Badiou interview

On Tuesday, Libération published an interview with Alain Badiou, which can be read on their website. Badiou is cast as one of Sarkozy’s three “adversaires”—he fits nicely into the prefab role of “radicalité.” So although the occasion of the interview is really only to continue the anti-Sarko circus, Badiou does manage to articulate some broad political points.

The mode in which the newspaper introduces Badiou is worth pointing out: he is a philosopher, who stands apart both from Derrida and from the nouveaux philosophes, “Il a préféré se lancer dans l’élaboration d’un système philosophique sophistiqué, d’inspiration platonicienne, où les mathématiques jouent un rôle important, et qui lui vaut une certaine renommée dans le monde universitaire anglosaxon.” Then he is also politically engaged, a practicing Maoist. The two are quite separate, and it is his philosophy, not his politics, that interests the English-speaking world; which, in my experience, is quite false. Of course, to begin with, the sectors of the US academy that are interested in Badiou would reject most formulations of a distinction between philosophy and politics. But also, anecdotally, it seems to me that the philosophy is worked through in order to get to the politics, or at least something that is supposed to be critique and therefore political.

(As an aside: I am amazed, though perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, that the French press still says ‘anglosaxon,’ when what it means is Britain and the US—the ethnic identification leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)

In the interview itself, Badiou indulges in anti-Sarko banter, which is the whole reason they asked him to do the thing in the first place. I think all that is beside the point (conjunctural?). Badiou reaffirms his commitment to the idea of changing the ‘motor’ of society to something other than self-interest, or profit. He argues that so-called democratic societies (the wealthy west) have not in fact reduced violence, but only externalized it. Although the form of this claim is compelling, and I am convinced that ‘we’ export rather than solve a great many of the problems that we solve, Badiou’s specific claim about violence is, as they says, fortement contestable. Also, perhaps, it is subject to empirical verification. The rhetorical reason for this specific claim was to contrast capitalist society with the Soviet Union and other socialist ‘experiments’ (a terrible way to refer to half the world). The capitalists export their systemic violence (one assumes from the capitalist core to the capitalist periphery, although, again, I think the spatialization of capital distribution implied here is, to be short, wrong), while the socialists fully assume it, which is to say, turn the apparatus of the state against the people it is supposed to serve.

Mostly, Badiou states (as probably he has said before) that in his opinion the major theoretical problem of our time is to arrive at an effective form of political mobilization that is not the military-party model. He says,

Le problème d’une discipline politique qui ne soit pas calqée sur le militaire est un problème ouvert, expérimental. Gardons-nous des approches théorique de la question, qui ramènent toujours à l’opposition entre le léninisme (l’organisation) et l’anarchisme (la mobilisation informelle). C’est-à-dire à l’opposition entre Etat et mouvement, qui est une impasse.

He seems to have some specific examples in mind when he rejects the ‘movement’ as a model of political activity. I’m not sure exactly what they are. But I agree that the fetishization of the state/non-state distinction is to be avoided, especially in France, where the line is sometimes hard to find.

I am off to the grève générale, where perhaps I will find some alternative to capitalism.

Renan on decline and reform

Renan, Ernest. La réforme intellectuelle et morale.


It is 1871, France has just lost a war and fallen into civil war and socialist revolution. Frenchmen cannot help but look at the surrounding ruins and wonder what brought them to this point, and what should be done next.

Renan thinks basically that materialism and democracy have brought France to its current state of crisis. The Capetian dynasty made France, preceded it, and France therefore in a sense committed suicide when it killed the king. Since the turmoil of the Revolution, France has sought to replace the king with one dynasty or another—first the Bonapartes, and then the renewed Bourbons. Although Renan remembers the July monarchy with fondness (that, not coincidentally, was the period of his own youth), it was also the scene of creeping materialism that manifested itself in the 1848 revolution and Republic. The folly of universal suffrage was made plain to the idealistic republicans, but not before France had chosen a new monarch, Louis-Napoleon. The Second Empire was a period in which France’s wealth grew vastly, and its moral and intellectual strength (virility) declined just as much. The decadence of this kind of life is not unpopular, and if the Emperor had avoided war, it could have lasted indefinitely.

