rather something they call Euhemerism. Just like the ancient critic Euhemerus had explained that myths about gods are nothing but exaggerated narratives about divinised kings, a new political Euhemerism should demonstrate that what seems to be transcendent, otherworldly Power is in reality nothing but relations between people. The present research shares Hardt and Negri’s conviction that in order to understand the powers that be of our time, we have to engage in a critical enquiry into the entanglement of socio-economico-political relations, which the Marxian tradition used to call political economy. The notion of critique here should be understood in its strict sense, i.e. as an exposition of the a priori conditions of experience and appearance. These historical a priori conditions (or rather incessant conditioning) constitute a transcendental plane, which “occupies a position not wholly in the immediate, immanent facts of experience but not wholly outside them either” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 6). According to the Italian-American philosophical duo, the capitalist transcendental plane, which shapes the conditions of the possibility of social life, is established in and through our everyday practices. And these practices are mundane, micrological, capillary etc. However, Hardt and Negri add another adjective, which should make us think twice before we fully embrace their proposal to get rid of all theology in analysing capitalism. They say that the socio-economic powers conditioning our experience are invisible. On the one hand power structures are so deeply embedded in our everyday lives, in the movements of our bodies, in our consciousness and unconsciousness, in our subjective and infra-subjective behaviour – every time we go to work, every time we go shopping – that they have become unperceivable. On the other hand, the movement of an abstract self-valorising value incessantly circulating at enormous speed in the heavens of financialised speculative capitalism seems to be 158 Mateusz Piotrowski: Allegories of the Invisible… ungraspable by a finite human mind. As if capital was at the same time too small and too big to be perceived. Alienation as method What is needed here is a conceptual and figurative device which could make the transcendental plane of capital – in the immediacy and abstractness of which we are all immersed – visible. In order to construct such a device I would like to turn to the somehow dusty and outmoded notion of alienation. It will not only be the object of our study but also its method. Alienation as method is aimed at producing estrangement effects, suddenly exposing the normal world, where everything is as it is, as something much more enchanted than we tend to think. That is why theology – that is a science which deals with the invisible – might be of some use for the analysis of capital. Estrangement effects created by a juxtaposition of theological imagery with political economy could enable us to step out of an undifferentiated movement, to grasp an invisible monster, which has no measurements and escapes definitions – to finally grasp it as a historical a priori which is always almost present as the unrepresentable condition of all appearances. Or, to use the language of Paul of Tarsus: it could help to expose the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the invisible atmosphere, the very air we are breathing as an alien power which stands against us (see: Ephesians 2:2, Colossians 2:14). What is the position of a human subject (say, a reader or the author of this text) in this process of estrangement? What is his position towards the protagonists of our moral play: capital, the capitalist and the worker? For what else is he if not the brother of the characters, caught in the spontaneous myths of ideology, in its illusions and privileged forms, as much as they are? If he is kept at a distance from the play itself, it is not to spare him or set him apart as a Judge – on the contrary, it is to take him and enlist him in this apparent distance, in this “estrangement” – to make him into this distance itself, the distance which is simply an active and living critique (Althusser, 1962). Critique brings the process to a stand-still. When the infinite movement suddenly stops, exposed as something alien, a certain distance is produced. Powers – confronting me from the outside as the alienated fruit of my own work, and from the inside as “another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner” (Romans 159 Praktyka Teoretyczna 3(17)/2015 7:23)1 – these powers could be therefore grasped as something non-identical with me. Even though they do co-constitute the very fabric of myself and the actual conditions of the process of subjectification, I can alienate myself from them. The human subject abstracts itself from the totalising socius and from its own self in the gesture of self-alienation, coming to a Paulinian conclusion that: “if I do not will, this I do, it is no longer I that