The Empire of the Known: subjectivity and anti-totality within the discourse of totality

Part I - Convergences of Subjectivity and Totality

Chapter 1: Simple and complex totalities of interiority (8-39)

Fichte and subjectivity

Hegel and thorough negativity

The intimate relation of subjectivity and totality

Totality as mediation

Spinoza on totality

Spinoza viewed by Hegel

Responses to Hegel on Spinoza

The revival of Spinoza and the critique of Hegel

Chapter 2: Complexity through the immanent deconstruction of simple totality (40-89)

The speculative logic in Marx’s Das Kapital

The significance of the presentational structure of Das Kapital

‘Real Abstraction’ and the simple point of departure

i) The historical preconditions of a synchronic totality

ii) The simple abstractions of value and abstract labour

Hegel’s shadow

The single commodity?

The logic of the progression to general equivalence

Subjectivist conceptions of value

Value and command

The politics of the law of value

Class in the dialectics of the equivalent form?

The measure of value

The transformation problem

Conclusion: the architectonic of Das Kapital and totality

Part II – Divergences of subjectivity and totality

Chapter 3: Differentiation, complexity and the exhaustion of totality (90-124)

The social totality

Bataille on loss

Social differentiation and social integration

System solidarity

The hypostasis of equilibrium

Cooperation and solidarity

Functionalism, sociology and Marxism

Neo-functionalism

Althusser and the exhaustion of totality

Postmodernism in sociological and Marxist approaches

Postmodernism and the idea of modernity

Subjectivity in post-modernity

Chapter 4: The war on totality: subjectivity, total refusal and social composition (125-161)

May 1968 and the creation of a creation

The Situationists on totality and separation

Feminism and the demise of totality

The return of production

Total Subsumption

The priority of productive power as ontology of social practice

Factory society

Work is a four- letter word

Society of control and immaterial labour

Potestas and constituted power

Abstractions of rights, alienation and representation

The afterbirth of Schmitt

From class to multitude

The multitude and subjectivity 

Chapter 5: Conclusion: The limits of totality (162-172)

The dark side of the multitude

There is no politics of the post-modern

The horizon of totality

The empire of the known

Bibliography (173-184)

“It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end”[1]

This research began as an inquiry towards a social explanation of the relationship between the theory of post-modernity and processes of differentiation in social agency. The obstacles that emerged in the attempt to provide such an account are difficulties inherent in the object of society itself. For a long time the category of totality has held a privileged place in the categories of sociological thought and critical and Marxist theory. A definable current within these theories of the social have however held onto the historicist idea that the categories of the understanding of human society change as the nature of that society changes. With the now considerable pervasiveness of the post-modern critique and its internal suturing moment of the critique of the grand synthetic narratives, it is necessary to consider the set of claims that a paradigmatic shift in social life has occurred of such proportions that it necessitates an entirely new theory that can adjust to the radical transformation of the meaning and nature of social life. An alternative claim could be made that post-modern theory reflects only particular and non-fundamental changes in social practice and thus refers instead to a particular western cultural experience, or alternatively changes in the institutions and cultures of knowledge production itself.

Clearly, after any paradigm shift, whether it is within science or within social organisation, the ongoing questioning of the foundations of social life and the ground of our knowledge of it, are reposed with a renewed force and with different evidence and new concepts are required to account for it. In the case of so-called post-modernity however, its intrinsic challenge is to refuse its objectification as a whole or an event. The post-modern is more than a new set of social relations; rather it reflects a set of circumstances where the critique of the understanding of social relations has become embedded into their inner workings. The standpoint of the post-modern is essentially that there has been a generalised shift in social relations that has produced an archetypal form of cultural sensibility and reproductive practice that has as an inner and essential element a critical disposition towards orders of knowledge and representation. As such, the very impossibility of defining a core practice of the post-modern, and its manifold, inner differentiation, has inevitably become, at least at the level of critique outside of its discourse, a kind of consensus around its nature.

The depth and the prevalence of the post-modern challenge forces us to take seriously the idea that thought that totalises and in particular, dialectical thought, operates within the same principle mechanisms. By ‘launching a war on totality’ the post-modern critique attempts to reduce all totalities to the same figure or category mistake. And yet a desire ­for totality seems to persist even in the midst of this post-modern scepticism.