Yet the era of nations is also that of struggle between nations. France, in its pride and virility, had defeated and humiliated Prussia at the beginning of the 19th century, and now Prussia has taken its revenge. Prussia’s defeat made it strong and disciplined. France, in its materialism, had grown weak. Hence the collapse of the government, of any force of order, hence, that is, the moral defeat following the military one.

The reforms that must be undertaken should be modeled roughly on those that Prussia undertook after its defeat. Most famous here are Renan’s views on the intellectual failure of France. He wants the French to bring back autonomous, competing universities (he’s not the only one), which, he says, were a French idea to begin with, and so would in no sense be copies of German models. More interesting to me is his swipe at representational government. Of course his preference is for a return to the monarchy, but he is willing to admit that once a people has enjoyed a right for a generation—even one such as universal suffrage, with very dubious benefits—that right cannot simply be taken away. Clearly, though, simple election of an assembly by universal suffrage would result in mediocre and worse than mediocre leadership. This kind of election means the advent of the politician, whose only skill is to be elected.

There must be, Renan says, a two-house system. Of course there must be an assembly that represents the population qua population—although even here he thinks that where single men get one vote, married men get two, and married men with children yet more, since Renan’s view is that women already have too much influence in politics as it is. There must also be a house that represents the ‘moral individuals’ that make up the state. This means something like the constituencies. The teachers will be represented as teachers, the bureaucrats as bureaucrats, and so on. Large cities, whose people are already represented, will themselves get representatives. This is, I must say, a remarkable vision of society reflected, or transmuted, into an assembly.

It is also radically at odds with the traditional view that the political culture of France is hopelessly caught in a Jacobin trap. Renan is a liberal. He refers to himself in this way, and has some liberal positions, such as the right to free speech (though not free assembly). But he is a liberal who has become obsessed with order. Democracy, he says, makes of the population a heap of sand—nothing can be built with that. I suppose the answer is that he is not a liberal Republican, but a liberal monarchist who probably prefers Guizot, and Guizot’s ‘moment,’ to any conceivable republican one. Order, for Renan, is built to an extent on the clear-eyed recognition of hierarchy.

Renan thinks in terms of millennia and the vast movement of races. He looks back to the 5th century Germanic invasions for parallels to the current situation, and is pleased to explain a great deal by national, racial, character. It would be interesting to investigate how deep Renan’s racial thinking in fact penetrates into his political thinking (such as it is). It is the right of strong nations to conquer weaker ones, and perhaps, he is willing to hazard, the Latin peoples have lost entirely what warrior spirit they absorbed from their contact with the naturally warrior-like Germanic peoples. After all, some races are suited to servitude (the Chinese are good with their hands and have no honor, which I suppose is meant to signify that they are good for industrial labor, and the Africans are strong and good-natured, and so well suited for agriculture). Perhaps the revenge of France will not be on the battlefield at all. Indeed, Renan works himself into such a frenzy of possibility that by the end of the essay, with the possibility of a global conflict between two models of nationhood (the German and the American) looming on the horizon, he suggests essentially that France will be remembered for its tact and politesse, as the salt of the earth, that which gives taste to an otherwise bland world…small consolation, it seems to me.

It would be easy to read this little essay as a sort of traumatic symptom. The trauma is plain enough, and the thing is full of what seem like contradictions. At one moment he is lamenting the lost possibility of a triumvirate of nations, France, England, and Germany, united to stave off the terrible threat of Russia—at the next moment he is asserting that the real enemy is the Germano-Slavic spirit. The preface suggests that the defeat of France and the victory of Prussia should be seen as the natural consequence of France’s previous victories. The first sentence of the essay itself says that one cannot find (admittedly, rigorous) cosmic justice in the wheel of historical fate. Later in the essay, though, he comes back to the theme again, dressed this time in pseudo-science: France defeated Prussia in 1807, and let the flame of Prussian pride, which comes back to France in 1870, perhaps to help France regenerate itself in the same way…

In the end, it seems to me that if Renan moved through a republican phase, and his scientism in 1848 is something like it, then after the war he returns to the political opinions that his masters held in his youth. We have a racialized version of the elitist liberalism of the July monarchy—making hecatombs of the benighted masses on the altar of reason. Equality is the greatest virtue, and finds its expression in science, but only the best have access to it. I read Renan because he was important, and because his French is beautiful. The sentences are so often quotable, worth writing down and memorizing for use at a dinner-party; which is, after all, both the fault and virtue of French culture, according to Renan. His writing has an ironic distance from itself, even his political attitudes are, as it were, always at a remove, always posed with an awareness of their contingency. Yet I find him distasteful. His honesty amounts to accepting the consequences of his own superiority, or his belief in it. No wonder he was disowned by later generations.