work it out, but sin that dwells in me” (Romans 7: 17). Alienation as a method could make us step out from the Heraclitean river of capital’s becoming, and achieve at least partial, conceptual mastery over its totality. Blockage of figuration Putting an infinite process into definitions, especially if chaos and fragmentation seem to be its very principles, seems ridiculous. The finite human subject and its subjective opinion appears to be comically incommensurable with capital’s measureless becoming. Much of contemporary thought relies on this incommensurability, ridiculing any attempt to master this chaosmos. Dominant doxa claims that the will to construct a mental totalisation must lead to totalitarian theory and, ultimately, to totalitarian practice. Or at best it has to remain nothing more than pathetic hubris: the pride of limited human reason confronted with powers infinitely exceeding it. Let there be no misunderstanding. Those who advocate the superiority of these processes are definitely right; nonnegotiable facts stand behind them. Nevertheless, we will risk the stupidity of reasoning, which tries to grasp the air surrounding us and is always left empty-handed. Here we are confronted with the problem of invisibility once again. It can be traced back to the text which shaped popular beliefs on classical economy: Adam Smith’s famous fragment on “the invisible hand” (Smith 1976, 456). While analysing this expression it is important to give equal value to both elements of this figurative concept. That is, to take into consideration both the idea of the rational providence evoked by the action of the “hand” – and its “invisibility”. The order, the rational pattern is there, however it remains ungraspable by the human eye and incomprehensible for the human reason of an actor embedded in economic reality; be it a worker, a merchant or a political sovereign. As Michel Foucault (Foucault 2008, 278–286) rightly noted in his reading of this text, non-transparency, or the objective blindness of agents engaged in economic action is constitutive for the rationality of the process. Human subjects act rationally if they are trying to predict ultimately 1 All quotations from the Bible are taken from the New International Version. 160 Mateusz Piotrowski: Allegories of the Invisible… unpredictable movements of the mighty hand. In contrast, any attempts to contradict the unfathomable verdicts of the economic reason, any attempts to intervene in the operations of the market, disturb the rational course of events – must lead to catastrophe. The human subject, be it individual or social, cannot posit itself on the level of the sovereign who sees the process and thus is able to shape its a priori conditions. Or at least that is what the economic Biblia pauperum teaches us. However, it would be overhasty to state, as Foucault does, that imposition of the economic reason makes the very idea of totality impossible, establishing economy as a fully immanent, atheistic domain, where there is no place for invisible Providence2. Totality is there, constituting the interrelation of independent agents, and guaranteeing harmonious coincidence. Thanks to this strange coincidence the pursuit of the maximisation of an individual profit is claimed to lead necessarily to general benefit and a just, rational allocation of resources (see Foucault 2005; Marx 1990, 280; Vogl 2015). The totality exists precisely as invisible. It remains at the threshold of the subject’s consciousness. As when we wake up every morning disquieted, trying to remind ourselves in vain of what it was that we did not do yesterday. Allegories of totality We have said that the concept-image of the invisible hand keeps the totality an almost- present, tacit precondition and the unsurpassable horizon of reasoning. It cannot step-over the point of figuration and conceptualisation, after which it could become an object of critique. A strange mixture of visible and invisible, sensuous and super-sensuous confronts us not only on the macro-level of totality, but also on the micro-level where we meet the cellular form of capitalist society – commodity. Commodity appears as something unitary: an unbreakable atom of socio-economic physics. Capitalist fetishism creates something that Marx calls “an indissoluble fusion” (Marx 1990, 983) of the sensuous and the super-sensuous. And this fusion proves to be strangely resistant to analysis. The social whole does not give itself to our cognition in any transparent symbol. There is no object of experience which could work as its pars totalis, a monad, in which totality is simply present. A statement that tries to pin down totality cannot be anything more than an example: a shadow, which precedes the body, a figure, which comes before the real 2 To make Foucault’s strong claim more questionable one could recall the strange similarity of the supposedly atheist Smithian invisible hand described in Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics to the beatific vision of the divine, cosmic necessity to which the Stoic sage has to adjust himself, which we encounter in his Hermeneutics of the Subject (Foucault 2008, 283–285). This of course tells us something not only about Adam Smith or Seneca, but also about Foucault’s own position, after the fall of the revolutionary wave of the sixties. 