IX Colóquio Internacional Marx e Engels GT 4 - Economia e política

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1 IX Colóquio Internacional Marx e Engels GT 4 - Economia e política Anticipation and inevitability: reification and totalization of time in contemporary capitalism Ana Flavia Badue PhD student Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY Narratives about the inevitability and inescapability of capitalism overtook Western thought towards the close of the previous century. The collapse of socialist regimes and the economic growth fostered by technological and scientific development have together made capitalism appear to be a totalizing system that leaves no room for other ways of being, such that the liminal present has taken over our temporal experiences. The future seems to be trapped in the present, and neither outside nor beyond it. Anthropologists and social movements have been emphasizing possibilities of other forms of existence outside capitalism, seeking to unravel (micro and macro) resistances and thereby highlight the untimely. Yet, this paper takes a different route. Rather than reflecting on resistance, I undertake a theoretical discussion that helps to historicize this moment and to think of the conditions that made this moment possible. I argue that our contemporary temporal experiences are connected to a formal process of totalization within capitalist social relations. With the the notion of reification, I analyze how and why the present appears as multiple and all-encompassing: as if the real, the possible, the actual and the virtual were identical. A saturated present and an anticipated future overwhelm (political) action because all the possibilities seem always already given, forcing us to withdraw and abandon other possible ways of thinking and living. My talk will be organized as follows: firstly I ll present what I call a stranded time; second, I will approach the notion of reification and how it can be used to think in relation to a stranded time; and then I will conclude with the idea that totalization works because the present seems to be saturated with all the possibilities, and I ll highlight the consequences for political and intellectual action. 1. Stranded time 1

2 What does stranded time mean? Authors who adopt a Foucauldian perspective analyze temporal regimes to show that practices such as indebtedness and scientific forecasts produce docile and anxious subjects who obey institutions that are external, overdetermining. For example, in an article about technoscience, affect and time, Adams, Murphy and Clarke (2009) argue that the current moment (as they called it in 2009), is characterized by a constant anticipation of the future. They show that technological and scientific discourses produce speculative forecast, which makes future known, graspable, controllable and almost inescapable. But knowing and controlling the futures is not all. Their point is that this new temporal regime affects the present and the way we inhabit time. The anticipation of the future, produced by technological and scientific discourses, makes us live the present as overdetermined by the forecasts. Our present affects, experiences and subjectivities work as if molded by an unescapable future. Moreover, anticipation it is not only an affective disposition, but also a material process. Once the future determines the present, and not vice-versa, the present becomes organized around actions and practices that urgently respond to the projected future. This perspective would also help us to understand Harvey s notion of foreclosed future through the optics of subjectivity formation. Harvey explains that college debt, mortgages and other forms of loans and debts foreclose our future. Because we owe huge amounts of money, every decision we take becomes oriented to the payment of the debt, and therefore financial institutions are the ones to whom we devote our lives. We could then take the anticipation as a form of making subjects trapped. The erasure of boundaries between future and present produces and is produced by totalizing discursivities, in the sense that all the possible actions are prefigured and predetermined. We could also think of how much the idea of anticipation works in other contexts. How has subject-formation been organized around foreclosed futures in places where anticipation based on science and reason? In Christen Smith s work, Police brutality, assassination of Black boys, girls, women and men, for example, appear to people living in Brazilian favelas both as a sign of the present and an index of the future. And this foreclosed and violent future differently shapes the subjectivities of mothers and fathers of victims of police brutality. The present is experienced based on a future marked by racialized, class based and gendered expectations, and by the present presence of an armed and violent state. 2