Science as Religion

There is a common rhetorical practice of comparing something, a form of politics, or of literary criticism, to a religion. The comparison is always pejorative, and always works because no one is every sure what religion means. The word stands for whatever sort of foolishness is to be indicated at any particular moment. So it is under advisement that I say that I have decided one can, in fact, talk about science as a religion in the 19th century.

Two books have brought me to this point. Ernest Renan’s L’avenir de la science, and Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médicine expérimentale. The first was written in 1848-9, and not published until the 1890s. It represents the record of a sort of conversion experience for which, I am certain, an analogue or description could be found in James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. Renan kept the manuscript with him, and mined passages and ideas from it over decades as, in fact, the progress of events stripped from him the transparent faith in the power (or perhaps efficacy) of critical, which is to say scientific, investigation. ‘Science’ meant something very different to the readers of this book in 1895 than it did when the book was written. It was indeed partly to remind people of that past that Renan had the thing published. At that time, reasoned investigation of man and nature seemed a force able to pull down the great wall of superstitions surrounding society and allow Humanity to enter the realm of its full potential. This messianic form of Enlightenment was not at all uncommon in the first half of the 19th century (no doubt “messianic Enlightenment” is not a great way of describing it, but I think the sense of continuity with Enlightenment projects of the previous century is must be retained). Renan describes the overwhelming experience of criticism, of the sense that a tool has been put into one’s hands that is able to dissolve nearly everything that one believed to have been solid. So this messianic Enlightenment is not only a social program, but a kind of emotional experience and discipline.

Here is the link, or rather the contrast, with Bernard’s Introduction, that makes the two books interesting together. Renan was a man of letters, but at a time when philosophy and literature and science and history could all still be boxed together. Bernard, in fact older than Renan, was professionally formed as what we, today, would call a research physician. His Introduction, published in 1865, comes toward the end of his life. If science is a messianic faith for Renan in 1848, ready at any moment to alter the world radically, it is for Bernard a way of living within the realm of appearances. Doubt and modesty are at the core values of Bernard’s experimental scientist. What I find most compelling is how effectively Bernard encloses this doubt within a higher faith. The very condition of existence of the scientist is faith in the absolute determinism of the physical world allied with the realization that this determinism will probably never be fully understood; faith in actual absolutes, doubt and modestly in the claims one makes on, for, and toward them. This is a recipe for living. If Renan’s young scientist is not exactly arrogant, it is only because he is himself too crushed by the power of reason. Bernard’s scientist, on the other hand, has never said anything that he knows to be absolutely true, and is ready to submit every opinion to the criteria of experiment and reason.

The intellectual position of the two scientists is similar. They are both committed to the practice of true knowledge about the world, which is governed by immutable laws that are in principle knowable. Their emotional, or perhaps subject, positions are radically different, as are the relations they imply between the scientist and the rest of the social world. For Renan it is the scientist’s duty to proselytize in the cause of reason. Bernard’s scientist is, it seems to me, unlikely to be very interested in engaging with society. No doubt this difference could be ascribed to their respective vocations: Renan was an historian above all, and Bernard a physiologist. Yet we can imagine without difficulty a Bernardian social-scientist. Let us put this differently: Renan’s scientist is, it seems to me, outside the problematic Max Weber describes in “Science as Vocation,” whereas Bernard’s scientist is firmly within it. Emotionally, however, Bernard’s scientist is the more firmly grounded. He or she (Renan’s science is strongly gendered—Bernard’s is not) is able to find a firm footing only on that which floats between two absolutes that are, in themselves, not graspable; on the one hand, there is the absolute determinism of the objective world, to which we have only relative access, on the other hand there are the absolutes of our subjective existence, to which we have access, but which we cannot bring into the objective world other than partly.

Renan and Bernard both describe modes of comportment determined by one’s understanding of a reality that is somehow at once beyond this world and within it: reason. Their conception of reason and its presence in the world is, I think, similar. The ‘conclusions,’ or modes of comportment, they draw from this same reason separate them. Why do I say this makes 19th century science like a religion? Because the two writers belong in different tents within the same house, because they draw inspiration, emotional sustenance, and rules for living from the same source, but differently. That this constitutes a religion (rather than a sect) is evidenced by the difference itself.

