Marx's Temporalities

by Massimiliano Tomba

Overview

The book rethinks the central categories of Marx's work beyond any philosophy of history, providing a critical analysis of his political and theoretical development from his early writings, to the elaboration of the critique of political economy and his final anthropological studies on pre-individualistic and communist forms. The study aims to integrate the paradigm of the spatialisation of time with that of the temporalisation of space, showing how capital places diverse temporalities into hierarchies that incessantly produce and reproduce new forms of class struggle. An adequate historiographical paradigm for globalised capitalism has to consider the plurality of temporal layers that are combined and come into conflict in the violently unifying historical dimension of modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789004236783
Publisher:	Brill Academic Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	11/15/2012
Series:	Historical Materialism Book Series , #44
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Massimiliano Tomba is Professor of Philosophy of Human Rights at the University of Padua. He has published many books, translations and articles, including Crisis and Critique in Bruno Bauer (2002) and La vera politica. Kant e Benjamin (2006).

Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter One: The Historical Materialist
Appendix One: Marx as Historical Materialist. Re-reading the Eighteenth Brumaire
Chapter Two: A New Phenotype
Chapter Three: Capital as Phantasmagoria
Appendix Two: A Contribution to the Historiography of Layers of Time
Bibliography
Index

Preface

Extract from the Preface

‘Historical materialism’ as a theory of history or a materialist conception of history does not exist. ‘Historical materialism’ is not a passe-partout for the comprehension of history, but a practical mode of intervention into history. The goal of this book is both to study Marx’s concepts of time and history, and to rethink the idea of historical time beyond the universal conception of history that was expressed by many ‘cold streams’ of Marxism. The book tries to reconnect to Marxism’s ‘warm streams’, reactivating Bloch’s idea of a ‘multiversum’ and Benjamin’s considerations on the concept of time. Moving into the ‘warm stream’ allows for the production of a different representation of the temporalities of capitalist modernity, by means of an alternative, transcendental approach. This change of perspective not only constitutes the content of the book, but is also embodied in its style, the goal of which is to effect a shift away from the current view of capitalist phenomena. Since form and content depend on each other, the break with the unilinear conception of time must be expressed in the very form and spatial organisation of the text. The book’s focus necessarily stands at its centre, constituting the second chapter on the ‘new phenotype’. Capitalism transforms the environment, de-naturalising nature, destroying space through the acceleration of time, and altering the form of human experience and human being itself. This is the real starting point of the book, which proceeds in both directions: towards the first chapter, in order to sketch out the different ‘types’ confronting the crisis; and towards the third chapter, where the perspective is transformed into the paradigm of plural temporalities. The two appendices constitute ‘laboratories’. They are approaches to a historiography of historical temporalities.
This book is written with the conviction that an entirely new consideration of time and space is needed if we are to confront our contemporary world. The materials of this first book (a second monograph on Time, Space and Anthropology is currently in progress) are assembled according to the spirit of the ‘warm stream’ of Marxism and Marx himself.
It is remarkable that Marx himself does not use the term ‘historical materialism’, but, instead, uses the expressions ‘practical materialist’ and ‘communist materialist’: figures able to produce new historiographical images by creating separation and choice in relation to the present. The ‘practical materialist’ does not presuppose a conception of history, be it idealist or materialist, but rather intervenes into an historical situation, delineating its force-fields and opening a new terrain of possibilities. This figure requires two preliminary moves: on the one hand, a critique of the singularisation of histories in the collective-singular Geschichte [history]; and, on the other hand, a historiography able to consider history in its incompleteness. Thus, it is never an object of which we could give an objective representation. Insofar as it is incomplete, history is produced constructively by a historiography able to trigger off the explosive charge of the past in the present. This ‘presentification’ of the past is the opposite of its ‘actualisation’. The latter tends to cancel out differences and historical ruptures, while the presentification of the past reopens, in the moment of a current struggle, the possibility of beginning another history, alternative to the course of capitalist modernisation. Rethinking different historical temporalities of the global present means rethinking and reopening other possible paths of modernisation that stand before us; that is, behind us and in front of us at the same time, pieces of the future that are encapsulated in the past. This task has become difficult or even almost impossible, since capitalism and the modern state have become metahistorical or even ‘natural’ ‘facts’. It is possible to imagine their reform; it is even possible to imagine them destroying the planet once and for all; but it is not possible to imagine their overcoming. The naturalisation of historical concepts produces the self-representation of modernity as something that cannot be transcended. The question is: how was and is this kind of naturalisation of historical presuppositions possible?
