Peace As Ideological Function pt 1

Something of incredible importance happened relatively recently; Barack Obama gave his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech. This event desperately necessitates critical elaboration but all the analysis that I have stumbled upon completely misses the mark. It is of unequivocal importance that we don’t get duped into solidarity with an opposition that decries the hypocrisy of giving a “War President” this most prestigious peace award. This reading not only obfuscates the significance of the event but participates in what is truly insidious about it. The problem lies not in the disparity between the image of a Nobel peace prize winner and the reality of Obama’s administration. What unsettles me is that the truth of Obama’s presidency can encapsulate that image because a fundamental realignment of our ethical universe has already set in. This event is a signifier for a shift in the liberal-democratic symbolic order.

Transcendental Materialism, Historical Materialism and Dialectical Materialism

In order to interrogate the nuances of this shift, and how it was accomplished, we first need to deploy a transcendental materialist analysis. I think Brendan nicely summarized transcendental materialism as follows:

Contrary to a [dialectical] materialism that understands the reality we have now as the necessary outcome of previous contradictions, we will rather begin to conceive the present situation as the failure to realize other possibilities; at the core of this position is the thesis that this failure continues to mark, indeed to haunt, our present, and that it is up to us to re-actualize, not the material failures of past movements, but their own radical core which exceeds and surpasses them.

What needs to be elaborated is transcendental materialism’s relation to Marxist Science and why it offers a better conceptual apparatus to think through the problems of Political Economy then dialectical materialism. Despite dialectical materialism, as a fully formed conceptual apparatus, not found in the work of Marx, but in Bolshevism, its deficiency is inscribed into the core of Marxism: historical materialism. To be absolutely clear on this point, Marxism absolutely necessitates one to operate with a materialist conception of history. Under close scrutiny, however, historical materialism discloses itself as not materialist enough.

In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Engels summarized that historical materialism:

designates that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the change in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggle of these classes against one another.

There is nothing objectionable about this statement as it stands. In fact, its implicit empirical theses are central to an understanding of political economy, two of which are 1) The rise and fall of different relations of  production are strictly correlative to whether said relations facilitate or encumber the productive capacity of the mode of production 2) In every relation of production there is a  determinate mode of production “which assigns ranks and influence to all others” (Marx, Gundrisse). However, historical materialism is situated within what they (mis)perceived as the reversal of Hegelian dialectics.  In Capital Marx writes:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”

In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy Engels Writes:

The dialectic of Hegel was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed on its feet.

From these two statements the conclusions to be drawn is that Marx and Engels are in fact the firsts vulgar Marxist. Lenin, being a very good Marxist, is no exception and also fails to think through the insufficiency of a materialist conception of history predicated on a (false) reversal from the Idea, which Marx importantly identifies with “the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking,” to Materialism.

However, as Zizek explains, not all failures are created equal. Lenin’s failure to re-actualize Hegelian philosophy in his theory of dialectical movement sheds light on Marx’s so-called problematique break with German Idealism.

In his Notebooks, Lenin is struggling with the same problem as Adorno in his “negative dialectics”: how to combine Hegel’s legacy of the critique of every immediacy, of the subjective mediation of all given objectivity, with the minimum of materialism that Adorno calls the “predominance of the objective” (this is the reason why Lenin still clings to the “theory of reflection” according to which the human thought mirrors objective reality).

The problem with this theory of reflection, which is present in Marx himself (“With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”)  is that it betrays idealist presuppositions. Namely, it posits mind as external and independent of the objective reality that it reflects. The radical materialist stance is:

insisting on the absolute INHERENCE of the external obstacle which prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself… partiality (distortion) of the “subjective reflection” occurs precisely because the subject is INCLUDED in the process it reflects.

The subjects very inclusion in objective conditions preclude the “real” material world from coming to full presence. Otherwise we would have to postulate an external positive, immaterial, and omnipresent gaze that see’s the totality of the material world. If we reject this postulation, which a materialist must, it is clear then that the criticism usually leveled at Hegel philosophy, that of a pan-logic monstrosity, is actually applicable to Marx.

This pan-logicism makes itself apparent when Engel speaks of the dialectical method as the  ”communist world outlook fought for by Marx and myself.” A world outlook! This is Marxism at its most vulgar. In one fell swoop Engels reduced Marxism from Science to both some asinine philosophy, philosophy in its most colloquial understanding as the way an individual sees the world, and base metaphysics. Heidegger makes clear that modern metaphysics is defined as such by this notion of the world picture.

“We get the picture’ concerning something does not  mean only that what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stand before–in all that belong to it and all that stands together –as a system.”To get the picture” throbs with being acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it.. What is in its entirety, is now taken is such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extend that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Whatever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirely. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter. (italics added)

It is this very acquaintance with the world that a materialist must uncompromisingly reject. Unlike the Marxist vision presented by Engels, and implicit in Marx, materialism is not, and should not be used, as a philosophical meta-language. It is neither a solution nor the medium in which a solution can be posed. It is a form of vision- the lens through which we see the world and not the world viewed-  that is accorded to a particular form of historical subjectivity which is constituted at the interstices of the de-territorializing wave of capitalism. As such, it reflects that logic of de-territorialization. It violently poses a hermeneutic question in order to unbind, to unground meaning. As such, it can never pose that the world IS anything as it de-terriorializing property of this vision makes it clear that the world is becoming.

Thus, Marxism is in desperate need of a theory of the subject in order to assert a materialist conception of history which preserves the core theses of historical materialism but resists it idealistic trappings. Despite what it may seem at first this does not necessarily entail a rejection of Althusser’s work. Althusser defined the Marxist conception of history as:

a process without a Subject or a Goal where the given circumstances in which ‘men’ act as subjects under the determination of social relations are the product of class struggles. History therefore does not have a Subject, in the philosophical sense of the term, but a motor : that very class struggle

This definition can be revised as history is a process with a subject without substance because a subject without substance is a rejection of Subject, and its philosophical/metaphysical underpinnings.

	Yunus is a devout Muslim, a registered member of the Communist Party of America, a misanthrope and an artist struggling to sell his paintings of women being eaten by monsters. Secretly he worries that the world sees him as a misogynist. In his spare time he enjoys tweeting about his poop.

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