Jennifer Hecht, in The End of the Soul, describes a group of free-thinking atheists in early Third Republic France who, she says, erected a certain kind of science in the place of religion to the extent that they have recreated Catholic burial rites in the form of autopsy procedures. This is the Society for Mutual Autopsy. They pay dues. They have meetings. When a member dies, the society removes that person’s brain and performs an autopsy on it to further science. Hecht takes as evidence that this is a recreation of religious rites that they continue to perform autopsies even when there is no possible scientific benefit. Although Hecht’s functionalism bothers me (she seems to assume that there are a set of basic human needs, and that Catholicism having been removed, a new procedure must be found to fulfill these needs), the historical situation she describes seems to warrant her assertion that the ceremonies of Catholicism, and their emotional meaning, were transferred to these ‘scientific’ procedures, so that, we might say, the meaning of the ritual became dissociated from its significance.

Hecht may point to her atheists as enacting a religion of science, but it is neither Renan’s nor Bernard’s. To allow the emotional significance of the autopsy procedure to over-run its scientific importance would be, for both, to have replaced science with superstition. It would mean leaving the house of science. So I would suggest that Hecht’s atheists are really still Catholics, something like inverted versions of Charles Maurras, who supported Catholicism for political reasons while refusing ‘belong’ to it himself.

surplus-value

By the end of chapter 7, “The labor process and the valorization process,” I had lost the train of Marx’s argument on the crucial ground of the creation of surplus-value. I went back, and believe that I have got it back. I will try to explain. Specifically, the following passage from chapter 6 made no sense to me, and then the crucial move of the next chapter, also reproduced here, relied upon it.

Suppose that [the] mass of commodities required for the average day contains six hours of social labor, then every day half a day of average social labor is objectified in labor-power, or in other words half a day of labor is required for the daily production of labor-power. This quantity of labor forms the value of a day’s labor-power, or the value of the labor-power produced every day. If half a day of average social labor is present in 3 shillings, then 3 shillings is the price corresponding to the value of a day’s labor-power. If its owner therefore offers it for sale at 3 shillings a day, its selling price is equal to its value, and according to our original assumption the owner of money, who is intent on transforming his 3 shillings into capital, pays this value. 276

The value of a day’s labor-power amounts to 3 shillings, because on our assumption half a day’s labor is objectified in that quantity of labor-power, i.e. because the means of subsistence required every day for the production of labor-power cost half a day’s labor. But the pas labor embodied in the labor-power and the living labor it can perform, and the daily cost of maintaining labor-power and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things. The former determines the exchange-value of the labor-power, the latter is its use-value. The fact that half a day’s labor is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore the value of labor-power, and the value which that labor-power valorizes [verwertet] in the labor-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labor-power. 300

And yet more clearly:

The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labor-power; he therefore has the use of it for a day, a day’s labor belongs to him. On the one hand the daily sustenance of labor-power costs only half a day’s labor, while on the other hand the very same labor-power can remain effective, can work, during a whole day, and consequently the value which its use during that day creates is double what the capitalist pays for that use; this circumstance is a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller. 301

The shillings, I think, confused me a little, as did the 6-hour half-day. The point of this passage and the next chapter is that the exchange-value of the commodity ‘12 hours of social labor’ (and by this is meant the mythic socially-average-labor of any given instance of production) is 6 hours of labor. Why, I thought, would the worker work a whole day if the cost of living for a whole day was half a day of labor? But we aren’t talking about 6 hours of substance farm labor in order to sustain life for the remaining 6 hours of a given 12 hour period. The worker possesses a commodity, labor-power over time, the exchange-value of which can be expressed in the labor-time necessary for its production, just like any other commodity. The special nature of labor-power as a commodity is that its use-value falls in the same qualitative category as its exchange-value, and is greater than this exchange-value. So it valorizes itself.