3 This idea that the future shapes the present and makes us trapped is, in my understanding, an inversion of the 1990 s and 2000 s discourses of end of history. Back then, there was no future that would be placed outside of the present. What we have now is that no present is experienced outside of a predetermined future. In both situations, our experiences appear to us a pre-defined, either by the present or by the future. Now, instead of furthering the analysis on how subjectivities are shaped and shape these totalizing narratives, I propose that totalization itself is part of a process of reification of the existing capitalist relations. In other words, we feel stranded in time because there is a social process that makes time a total form of social experience. 2. Why reification? To understand what I mean by total form, I will briefly present why the notion of reification is important here. I follow Marx, Lukács and Postone (who has passed away a couple days ago) to explain reification as a process of autonomization of forms that are socially constructed, and the subsequent impacts of this autonomization. Let s begin with the commodity form, which is the first thing that appears in Marx s capital. According to Marx (and to many anthropologists, like Mauss), there is nothing natural in the commodity form. A commodity is the form that things assume in societies when they are purposefully produced to be exchanged. In capitalist societies, when things are purposefully produced to be exchanged, their exchange-value is constructed upon an abstraction: labor time. The real mediation among commodities is abstract human labor, which is abstracted through the erasure of the concreteness of particular labor and converted into nothing but expenditure of human labor (MARX, 1984). This abstraction uses labor time as a measure to calculate the expenditure of human labor in general, so things can be exchanged based on a general substratum, a general value. Historically, says Lukács (1972), the quantitative extension of the mercantile exchange produces a qualitative result: exchange becomes the dominant form of social metabolism, as if everything that was produced was meant to be commodified and exchanged. Therefore, most of the social relations in capitalism are mediated by the commodity form. It means that most of the activities that people undertake are somehow oriented by the logic of exchange. Yet, the predominance of exchange over social relations assumes an autonomous and non-historic character, as if it was natural, external and deterministic. Likewise, the abstraction of labor and the 3

4 reduction of the qualities of labor into labor time becomes naturalized, converted into an external measure, a quantifier of the value of the commodity, and a quantifier to other social relations as well. Time as an abstraction, therefore, is socially constructed, but it works as if it was suspended over our heads. Like that, it seems to determine our rhythms, activities and the way we interact. (This is how I historicize the totalizing narratives!) While Marx uses the notion of fetish to account for these inversions that take place within the commodity form, Lukács prefers the notion of reification. Lukács suggests that we think of reification as a process that accounts for the social relations that produce forms which, contradictorily, erase these same social relations as their producers, and that become the reason for social relations to occur. In very simplified terms, reification is a concept that grasps the transformation of the products of social relations into their cause. Although Marx and Lukács are referring to the same process of objectification of the social relations, reification brings the possibility to expand Marx s dialectical lenses to a broader set of contexts, not only for political economy. When we think that the expansion of the commodity form is also an expansion of the abstract labor, time as an abstraction also becomes external, autonomous and transcendent. This is why we think of time in philosophical ways, and not in material ways. In Postone s words, clock time and synchronization developed within the context of large-scale production for exchange, based upon wage labor (POSTONE, 1996, p. 211). I highlight within because this is what the notion of reification does: if sheds light on a controversial process, in which the product of social relations become determining of these relations. This is what Marx means when he says that abstract labor seems to be fixed by costume : abstract time loses its social determination (a mechanism to organize and mediate the exchange of commodities) to become a determination itself (time as structuring). Or as Postone puts it, the time expended in producing a particular commodity is socially transformed into an average that determines the magnitude of the value of the product (POSTONE, 1996, p. 191). So far, I have used the notion of reification to show how capitalism, where social relations are oriented by exchange of value, promotes an inversion and conversion of the products of these relations into norms. One last discussion that is important here before we go to our contemporary experience of time, is the notion of totality. Because the expansion of capitalism is the expansion of the commodification of human actions, which become human labor, and commodification of 4