161 Praktyka Teoretyczna 3(17)/2015 thing (Hebrews 1:10, see also de Lubac 1988). As Marx warns us, whoever simply identifies capital with a material, visible thing, falls into fetishism. Fetish is no-thing (1 Corinthians 10:19–20), even if it uses a material body as its bearer. That is why, instead of seeing totality in any particular, concrete symbol we need to satisfy ourselves with what Paul of Tarsus baptised as allegories (Galatians 4:24–26). Allegories, in contrast to symbols, are necessarily partial and incomplete (Benjamin 2003, Jameson 2008). The allegorical gaze always requires an interpretative or political act: a decision on the part of the subject, be it individual or collective. The subject has to recognise a figure in a cloud, to draw the lines between dispersed dots in order to see the movement of totality in a concrete moment for the first time. The object of analysis: the production process This might all sound too poetic. However, as Bertolt Brecht teaches us, in certain circumstances an intensified poetical estrangement effect can work as an instrument of scientific cognisance. What I want to prove in my paper is that this figurative operation we call estrangement can be treated as an actual method of Marxian analysis, in its literal sense. Analysis dissects and discerns. What is, what gets dissected in Capital? I would like to argue that it is firstly and most importantly fetish, that is, as we have said, a very peculiar indissoluble amalgamate of the sensuous and the super-sensuous. The vast majority of commentators recalls the concept of fetish solely in the context of the opening chapters of Das Kapital, where Marx deals with so called “simple circulation”. Thus fetishism is usually analysed as a problem emerging in the sphere of exchange and eventually, consumption (with important consequences for the reconstruction of Marxian thought). In my reading I try to take into consideration fetishist “equivocation”, a phantasmic becoming, which takes place not only in exchange, but also at the heart of the production process. Thanks to such an analysis, rather than being confronted with a unitary block of totality on the one hand and the unbreakable atom of commodity on the other, we could see them as incoherent and temporary production processes. What is more, under an estranging gaze the production process itself falls apart, exposing the coincidence of two very different realities: the labour process and the valorisation process. In the actual reality (or rather: in the reality as conditioned by capitalist a priori conditioning) these two processes merge, appearing as a unitary semblance: fetish. The analysis of fetishes tries to dissolve it, by breaking it into distinct and potentially – but only potentially – conflicted layers. The task of a critique of 162 Mateusz Piotrowski: Allegories of the Invisible… fetishes is to alienate the poles, which constitute this semblance, to polarise them and to turn one against the other. Inside the fetishist visual field social objects and subjects are presented as something unitary: as “commodity”, “labour” or “capital” pure and simple. Things and actions (the commodity on a supermarket shelf, the act of buying this commodity for money, the act of earning this money for producing other commodities) appear “at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing”. Only “analysis” exposes it as something “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx 1990, 163). The analysis of fetishes tries to arrest the indivisible movement of the capitalisation of labour, in order to dissect it and expose its strangely twofold character. To understand how this process works, it is necessary to make it stand still, as if by using a slow-motion camera, separating moments and movements, which in capitalist reality exist in the eternal present of creatio continua of incessant production- distribution-exchange-consumption-production. The method applied here tries to produce such a chemical solution which will make elements of fetishist “indissoluble amalgamation” precipitate. II ANALYSIS OF PRODUCTION Inversion, or why is disenchanted critique not enough? These are, however, still promises without sufficient grounding. Let us come back to Hardt and Negri to see better – in contrast to their optimistic, secular, enlightened Euhumersim – how theological estrangement works. Hardt and Negri’s attack on political theology recalls the rhetorical pathos of young Marx’s critique of religion (stop looking for sovereignty in the heavens and recognise the structures of power on earth!). The aim of such a critique is to present things as they really are. Young Marx’s “irreligious criticism” is based