The total value that goes into the production of any given commodity is measurable in labor-time. But (at the arbitrary 1:2 subsistence ratio) each hour of labor-time purchased at its exchange-value on the market in the form of labor-power (as opposed to the congealed form of leather, or yarn, or any other physical commodity) yields, when it is consumed in use-value, 2 hours of labor-power. That is the source, as far as I can tell, of surplus-value, and therefore of capital. The general formula for capital, M-C-M’, expanded into M-C-M+ΔM, expresses just this fundamental result of the treatment of labor-power as a commodity, measured in time, but expressible in money. So surplus-value itself rests, just as value does, on time measured and chopped up into bits.

Some weeks ago there was a much-reported factory occupation in Chicago. My understanding is that the conflict was over, in part, delayed compensation. Or put differently, the necessity for the worker to lend their labor-power to the capitalist over short periods of time. Another way of saying this is that workers are always paid after the work is done. Marx says,

In every country where the capitalist mode of production prevails, it is the custom not to pay for labor-power until it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, for example at the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the worker advances the use-value of his labor-power to the capitalist. He lets the buyer consume it before he received payment of the price. Everywhere the worker allows credit to the capitalist. That this credit is no mere fiction is shown not only by the occasional loss of wages the worker has already advanced, when a capitalist goes bankrupt, but also by a series of more long-lasting consequences. 278

The footnote to this passage describes, among other things, the system of factory-shops, in which workers who are paid only at long intervals are obliged, between paychecks, to buy necessities on credit at high prices. The very idea of this ‘company shop’ is scandalous now, but the practice of carrying significant credit card debt is really no different. Marx insists that value be measured in social time—necessity is also social. This is to say that Marx’s basic schema still makes a certain amount of sense in an ‘affluent’ society, because necessities for the reproduction of ‘the worker’ are socially, rather than physiologically, determined. Much more value is required to produce a stock-broker who will operate at ‘normal’ levels than is required to feed a human being. As Balzac makes quite clear, much more is required to make a successful journalist than a pen and coffee—there are social, but none the less real, costs to doing this kind of commodity production. Marx also insists on the physicality of labor, the metabolic relationship between man and nature that it incarnates. Although I haven’t worked it all out, it seems to me that most of what I have so far read could stand without this strong (dare I say metaphysical?) distinction between nature and man.

This man/nature distinction is related, I think, to another distinction, that between the two kinds of consumption. There is productive consumption, which is social—leather is consumed in producing a boot, for instance, but the value of the leather is transformed and carried on in the exchange-value of the boot. Then there is individual consumption, which is to say the non-productive realization of the use-value of any given commodity. The boots are purchased, and then worn, until they are used up. The distinction seems to be essentially between production which is then rolled into a new commodity, and production which leaves the field of commodity exchange. But what if a worker buys the boots, and wears them to the factory, as a necessary part of his working equipment? Or, to extend my contentious counter-example, what if a stock-broker, or an investment banker, buys the fancy leather shoes, and wears them to work where they become part of the image of success that is, often, what is in fact being sold. In both cases the individual consumption is folded back into the reproduction or production (is there, regarding labor-power, any distinction there at all?) of the labor-power commodity. How are we to draw the line between commodities that an individual buys to consume individually, and those that are purchased and folded into the labor-power sold by this individual? The more we expand the concept of labor-power, the more problematic this becomes. How, in the end, are we to retain the socially constituted aspect of necessity while distinguishing it from that which is not necessary? If we are no longer considering necessity in terms of calories (which Marx is quite clear that we do not), then do we turn to the empirically observed fact of success in any given area of production as the only possible measure of necessity? This is perhaps the relativism of which Marx is sometimes accused.

No doubt at least some of this will become clearer as I read on.

beginning Capital

It seems to me, five chapters into Capital, that everything Marx is building depends on a theory of value as crystallized labor-time. This labor-time is arrived at, even in theory, only through the mediation of society understood as a measurable, limited, abstraction. It seems that this theory of value will be invoked to preclude the possibility that surplus-value may accrue to money (turning it into capital) through the labor invested in it by those who hold it. In this way, it seems, labor will be constrained within the comprehensible domain of turning leather into boots (rather than that of selling dear and buying cheap). The development of money into capital seems set to take place autonomously. I have a hard time accepting this. It is not a stripping-away of illusion so much as a blatant failure to take actual practice into account. I do not find the easy references to 'social averages' especially convincing or plausible. Or perhaps, very likely, I have misunderstood. A large part of this volume of Capital is taken up by discussions of surplus-value, and the labor theory of value, and perhaps by the end of them I will have explanations for what seem like very large blind spots.