°XI
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. - Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach”.
Thesis Eleven – what is ‘the point’? What is at stake? Eleventh - that moment beyond the neat ten, in excess of the theological commandments. Karl Marx’s eleventh comment on Feuerbach, while very far from being, as it is so often read to be, the purportedly a-theoretical pragmatic command which forestalls asking any significant or difficult questions about ‘how things are’ or, even less, amounting to a dialectics which seeks to project idealised versions of what exists into an infinite future, is nevertheless equivocal enough to have enabled interpretations of such varieties. Such are the contingencies of writing and reading, to be sure.
But the ambiguity is also the tension between the adoption of a canonical philosophical register – the transcendental, dehistoricised voice that proceeds by way of a faithful-critical succession through proper names – and the urgency of political difference in the midst of the dialectic’s gluttonous, eternalising inclination. Walter Benjamin’s translation of the eleventh thesis is not quite so constrained, the sense of horror and threat that much more palpable. Here, Marx’s insistence that changing the world is what is at stake in ‘philosophy’, even as any materialist ‘philosophising’ can never aspire to accomplish this transformation, achieves one of its more urgent renditions. It is not a question of choosing, as if in a marketplace, from a variety of interpretations, nor of being compelled, quite. Reeling from the announcement of the ‘non-aggression’ treaty between Germany and the USSR in 1939, Benjamin wrote not of the geopolitical cynicism of this pact, nor of a certain instrumentalisation of diplomacy for the purpose of biding time (these aspects should not be discounted, but perhaps rethought accordingly), but of a profound, almost unthinkable complicity that the abbreviation of national socialism to nazism tends, to this day, to elide.
Here is Walter Benjamin’s eleventh thesis, from the “Theses on History”:
The conformism which has dwelt within social democracy from the very beginning rests not merely on its political tactics, but also on its economic conceptions. It is a fundamental cause of the later collapse. There is nothing which has corrupted the German working-class so much as the opinion that they were swimming with the tide. Technical developments counted to them as the course of the stream, which they thought they were swimming in. From this, it was only a step to the illusion that the factory-labor set forth by the path of technological progress represented a political achievement. The old Protestant work ethic celebrated its resurrection among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program already bore traces of this confusion. It defined labor as “the source of all wealth and all culture”. Suspecting the worst, Marx responded that human being, who owned no other property aside from his labor-power, “must be the slave of other human beings, who… have made themselves into property-owners.” Oblivious to this, the confusion only increased, and soon afterwards Josef Dietzgen announced: “Labor is the savior of modern times … In the … improvement … of labor … consists the wealth, which can now finally fulfill what no redeemer could hitherto achieve.” This vulgar-Marxist concept of what labor is, does not bother to ask the question of how its products affect workers, so long as these are no longer at their disposal. It wishes to perceive only the progression of the exploitation of nature, not the regression of society. It already bears the technocratic traces which would later be found in Fascism. Among these is a concept of nature which diverges in a worrisome manner from those in the socialist utopias of the Vormaerz period [pre-1848]. Labor, as it is henceforth conceived, is tantamount to the exploitation of nature, which is contrasted to the exploitation of the proletariat with naïve self-satisfaction. Compared to this positivistic conception, the fantasies which provided so much ammunition for the ridicule of Fourier exhibit a surprisingly healthy sensibility. According to Fourier, a beneficent division of social labor would have the following consequences: four moons would illuminate the night sky; ice would be removed from the polar cap; saltwater from the sea would no longer taste salty; and wild beasts would enter into the service of human beings. All this illustrates a labor which, far from exploiting nature, is instead capable of delivering creations whose possibility slumbers in her womb. To the corrupted concept of labor belongs, as its logical complement, that nature which, as Dietzgen put it, “is there gratis”.
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The eleventh hour?
matt [April 4, 2008 @ 12:52 am]
Ha. Though destiny is not what it seems.
s0metim3s [April 4, 2008 @ 1:09 am]
yah,have been catching up all week!
matt [April 4, 2008 @ 2:19 pm]
I can’t recall where he says it, likely in Reading Capital - but, somewhere, Althusser remarks that Capital, or perhaps Marx’s writings generally, are (were) the priveliged terrain of discourse and its conflicts. It occurs to me that BSG may well have attained such textual standing … Doesn’t displace, but it sure makes it less a question of fidelity than play - notwithstanding the navigating of IP, broadcasting territorialities, and timezones … which is perhaps part of the (frakking with technics) fun for those of us not in the US.
s0metim3s [April 4, 2008 @ 2:36 pm]
yes, now i see.
the passage from benjamin also an important one. I will say more about this later
Anyway, i rented the entire first season of BSG and am about to start watching it now.
dionysusstoned [April 4, 2008 @ 3:12 pm]
Oh, there’s a reason this begins with the epigrams that it does. The Benjamin fragment - yes, very, very important. And would Fourier count as scifi? Though I have to say I prefer my scifi deeply dystopic - “The storm drives [the Angel] irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm” - and a politics (and life) sans any utopia, bleak or hopeful.
s0metim3s [April 4, 2008 @ 3:29 pm]
no, no…can’t read that now. only just finished the first disk.
Eish!
dionysusstoned [April 4, 2008 @ 6:30 pm]
and yes..angel of history very appropriate. always (or)
dionysusstoned [April 4, 2008 @ 6:33 pm]
You could always watch the often-hilarious recap of seasons 1 to 3. And might I say, for those up to the most recent: the “I cut myself shaving” comment was beautiful.
s0metim3s [April 5, 2008 @ 6:25 pm]
On thesis eleven - this appeared recently in the Monthly Review. Haven’t read it yet, though.
Craig [April 7, 2008 @ 5:51 pm]
Cosmology?
s0metim3s [April 8, 2008 @ 9:03 pm]
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to blog it. - Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach” (unpublished notes).
completely ott. my blog is down, for now. nasssty new rightsss!
pls to be reading:
http://slackbastard.blogspot.com/2008/04/slackbastard-v-mathaba-free-speech-vs.html
thanks!
— @ndy.
@ndy [April 12, 2008 @ 4:48 pm]