Yourstruly is reading through a lot of Marx’s earlier writings (which should be apparent, at least partially, from this), and I am going to keep track of the development of the “notion” of alienation in Marx’s thought. I’m pretty familiar with what Marx takes alienation to be in Capital — and the account he fleshes it out there I find to be, if not unavoidably compelling, at least put in such a way that its claims are capable of evaluation. The alienation in “On the Jewish Question” and in the “Estranged Labor” section in the 1844 manuscripts, however, I find to be a lot less determinate, and much more caught up in idealist, rhetorical flamboyance that Marx will later eschew. Here are some remarks on them.

First a section from “On the Jewish Question”:

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In his new book on Reification, Axel Honneth takes Lukacs’ essay as his starting point and then proceeds to supplement it with an argument of his own, positing that in order to revive reification as a concept in today’s climate something more is needed. For Honneth, that something more is recognition. He comes to this conclusion through an exegesis of what Lukács means by the term “reification.”

In simple terms, Lukács uses reification to designate what occurs when “a relation between people has taken on the character of a thing.” This seems to imply that reification is only an epistemic error, when people mistake a social process as a thing. However, Honneth argues that this is not how Lukács intends it; he claims that not only is reification a category mistake. It is a faulty orientation toward the world that manifests itself in several ways. Honneth lists the following:

Subjects in commodity exchange are mutually urged (a) to perceive given objects solely as “things” that one can potentially make a profit on, (b) to regard each other solely as “objects” of a profitable transaction, and finally (c) to regard their own abilities as nothing by supplemental “resources” in the calculation of profit opportunities. (22)

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Sometimes I like conceptual art. Like this piece above by Manzoni: the base of the world. The base of the world! It stands on nothing but thin air. It’s clever, but it’s a bit of a one liner. And after you tease out its implications — groundlessness, the world itself as a work of creation — there’s not much else, and the work itself is a bit boring. The limits of the concept impose themselves, and then a piece’s unidimensionality spells its own ruin. It becomes “cute” or “trite.”

Othertimes though a piece becomes more interesting inspite of itself. Like another one by Manzoni, “Artist’s Shit.” The gag for this one was a bit more performative than that of the base of the world: Manzoni collected his shit and then split it into 30g specimens, divided into 90 cans. He labeled each can with its contents, and then sold each for its weight in gold. Ho ho! The art world’s luminaries understand this as a comment on commodification and reification of the artist’s product — explicitly here, his solid waste. But this doesn’t really comprehend what’s going on; or it only grasps part of it. Because while there is certainly something like commodification going on here, strictly speaking our 90 cans of Manzoni’s solid waste are not commodities proper. If there were, someone else could have shat in a can and sold it for its weight in silver, and thereby driven Manzoni out of, as it were, the shit business.

So there is something else at play in the sale of art in the upper reaches. Those that shell out 50,000 GBP for a 30g, oxidized tin of what very well might be shit are after something other than commodities, and the amount they pay for something is caught up in far more complex process than its costs of production — even in the most simple picture. To get at this would require looking at the complex sequence of events and choices that lends a certain artist the aura or cachet that makes his or her work appear as a constant store of value — the rich do not spend upwards of a 100,000 dollars on one of Manzoni’s tins only to debase it by opening it up to find out just what is inside.

Commodification and reification are presupposed in the production of works like “Artist’s Shit.” But they are not what the work is about, even on a functional level. In order for the art world to function, in its semi-autonomous way, over and above the more basic and brutal labor-market, a given amount of liquidity has to be transfered to the buyers and devotees that make it up, and this transfer is effected by the motor of commodity-production. Of course this is the case. But this is not sufficient for a given art-object to be vaulted into Sotheby’s ambit. A peculiar anticipation of an object’s continued value, in spite of being a bit of shit, or a heap of junk, is what allows Manzoni’s tins to function as art. Hence there is little irony in the fact that people buy it, or a pissoir, despite both being recepticles of human waste. Not only are the buyers playing a role within a specific social milieu where there is a status attached to owning a bit of Manzoni, they are anticipating future worth.

This does not mean, either, that anything can be art. It means that almost nothing can. So you have to wonder who the joke is on.

The Batmovie has made some waves in the blogosphere. Much of what has been said makes sense (it has fascistic undertones, its violence is sexualized, etc), and some of it has been insightful. All the same I am not really convinced that the ideology at play in the movie is all that different from every single other superhero comick or novel or play or motion picture. The notion of the superhero at its very base is undemocratic, magical, banally tied to contemporary society’s blindnesses.

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Commodities initially appear as trivially obvious: 3M makes gaskets and they serve a particular need, hence they sell. But, under closer inspection this activity becomes increasingly mysterious. The gaskets sell because they serve a particular need, sure, but why do they sell at a certain price? To take the stock example, why is two ounces of gold worth a ton of iron; or why should the Adobe Creative Suite be worth as much as the beater rust bucket I drive around? In terms of what these objects do, there is little to relate them: a ton of iron is quite qualitatively distinct from a rubber gasket, and neither relate very well to a software program. Nor can we simply say that they are all products of an ethereal labor, since the concrete labor that goes into writing code is qualitatively distinct from the concrete labor that goes into mining ore. Insofar as we look at the natural characteristics of objects, their chemical structures and atomic numbers, there is no reason whatsoever that one should be worth anything in terms of another, any reason why a particular use is worth Y and another Z. This requires something over and above natural characteristics.

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Chabert writes

This “argument” of the fictional conservative is left standing, not to be contested but for its underlying assumptions, its premises to sink in. As always in Zizek, when he ventriloquises like this, the statements of fact (and the unstated but clearly conveyed and indispensible assumptions, which the reader is required to produce in their own minds to make the remarks even intelligible) which he himself presents through the marionette are treated thereafter in the text as firmly established. The sock puppet’s lines always have two parts - statements of ( always false) facts (which are encrusted with always false, always right wing, always ideological, and almost always racist assumptions) and usually foolish opinions or attitudes about them. The statements of fact are never subjected to questioning or interrogation; Zizek’s textual sock puppets appear simply like pundit experts on MSNBC: the cardboard “conservative” is only very briefly made to appear in order for Zizek to avoid making stark, quotable mendacious statements “in his own voice” on which he might be challenged, and to seduce his reader into the acceptance of these “facts” as unavoidable conditions: such as that “the Muslims” and “Europe” are mutually exclusive terms, and “Europe” is synonymous with “we Christians”, and “the Muslisms” are killing and burning, while “we Christians” neither kill nor burn but merely speak (exercising our special gift) without pausing to question their veracity or sense.

This is not only in Zizek. It happens throughout the media, throughout the presentation of argument to mass audiences. But it doesn’t take more than a child to question whether the straw-men are valid presentations of another point of view, so the response of children to statements of fact are carefully molded from a very early age by education and social practice. It begins with a domination of the subject’s sense of self and world: from the earliest age there are reified measures handed to children which are they are expected to use unquestioningly, mechanically. These measures are not explained as the result of a collective investigation into our sense of things, as an accretion of subjective acts, they are simply given; an internalized sense of passivity comes to dominate our engagement with objects, they take on their determinations in virtue not of our acts but due to their relation to given measures.

This passivity prepares us to accept all manner of given statements, to internalize them and then interact with the world as appendages of the social formations that give birth to them. Frightening. Brilliant.