5 the products of human labor, the socially necessary labor time expands as the measure for more and more human actions. This expansion is important because it helps us to understand how reification is a process of social domination. 3. Reification as totalization I will follow Marx s mode of exposition in Capital to get to the notion of totalization. The process of totalization begins, in his work, with the transformation of all things that exist into a commodity, including all forms of labor. This generalization of the commodity form in terms of the individual labor enables its expansion and conversion into the total social mediator, meaning the hegemonic form of satisfaction of needs, of art, of subjectivities, of culture. If this is the case, the more the commodity form is generalized, the more abstract time is generalized, and vice-versa. What is at stake here is not simply that everything becomes marketized, but that everything assumes the commodity form, a form that inverts subjects and objects. Fetish or reification entail the inversion between use and exchange value production producing to exchange, and use as the realization of the exchange, instead of production and exchange serving for the purposes of utility which occurs from labor relations to intimate experiences. It is important to have in mind that if we think of the commodity form as the dominant form of social relation, it is totalizing for three reasons: first, because social forms become the form of society (it is not random that Durkheim s social fact defines Western sociology); second, these forms become the general abstract reference for particular and concrete experiences; and third because this imposition touches and transforms the individuals themselves, meaning that the abstraction is not only external to individuals but also takes place internally. Reification implies totalization, therefore, because the processes of objectification are accompanied by the transformation of these objects into totalizing categories, that dictate, structure and organize their own conditions of possibility. In this sense, totalization means a social process that creates symbolic, practical and organizational structures that operate as if what is outside these structures was not part of the society. This is precisely what happens with time! Abstract labor, which is a product of capitalist relations, not only becomes the norm and structuring of other social relations, but also negates the possibility of other temporalities. 5

6 4. Saturated time I return now to my main argument that time has been reified and totalized. The end of history or the anticipatory discourses and practices reveal that, as Adorno puts it, [In the West] people have lost... the capability to imagine the totality as something that could be completely different... people are sworn to this world as it is and have this blocked consciousness vis-à-vis possibility (ADORNO; BLOCH, 1988). As I showed in the beginning, the present and the future become flattened. The real, the possible, the actual and the virtual become identical. What equates these formerly distinct moments is the transformation of our present and our social relations into the only social relations possible. Again, the particular becomes the autonomized, external and transcendent universal. In the 1990s, the present become the norm for all the possible social relations. Now, it is the future that appears as pre-determined, and as such, it determines the present. What I am saying is that not only the commodity form assumes a character of transcendence and of totality, like Marx, Lukács and Postone argue, but time also does. A quantitative, anticipated time. As an unfolding of the totalization of the commodity form, capitalist present and future social relations become the reference, the norm, the parameter, and therefore different times become identical, despite their differences. In other words, time becomes synonym of capitalism, it is totalized, transformed into an object and that rebounds back, structuring social experiences. The contemporary forms of reification operate via the virtual encompassing of everything. I emphasize the word virtual because what is at stake in my presentation is not the reality of foreclosing all the possibilities. Instead, the shifting of social forms into present legitimations of what is given takes place because present and future become identical and appear as the only historic moment that encompasses all forms of life in their differences. Anticipation entails a thoroughly measured future that is inevitable, that organizes and saturates time with multiplicity and differences, in the sense that everything that might happen to us is potentially predictable by machines and devices. Now-time (which includes present and future) colonizes all the possibilities of existence. Totalization, therefore, means a form of reification made possible by the perpetuation of the saturated time. This saturation makes us exhausted, because all the possibilities seem to be always already encompassed. All that is left to us is to keep up with them. And innovate, of course. Or, you withdraw, and you lose the game. Other possibilities do exist, but they are presented to us as if 6

7 they were either part of the existing or as if they did not make any sense. Our time appears to us as if we were stranded in it. But every second of a minute is the moment to deny it. Bibliography ADAMS, V.; MURPHY, M.; CLARKE, A. Anticipation: Technoscience, Life, Affect, Temporality. Subjectivity, n. 28, p , ADORNO, T.; BLOCH, E. Something s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing. In: BLOCH, E. (Ed.).. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Cambridge: MIT Press, LUKÁCS, G. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Tradução Rodney Livingstone. MIT Press edition ed. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, MARX, K. O Capital - vol. 1. Livro Primeiro. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, POSTONE, M. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx s Critical Theory. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press,

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