From Dialectical Reason to Systematic Dialectics

We will now establish the connection between dialectics and real teleology in order to account for the argument that a systematic dialectic is needed to orientate ourselves in capitalist actuality.

Different notions of totality are at play in the relation between the history of the natural history of the species and that of modes of production; by implication this gives us different methods as well as different theorisations of history in terms of totality. First, there is the issue of a history which diachronically and synchronically involves many modes of production, and, perhaps, floating disorganised elements. Secondly, there is the totality of a mode of production, as the 'idealisation of a manifold', i.e. as an organic teleology, self-positing, self-reproductive. The former opens the question of the totality or set of all totalities: either a substantial non-subjective 'totality' of elements external to one another, like Spinoza's 'Deus, sive Natura', or the Hegelian speculative, subjective unity of a teleology of teleologies.³⁸⁶ Hegel's thesis challenges the formulation of the Spinozist notion of substance in a similar way that he challenged the principle of atomism (cf. chapter 1). While Hegel accepts the notion of physical nature as a non-totalised multiplicity, he insists that this concept of Nature is impossible without Spirit, and that Spirit must be shown to have arisen from the interiorisation of this nature itself, the comprehension of which is only possible retrospectively as the Spirit's recognition of itself in exteriority.³⁸⁷ The Philosophy of Nature starts with this exteriority of the Spirit to itself in an abstract substantial nature without teleology, but proceeds to teleology, particularly in relation to the concept of organic life, following Kant's Critique of Judgement.³⁸⁸

While Marx, of course, shows little interest in this debate over the philosophical concept of God, his approach is interesting in that it rests neither on a purely immanentist rejection of the reality of teleology, nor on the stereotypical image of the

386 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (New York: Hafner Press, 1949); Hegel, Science of Logic, 1969. For a discussion on Hegel's critique that Spinoza's substance 'lacks the principle of personality' or subjectivity, see Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, trans. Susan M. Ruddick (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 13–19.

387 Note here the famous transition from the Encyclopedia Logic to the Philosophy of Nature, whereby the former grounds the latter.

388 On the difference of Hegel's notion of intrinsic teleologies, see appendix 4.3.

Hegelian reduction and subsumption of the differences of the world to the great teleology of the Spirit.³⁸⁹ Instead, he tries to hold up both images at once. In doing so, we might see him adopting Hegel's more circumscribed perspective on nature both as the existence of elements in their exteriority, treated by the Understanding, and as actuality of great many teleologies (natural and historical) in their interiority, grasped through dialectical reason.³⁹⁰ Whereas the Understanding treats things as exterior to itself and each other, as things, 'Dialectical' or 'Negative' Reason includes within itself the perspective of the movement and self-reflexivity of the thing. It is the 'immanent transcending [immanente Herausgehen], in which the one-sidedness and restrictiveness of the determinations of the understanding displays itself as what it is, i.e., as their negation.' As thus it is 'the principle through which alone immanent coherence and necessity enter into the content of science...'³⁹¹ As Sartre states in his Critique of Dialectical Reason:

If dialectical Reason exists, then, from the ontological point of view, it can only be a developing totalisation, occurring where the totalisation occurs, and, from the epistemological point of view, it can only be the accessibility of that totalisation to a knowledge which is itself, in principle, totalising in its procedures.³⁹²

The theoretical orientation toward totality must therefore be understood not as a pure need of reason, but as an imposed need by the developing totalisation in which theoreticians – be it Marx or Silesian proletarians – find themselves. The two perspectives on dialectical Reason, one 'ontological' the other 'epistemological', pose here the ideal of an orientation in which they coincide, and their split: orientation is precisely needed because these perspectives do not coincide.³⁹³ If Kantian critique is the

389 Hegel is careful to insist that nature is irreducible to conceptual thought. 'As thoughts invade the limitless multiformity of nature, its richness is impoverished, its springtimes die, and there is a fading in the play of its colours. That which in nature was noisy with life, falls silent in the quietude of thought; its warm abundance, which shaped itself into a thousand intriguing wonders, withers into arid forms and shapeless generalities, which resemble a dull northern fog. ... By thinking things, we transform them into something universal; things are singularities however, and the lion in general does not exist.' Hegel, Philosophy of Nature I, 198.