The singularisation of the concept of history, which occurred in the German conceptual vocabulary between the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, constituted, on the one hand, the condition of possibility for the processualisation of history in the direction of the theories of history of the nineteenth century; on the other hand, it produced the processualisation of political concepts. Concepts like democracy or equality thus became vectors of historical process, new concepts with new words: democratisation, levelling. These semantic changes occurred in the historiographical reflection on the French Revolution, as an attempt to domesticate it, inserting it into a long process of centralisation of state-power that began with the ancien régime, was continued during the Revolution, and culminated in the dictatorship of the two Napoleons. In representing this temporal arc, stretching between tragedy and farce, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire produced a background-image of political modernity: a long nineteenth century, still unfinished. The processualisation of history, elevating Weltgeschichte to Weltgericht, also submitted history to process, in a sort of auto-reflection. Unilinear historical progress allowed the measuring of the level of (Western) civilisation attained by populations with histories different from those of Europe, thus justifying the domination of those who were represented as lower down the scale. The East India Company clerk John Stuart Mill did precisely this when confronted with ‘backward’ states of society populated by ‘nonage’ races. This still occurs today when different political forms in various countries are related to medieval Europe.
This modern concept of history orders and temporalises an enlarged geographical field of experience by producing an axiology between that which is developed and that which is residual. It produces a determinate imaginary of politics and, therefore, a determinate figure of politics that we call ‘progress’. This conception is not reducible merely to the ‘magnificent progressive destiny’ of our civilisation, faith in which Giacomo Leopardi already denounced two centuries ago; rather, progress is a synonym of advancing along a vector of a given orientation, whose tendency the theory of history claims to be able to discern. The modern concept of progress, which combines a continuously growing knowledge of nature with an increasingly extensive domination of it, in the nineteenth century became a political slogan simultaneously legitimating the reformist claims of social democracy and the colonialism of the liberals.
In the third chapter, I consider the current concept of linear time and progress through the prism of Marx’s concept of phantasmagoria. Within this perspective, I try to explain how the modern image of the indefinite and unlimited character of progress, the temporality of which is that of homogenous and empty time, expresses the lack of proportion of the process of valorisation. According to Marx, capitalist progress emancipated humanity from the limits of nature and dissolved the old communitarian bonds; the autonomisation of capital did not, however, open up the possibility of liberation, but rather led humanity and nature to a state of extreme degradation. The use-value of commodities is not neutral, but rather expresses a specifically capitalist nature that is manifested in machines whose end is to increase the production of exchange-value and to eliminate the ‘pores’ in the working day. The capitalist use-value of machinery retroacts on technique, techonology, science and modern rationality itself. The genesis of this capitalist modernity can, therefore, be studied only from the perspective of the possibility of its demise. As the categories of capitalist modernity present themselves as impossible to transcend, the main problem is to delimit their reality in a highly determinate historical moment. However, in the observation of the historical character of categories, the observer is, at the same time, that which is being observed.
We need to undertake a change of perspective in order to abandon not only the spatial and geographical provincialism of the Eurocentric perspective, but also the temporal provincialism that produces the self-representation of the world of the West as the tip of the arrow of historical time. Marx overturned this perspective in his late anthropological studies: the study of so-called primitive societies led him to show, conversely, the historical, non-eternal character of the capitalist mode of production, of private property, and of individualism. He questioned the attempt by the Russian anthropologist Maxim Kovalevsky to analyse pre-Columbian societies by means of European categories of feudalism and of private property; he criticised the distortions introduced by Ludwig Lange when he interpreted the common property of ancient Rome in the light of individual property. Furthermore, he sketched out a historiography that is able to comprehend politically the action of the past on the present and the action of the present on the past. I investigate these interactions in the two appendices.
In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx remarks that ‘the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’, but, at the same time, that the past tradition can also be revitalised in order to change the present. In an early letter to Ruge, Marx wrote:

It will then become plain that the world has long dreamed of something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become plain that it is not a question of drawing a sharp mental line between past and future, but of completing the thought of the past. Lastly, it will become plain that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously bring about the completion of its old work.