on an assumption that “Man makes religion, religion does not make man” (Marx 1992, 244). Religious inversion, which pictures the producer (man) as conditioned by his product (god) is something in the imagination only, but in truth and reality nothing. For young Marx and his mentor, Ludwig Feuerbach, the main subject of criticism, the arch-enemy, who managed to prolong the existence of religion by dressing it up as philosophy was, of course, G.W.F. Hegel. According to the young radicals, Hegel, a theologian undercover, a bookish idealist, an apologist of the Prussian authoritarian state, in an all too Christian manner replaced the concrete, sensual, living human subjectivity, a man of flesh and blood, a man with a body (and a stomach!) with a theoretical, abstract hypostasis called the Idea. In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Marx condemns the Hegelian Idea 163 Praktyka Teoretyczna 3(17)/2015 – the supposedly self-positioning Subject – as nothing but an inversion of real relations. He finds Hegel guilty of a “logical, pantheistic mysticism” (Marx 1992, 61), which conceives human beings to be mere moments of the process of the actualisation of the Idea. Describing how social positions really are distributed in the modern state and how the division of labour operates in modern society, young Marx writes: The real relationship is “that the assignment of the material of the state to any given individual is mediated by circumstances, his caprice and his personal choice of his station in life”. This fact, this real relationship is described by speculative philosophy as appearance, as phenomenon. […] The family and civil society are the preconditions of the state; they are the true agents; but in speculative philosophy it is the reverse. When the Idea is subjectivized the real subjects – civil society, the family, “circumstances, caprice etc.” – are all transformed into unreal, objective moments of the Idea [...] the condition is posited as the conditioned, the determinator as the determined, the producer as the product (Marx 1992, 60–63). We find here a sharp contrast between “the real” and its inversion in speculation. Inside this critical framework capital cannot be conceptualised otherwise, than as a merely imaginative hypostasis of the actions of individuals and their families; as nothing but a semblance. But, for some reason, workers find this illusion real enough to make them work. How does capital succeed in changing individuals into nothing but living elements of a collective machine producing profit? Is capital a real thing or a phantasmagoria? If we could really speak of a rupture between the rhetoric of the young and the mature Marx, it does not happen with the abandonment of the “religious myth” of alienation. “Rupture” (or rather the reconfiguration of the elements of thought, a regrouping forced by the blockage encountered) is produced by the attempt to conceptualise the strangely sensuous-super- sensuous, real-phantasmagorical character of capital. The problem of alienation was persistently and stubbornly present in the writings of Marx (see Marx 1990, 989–990, 1002– 1003)3. As we will see, for the mature Marx alienation is above all a matter of the results of production under a specific social formation. Criticism of religion, defined as the fundament of all criticism in his early writings, remains. But in the Grundrisse and Das Kapital it does not operate in the mode of a Euhemerist denunciation of the misty creations of religion as merely inexistent hypostases. “Irreligion” returns as a practical critique of fetishes. Capital as fetish, far from being something in the imagination only, is immersed in material practices and produces real effects. It organises the division of the social field and the division of social labour: 3 In these writings Marx explicitly discusses religious alienation in the context of the capitalist relations of production, using both the terms “alienation” (Entfremdung) and “fetish”. 164 Mateusz Piotrowski: Allegories of the Invisible… Capital is the lifeblood that flows through/in the body politic of all those societies we call capitalists […]. It is thanks to this flow that we, who live under capitalism, acquire our daily bread, as well as our houses, cars, cell phones, shirts, shoes and all the other goods we need to support our daily life. By way of these flows the wealth is created from which the many services that support, entertain, educate, resuscitate or cleanse us are provided. By taxing this flow states augment their power, their military might and their capacity to ensure an adequate standard of life for their citizens. Interrupt, slow down or, even worse, suspend the flow and we encounter a crisis of capitalism in which daily life can no longer go on in the style to which we have become accustomed (Harvey 2010, vi). Participation in and dependence on capital flows can be more or less direct. Our income which gives us access to the means of subsistence and makes our existence possible