A response to the comment

This is the third of what will be four papers written for the course I am in: 'foundations of social theory'. I post it here because the green letters look nice.

I’d like to begin this text with a comment. Received from my ‘post-modern friend’, the comment came by way of Auntie Vulgar, and is a comment, says my friend, about ‘the reification of the logos’, and is in response to my polemic, ‘Death and Praxis:

“Here is Lyotard commenting on ‘the abyss between the denotative and the prescriptive’ from _Just Gaming_(Minnesota, 1985). ‘[In] not only Plato but Marx as well, there is the deep conviction that there is a true being of society, and that society will be just if it is brought into conformity with this true being, and therefore one can draw prescriptions from a description that is true, in the sense of “correct”…. But this passage from the true to the just raises a problem, because if one were to ground it, it would mean that a prescriptive statement would constitute an obligation only if…the addressee of the statement is able to put himself in the position of the sender of the statement…in order to work out all over again the theoretical discourse that legitimates, in the eyes of this sender, the command that he is issuing.’” 

I would like to begin with this ‘legitimization of commands’ and the agency of the receiver in meaning construction. To legitimize a particular structure is a choice, though often a passive or structurally coerced one. It is not only a ‘true being of society’ whose prescriptions must ‘bridge the abyss’ to legitimacy and receiver response, but the inherited society as well. People constantly legitimize certain prescriptions of action in favor of others, for the most part (and perhaps necessarily) unaware of the reasons save the most apparent. Society is a complex of de/legitimizing discourse. Something as simple as watching a particular commercial broadcast or purchasing a new pair of shoes is legitimizing discourse –in the former instance because you and I have our meaning making capacities and projected purchasing power sold to advertising agents, and in playing that role become complicit in current uses of monologic media channels; and in the latter case the purchase of shoes realizes the goal of a particular production process so that at the moment of exchange an entire complex of social structures are legitimized: the global division of labor, particular concepts of ownership and exchange, branding and a culture of self bound intimately with the commodity fetish –image as commodity, and of course the functionaly creative and mechanical activity to which so much of our labor is devoted when sold. One could also suggest that a simple conversation with another person is a legitimizing discourse in that it will more or less adhere to certain learned, accepted, and anticipated patterns and norms of dialogic activity. All Lyotard observes here, it seems to me, is the jurisdiction the receiver of a message can claim in terms of meaning construction, and the extent to which they choose to permit the ‘abyss’ between the meaning constructed and the level of receptivity to the prescription for action if any there be. Inherited structures, inherited prescriptions, however, come with a bridge largely and already intact. Such prescriptions, which obviously vary in type and degree from person to person based on demographic and personal experience, can be and often are followed either automatically or out of compulsion.

Some automobile owners in the United States, for example, might opt not to own or regularly drive such a vehicle (for any number of reasons) were it but for their country’s largely auto-centric urban and interstate planning. The rationalization of automobile ownership in this case may be that I must work and enjoy particular forms of recreation and consumption, and that there is only one means of transport through which these are accessible. Or, I may truly believe, as the advertisements suggest, that automobile ownership endows me with greater freedom or prestige, or maybe I just really actually like driving a car. Or, and most likely, it is an over-determination, with any number of subjective, cultural, and political-economic factors ‘determined and determining ‘in one and the same movement’ (Swingewood: 189) a mass of individual legitimizations, i.e. the prescription of car ownership bridging the abyss.

This is dangerous ground, and if not careful I may not be as lucky as the car. Although both I and my example have talked along the lines of Althusser’s relatively autonomous levels of society combining to form the ‘structural complexity’ of a social formation; thereby achieving an over-determined structural causality (Swingewood: 190), the remainder of my response to Lyotard’s statement runs less with Althusser and more along the lines of critical-theory, Gramsci, and Marxism as rooted in subjective and inter-subjective praxis. The essential difference is that while Althusser suggests there is no prescription other than the eventual unfolding of structurally over-determined events, Gramsci and school suggests humanity writes its own history both backward and forward in time.

That a ‘deep conviction of a true being of society’ is in Marxism is very much the case. Marxism implies a cache of normative views on power relations in society. In essence, Marxism advocates that the present mode of social reproduction is unjust and exploitative, and suggests that human kind can and must struggle to achieve alternative social norms of the ‘just’.  In some instances these views do take on an almost messianic character, at which point the Marxist ‘logos’, if you will, is reified; moves from critical-theory to a ‘quasi-religious system’ (Swingewood: 113). Such occurrences are unfortunate since the essential concern of Marxism as a critical theory is the extent to which particular structures and Weltanschauungs, specifically those of capitalism, ossify, reign hegemonic and assume an existence seemingly outside the realm of human influence or choice. What Kirkpatrick and crew call ‘an alienated society’ (Kirkpatrick et al: 2). It practically goes without saying that Marxism as a closed discourse, as a set of particular theories to be accepted or rejected ad hominem, assumes the status of an ideology, very much in the Althusserian sense of the term, and in so doing negates itself as a theory of the practice of emancipation. This is the problem of orthodoxy and dogma.

However, this relationship between orthodoxy and Marxism should not be over-stated, nor made into a behavior singular to the Marxist approach. The purpose of the above discussion on legitimacy and structure was to demonstrate that a given mode of reproduction can only survive so long as the correct demographics continue to act in a legitimizing manner –in accord with a particular rubric of ideologies and norms relatively non-threatening to the status quo, or as Gramsci would say, in ‘active acquiescence’ in the persistence of bourgeois society (Swingewood: 118).  In our particular situation capitalism continues to persist in part because the bourgeois Weltanschauung’, its particular iteration of truth and its particular movement from the true to the just, (“the rule of law”, “liberal representative democracy”, “an honest day’s work”, “the free market”), successfully bridged, and unless actively challenged, will continue to monopolize the bridge between the denotative and prescriptive. So, while Marxism runs risk of orthodoxy, the bourgeois Weltanschauung is for us and many other people orthodoxy a priori.  