390 For an explication of the difference between the Understanding, Dialectical Reason and Speculative Reason, see Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 125–34, sections 79-82.

391 Ibid., 128, §81.

392 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason - Volume 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, new ed.

(London: Verso Books, 2004), 47.

393 Perhaps the quintessential concept of this coincidence is given by Hegel: 'The absolute Idea has shown itself to be the identity of the theoretical and the practical idea.' Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. (Miller Trans.), 824.

study of the conditions of possibility of a given object, dialectics is the form of critique appropriate to an immanent totalisation, a process which posits itself and whose elements mutually presuppose one another, that is to say a process which is, in short, 'organic' or 'teleological.'³⁹⁴

The idea of a systematic as opposed to historical dialectic can be understood as an answer to and a defence against the Althusserian attack on the historicism and economism of Hegel-inspired readings of Marx, as well as an internal critique of the old Hegelian Marxist of the philosophy of history as such, which had gone into disrepute through the experiences of the world-wars and Stalinism. As such, it was an attack on the uniform interpretation of history according to general transhistorical trends, but an attack carried out from the standpoint of a basic faithfulness to dialectics. Thus, unlike Althusser's proposal of structural causality which eliminates the subjective unification of history ('history as a process without a subject'), the systematic dialectics approach theorises history in terms of the figure of a subject in history, but limits it to the capitalist epoch. In Capital the abstract and impersonal power of capital is itself an historical actor, a self-developing, automatic subject. Its value form is 'the dominant [übergreifendes] subject of this process.'³⁹⁵ It is important to note, however, that these two conceptions are not mutually exclusive. Capital as a subjective force in history might be taken as a regional subject within the overall process of history, which has no subject. This is indeed the route we will take.

If the research programme of systematic dialectics is limited to the historical epoch, this limitation functions precisely through the positing of capitalism as a real subject, whose history can be understood, retrospectively, as the unfolding of its essence. The negation of the historical dialectic in favour of a systematic dialectic situates us within a given organic whole, and allows us to study the systematic, reproductive relations between its parts.³⁹⁶ Historical interpretation, for Chris Arthur, itself becomes 'irrelevant' to the study of totalities and their reproduction, understood as the 'circuit of reproduction of these moments by each other.'³⁹⁷ He follows here Marx's strict insistence on the priority

394 The dialectic is critical insofar as it inquires into conditions of an existing object. However, unlike the Kantian critique which aims at providing the transcendental conditions of the possibility of an object whose existence is taken for granted, the Hegelian dialectic is interested in the inner conditions of necessitation of the object itself.

395 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 255.

396 'If the dialectic as inquiry is the search for internal relations within and between abstracted units, the dialectic as exposition is Marx's means of expounding these relations to his readers.' Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 65.

397 Arthur, New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 64.

of the being over capital over its historical becoming, and that the starting point of any cognition lies in the orientation vis-a-vis actuality, indeed that any orientation is also an effect of actuality:

In the succession of the economic categories, as in any other historical, social science, it must not be forgotten that their subject – here, modern bourgeois society – is always what is given in the head as well as reality [der Wirklichkeit]...³⁹⁸

This reality must be considered in terms of actual organisation and production, rather than its history. In bourgeois society capital is the 'all-dominating power.'

It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development.³⁹⁹

Any object of study which is a totality requires such a systematic method, which in turn will allow insight into 'the necessity of certain forms and laws of movement of the whole under consideration.'⁴⁰⁰ This systematic, and contradictory character of capital is what gives it its specific dynamics and tendencies, a temporality which is its own, irreducible to natural history. Pace Althusser, the 'essential section' of capital is valid because this essential conflict is what makes capital appear, with necessity, as an abstract subject.

If there is no dialectic of history as such, but only of specific historical modes of production, at the very least the capitalist one, does that entail a total negation of natural history? Does that, qua the thesis of the co-constitution of real totalisation and the knowledge of that totalisation, entail a thesis that each epoch is only truly comprehensible to itself? And does this throw us back to a kind of radical historical solipsism limited to the interiority of capital?

398 Marx, Grundrisse, 107.

399 Ibid.

400 Arthur, New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 64.