The nightmare immobilises; the dream shows in the present a task from the past that still has to be completed. In ‘awakening’, humanity explains to itself the meaning of its own actions; it is the moment in which humanity becomes conscious that it has a task for which ‘our coming was expected on earth’. The new, retroacting in the past to the point of modifying the order of the tradition, brings the dead back to life. It was in this sense that at the beginning of the great historiographical experiment called Thomas Müntzer, Ernst Bloch wrote: ‘Thus we certainly do not look back, even here. Rather, we involve ourselves vigorously. And the others also come back, transformed, the dead return, their acts want to be fulfilled once again with us’. For the historical materialist, the problem that Marx managed to pose can be of even greater actuality for our present than it had for his contemporaries. Previous attempts at liberation await their completion. This is the political problem of ‘remembrance’, as against the postmodern destruction of memory. As Daniel Bensaïd emphasises, ‘far removed from the “duty to remember” and other commemorative pedagogies, commemoration, according to Benjamin, is a struggle for the oppressed past in the name of defeated generations’. Events need to be thought simultaneously in a historical and in a non-historical way: historical, because they belong to the past; non-historical, because they leap out of the past as a possible future. This rethinking of history, announced in the early years of the twentieth century, is now being undertaken in different fields of research: the critique of the iconography of progress and of the linear conception of history in the paleontological studies of Stephen Jay Gould; the rethinking of anachronisms in the history of art by Georges Didi-Huberman; the questioning of the ‘direction’ of time and of the principle of causality in quantum physics, as the possibility of changing the past by means of a present-day measurement.
A sentence that Anaïs Nin ascribes to the Talmud states: ‘We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are’. In order to produce a different view of modernity, we need to effect a change in our viewpoint and in ourselves. By means of the metaphor of the ‘camera obscura’ and of the ‘mirror’, Marx tried on numerous occasions to provide an image of modernity as ‘inversion’. This inversion regards the relation between value and use-value: production, no longer directed towards use-values, destroys the limits of community and becomes indifferent to the quality of the objects of use, which, beginning with the means of production, take on an intrinsically capitalist use-value. The relation between man and thing takes the place of the relation between man and man; value subsumes use-value. This overturning gives rise to the fetishistic image of the world and to a new anthropology: the modern individuals entrapped in the garden of Calypso. Human desires become animal desires; needs to be satisfied. The desire of the novum is crushed in the incessant, always self-same repetition of novelties. The crisis of experience that accompanies the subsumption of use-value in exchange-value is displayed in Benjamin’s Passagenwerk; it generates Beaudelaire’s search for excess, Benn’s freezing of history, Ballard’s explosions of violence. In this horizon, the idea itself of political change collapses, becoming unthinkable.
Here, the historical materialist has the task of producing an image of reality that is able to illuminate the possibility of change. However, if the representation of reality is always mediated by categorial frames and takes shape from the perspective of observation, it is a case of producing a shift in perspective, which does not move in the direction of a greater objectivity – any vision can claim the title of ‘objectivity’ – but towards a vision able to grasp what another perspective occludes. This shift effects a revelation, or an illumination. The postmodern image of the indifferent plurality of points of view is, indeed, nothing but the completed self-representation of the modern that veils this dissymmetry of perspectives.
From this book’s perspective, the appearance of the spatialisation of time is nothing other than the inverted image of the harder temporalisation of space. The former juxtaposes spatially the different times in contemporaneity, reproducing the image of that which appears; the latter, instead, intervening with its own specific temporality, shows how temporalities are placed in hierarchies and come into conflict. Time is not transformed into space, but rather impresses on it a constant rescaling, a redefinition of the spatial scales and of the hierarchical scales of state-regulation that traverse different nation-states, redefining their sovereign-functions without at all dissolving them. Geography does not take the place of history, but rather cannot neglect the temporal and historical dimension of capitalist accumulation. In this scenario, there opens up the question of the possibility of another history. This was the hypothesis that Marx studied extremely seriously together with the Russian populists. I consider this topic in the second appendix.

Editorial Reviews

It is [Western Marxism] that commands the full attention of Massimilliano Tomba’s timely and often brilliantly suggestive and informed reading of how Marxism lost its way and failed to account for the changes that Marx introduced in the 1860s and 1870s, producing Capital as a massive conceptualization of capitalism’s system of time accountancy that finds in the world market the instrument to synchronize the multiple temporalities and different forms of exploitation embodied in commodities, in order to secure greater surplus value.
— Harry Harootunian, Radical Philosophy


It is [Western Marxism] that commands the full attention of Massimilliano Tomba’s timely and often brilliantly suggestive and informed reading of how Marxism lost its way and failed to account for the changes that Marx introduced in the 1860s and 1870s, producing Capital as a massive conceptualization of capitalism’s system of time accountancy that finds in the world market the instrument to synchronize the multiple temporalities and different forms of exploitation embodied in commodities, in order to secure greater surplus value.
— Harry Harootunian, Radical Philosophy

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