While I agree with Lyotard, on a purely functional level, that there is an endemic problem, for whatever reasons, of Marxism’s ability to actually cross the abyss, to actually move more active agents into a different theoretical and practical frame that challenges capitalism’s ‘truths’; question notions of social reality limited in scope to the realm of the ‘objective’ and empirical. However, I would strongly disagree with any implication that the problem is Marxism’s attempt as such. The greatest strength of the Marxist discourse has been promoting an understanding that ‘truth lies not in the facts of the given reality, but in the negation or transcendence of those facts…in our attempt to change the world, in our critique of the established reality’ (Kirkpatrick et al: 2). Marxism, at its best, is not merely an attempt to change the ‘facts’ of world capitalism, but a perspective which asks always “what is a fact?” (Kirkpatrick et al: 2). Truth is inter-subjectively constructed, and as such Gramsci’s immediate ancestors, Labriola and Sorel, are right to suggest “there is no truth waiting to be discovered only a truth which must be made.” (Swingewood: 115). The use of the indefinite article, ‘a truth’, very much implies the subjective, mutable, and fluid conceptualization of ‘truth’ in the tradition of critical theory. The ‘true being of society’ is not, in this iteration of Marx, one particular structruration of society, but rather it is any number of possibilities, imminent realities, for which humanity must actively struggle to make real. “Reality is not a given datum but created through human activity; the goal of socialism is not lying in wait in some distant future but results from praxis.” What is the goal of socialism? An inalienable society, a society actively determined by its agents in a democratic and non-exploitative manner. How do we arrive at this? By “making the critique of alienation speak for popular needs and lead to concrete actions against the capitalist commodity relationships—within historical possibilities” (Kirkpatrick et al: 3 my emphasis).

While it is clear that Marxists cannot afford the naïve assumption that their messages are constructed by those who receive them in such a manner as to engender and encourage a new Weltanschauung –and the elitism in Bolshevism or otherwise will certainly not do. However, it is also naïve to suggest that society is either so utterly fragmented and subjective or structurally determined (objectified) that any attempt at change via ‘human will organized into collective forms’ is doomed forever to lurk in the abyss. In the first instance, the relativist thread in post-modern thinking can be seen very much as a positive development, as it does encourage a mode of thought conducive to identifying and questioning reified forms, even if that questioning is not, strictly speaking, Marxist. In the second instance, structures evolve as agents work through them. The observation of the Frankfurt School, that ‘capitalist societies are closed systems with monologic modes of social communication as a simple one-way process of cultural indoctrination” (Swingewood: 132-3), could start to ring less true. The monologic structure of the culture industry has the potential for further significant change; the diffuse nature, interactive and productive potential of the new tools of cultural production make praxis in general, and Gramsci in particular, more relevant than ever before:

“All revolutions are preceded ‘by an intense work of cultural penetration’ as the rising class aims to subjugate allied and subordinate strata to its ideas. A dominant class is…defined as one which saturates civil society with the spirit of its morality, customs, religious and political practices: ‘The foundation of a ruling class is equivalent to the creation of a Weltanschauung.’ If the working class is to constitute a dominant class it must establish a culture that commands the support of other strata; its world view, Marxism, is thus not a class ideology as such, but the expression of the immanent structural trends of history. Cultural hegemony prior to the act of revolution is created through collective action” (Swingewood: 118). 

The ‘historical possibilities’ have seldom been potentially more conducive to the cultural penetration by ‘ordinary people’ into the culture industry; a growing awareness of these possibilities is reflected in the growing activity and discourse surrounding ‘new media’: ‘There is a battle for the soul of the internet, and if a greater democracy is to claim this soul it will only do so through the work of ‘ordinary people’, entering, shaping, and governing these new means of production, these new communication means (Coleman 2005a: 280). Given the quite real and very vulnerable nature of these new opportunities for cultural penetration, to reject collective action a priori is a futile and worthless act. Relativism is preparing collective actions of its own. Making symmetrical the power relationships in narrative production is critical praxis; a grand narrative of subjective experiences, a great many voices communicating the local as globally shared –a de-localization and democratizing of cultural production, of message and construction –potentially. Already the bourgeois Weltanschauung takes root. “Technologies are never neutral: they are designed, shaped and socially modified in accordance with discourses that are often profoundly political and hegemonic” (Lessig in Coleman 2005b: 185).  Already some give up: ‘the internet will be ‘free’ only where this serves the purposes of commercial development’ (McQuail: 140). Unless we can claim it.

Works Cited

Coleman, S. (2005a). ‘Blogs and the new Politics of Listening’. The Political Quarterly, 76(2), 273-279.

Coleman, S. (2005b). ‘New Mediation and Direct Representation: Reconceptualizing representation in the digital age’. New Media & Society, (7)2, 177-198. 

Kirkpatrick, R. G., Katsiaficas, G. N., & Lou Emery, M. (1978). ‘Critical Theory and the Limits of Sociological Positivism, Red Feather Institute.

McQuail, D. (2000). McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory, 4^th ed.
London: Sage Publications. 

Swingewood, A. (2000). A Short History of Sociological Thought, 3^rd Ed., Palgrave Macmillan.