does not have to be acquired in the form of the wage. It can be the gain of a speculator, the pension of a pensioner, the benefit of a benefiter or the share of income transferred from a wage- labourer to his wife for her reproductive labour. In any case, it seems that the means of subsistence ultimately comes from a single source – capital. It appears – and here I ask the reader to keep in mind the uncertainty of this word – that in this world capital is the breathable air, the invisible being in which human beings live and move and have their being. What will the markets say about this? Are the markets happy with the new government? The hypostases of our own activity, the products of our own labour appear as a natural-divine precondition of labour, as a quasi-cause of the social process and as a self- begotten being. In the Realprozess of capital, like in the movement of the Hegelian Idea, capital posits and presents itself as a presupposition of labour, changing its precondition into something conditioned. Real, concrete, finite human beings are subsumed under capital to serve the infinite process of valorisation of abstract value, which has become the final goal of production. Human life is contingent, and becomes more and more precarious, whereas abstract markets attain ontological solidity. Capital posits the laws of its own reproduction as necessary, whereas the epiphenomenal existence of this or that particular human individual becomes perfectly unnecessary in the very moment that it ceases to play the role of a bearer of the valorisation process. The phantasy, which conceives the human subject to be “a moment of the inner imaginary activity” (Marx 1992, 62) of the Capital-Idea – this phantasy is made real in the actual production process whenever capital succeeds in turning living labour into a moment of its own becoming. The means of production, the products of labour, represented and personified by the capitalist, rule over living labour as an alien power. This produces an inverted world, which cannot be fathomed by flat, two-dimensional, disenchanted Euhemerist discourses. 165 Praktyka Teoretyczna 3(17)/2015 Sphere of tension: semblance/appearance Before we can penetrate this strange world (where dancing tables animated by the movement of exchange go about their own business and dead labour spiritualised as capital employs and commands living labour), we have to devote some time to the exegesis of the opening sentence of Capital. Or, to be more precise, to the exegesis of a single notion used in this sentence. A notion, which plays a crucial role in understanding the Marxian idea of sensuous– super-sensuous social objectivity. Marx begins his opus magnum with the following statement: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears [erscheint] as an »immense collection of commodities«; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form” (Marx 1990, 125). Marx picks his words very carefully here, and for good reason. He does not say that wealth simply is an immense collection of commodities. He says that under capitalism things appear as commodities. The meaning of the word Erscheinung used in this sentence is usually explained as “a necessary mode of expression” or “objective appearance”. It is often compared and contrasted with another closely connected, and at times overlapping term – Schein, which in this context is translated as “semblance” or “illusion” (see Bellofiore 2009). In the writings of the mature Marx there is an incessant ambivalence, a constant oscillation between Schein and Erscheinung, between appearance and semblance: between capital understood as an objective and necessary form of social mediation, and capital understood as something illusory, lacking any power, apart from the power extracted and expropriated from living labour. The same ambiguity lies at the heart of the Marxian idea of human subjectivity. The meaning of “the subject” in Das Kapital is notoriously undetermined and unstable. It is simultaneously a surface effect of the underlying forces of capital and a genuine power of the self-determination latently present in the “residual subjectivity” (Arthur 2004, 53) of workers resisting and fighting capital. I will try to prove that this ambiguity in not a matter of Marx’s inability to distinguish clearly between the different meanings of words, but rather an expression of real ambivalences inherent to a specific social process. “Appearance” recurs in innumerable passages of Capital in the most decisive moments. It is used not only when Marx defines the “elementary form” of capitalist society (i.e. commodity) but also when he speaks of capitalist production, which transforms dead labour into capital. Under capitalism things appear as commodities, living labour predominantly acquires the form of wage-labour and the means of production present themselves as being capital by nature. Thus, a specific social relation appears as something intrinsic to the thing-hood [dingliche Qualität] of a thing, 166