In the rejection of modernism there is also a conflation of modernisms. The same process occurs theoretically with the question of totality. It is not this or that form of totality, but totality tout court that must be rejected. These paradoxes are not simply bad theory, they are antinomies generated out of the complex processes and instances where society, or rather elements of it, reflects on itself. Such reflection is the notion of ideology used here and it is different from the social explanation of post-modern thought as a ‘false consciousness’ that can be opposed as merely something like an aberration from the truth or a mystical flight into fancy.[2] Indeed many reactions to the post-modern paradoxically reaffirm its very point of criticism in that their understanding and critique of ideology is sutured to the kind of imperatives of totalising reason that post-modern critique has endeavoured to undermine. Part of the investigation of totality involves understanding how the sociological imagination is disposed to treat systems of thought, belief and action in a unitary way.[3] It inscribes intelligibility, rationality and functionality into its sets of social facts. But how can it be known with confidence that the systemic treatment of social facts is the most appropriate approach, and how much is this the result of a limited view of science that comes to its material with standards imported from the outside?

As soon as we transport the necessity of a synthetic analysis from the ideational requirements of the thinking scientific brain, and inscribe it as a materially substantial form of the existence of the outside world and the acting beings within it, the problem arises that the certainty of foundations that could be found within logic must be found outside of thought. We think about the material world but our mind is not at home there. It is foreign to the objects it apprehends. In both dialectical and non-dialectical forms of thought within what is called modernity, the concept of totality has been an essential way of bridging the passage from knowing to the known. If Hegel rediscovered the homeliness of thought by reducing being to thought, Marx in contrast found the certainty of being in these estrangements towards thought.  In both idealism and historical materialism there is a strong ontological appeal to totality. The power of totality as a horizon of political and theoretical practice has produced a plenitude of differentially situated practices of knowledge production, where concepts of totality and practices of totalising thought have been fundamental to the understanding of relations politically in terms of interiority and exteriority. It will be argued that the demise and transformation of such strong associations between the epistemological confidence in the conceptual necessity of a methodological process that involves totality and the notion that the social world and social objects actually exist as totalities informs the outlook of post-modern theoretical practice.

The inner commitment of the post-modern to the critique of totality expresses what is most extraordinary about postmodernism: it apparently defies any possibility of an external critique. Because of its claim for the reflexivity of the practice of knowledge production, critiquing the post-modern (or theories that go under that name) in effect reproduces the post-modern. This is of course a highly contentious claim, but it is argued that this is something that will have to be accepted by any sincere analysis of post-modernity as a social fact. The claim will be supported by a social analysis of the post-modern as a set of generalised reflexive and constitutive practices that are internally necessary to social life and whose conditions of possibility can be recognised in what is already known about social systems in general and western capitalism in particular. The approach deemed appropriate to such an entity is to evaluate it from the combined perspective of totality and subjectivity and to trace the reasons for the analytical breakdown of these unities.

Explanation of chapters

The inquiry will first establish whether one can at least in principle distinguish different totalities. For this reason I will first investigate the role of totality in idealism as this furnishes us, for reasons that will become apparent, with the closest working system of totality as such i.e. qua totality itself. This will involve an investigation of the dialectic in Hegel and Fichte’s idealism. In these two philosophies there is an intimate relation between subjectivity and totality in systems of self-positing interiority where the movement of totality is concomitantly the establishment of its own ground. By looking at some of the problems generated by the idealist totality of self-positing interiority, and in drawing on critiques from critical theory, structuralism and other materialist philosophies, I hope to achieve two things. Firstly by the contrast of Hegel with Spinoza and Bataille, I hope to show that the drive towards totality is a drive towards the creation of interiority. Secondly that considered from the point of view of a genetic self-positing totality, the dialectics of totality as such appear to require a methodological reduction to a simple form of the object. Thirdly it will be shown that the whole is more than the parts in a Hegelian sense only if it can to be shown to have existence as a whole. Here we will question the notion of an overall or total movement in which all practice exists as totality. It will be claimed that it is not helpful for social science to think in this way, and that it is philosophically untenable to think that wholes have a being as wholes.[4] The attempt to think the being of a whole results in reductions that negate the autonomous power of its constituent elements. It will be contended that in analytical terms, the Hegelian totality and idealist totalities more generally, perform a type of reduction that cannot be legitimately used to inform a materialist understanding of the social, although they have often been drawn on with exactly this purpose in mind. Later chapters examine these theories and the criticisms of them.

By drawing contrasts between these self-positing totalities of interiority and subjectivity found principally in Hegel and Spinoza the results will be used to inform our understanding of the attempt to give a materialist representation to the laws of capital in Marx’s work. In delineating some of the similarities and differences within this comparison of meta-theoretical perspectives, Chapter Two forms a closer examination of the interconnection of the theoretical perspective with the social processes that it observes. This will be followed by a critical comparison of the structural Marxist totality with functionalism in sociological theory in Chapter Three. The method followed here is by no means intended to be a historical narration. I will attempt to demonstrate that in each case where subjectivity is sutured to totality there is an intrinsic and inevitable moment of anti-totality, whether this is formative or resultant.

The entire debate over the ontological status of value is the lynchpin of a much broader question concerning the relationship between thought and being and our ability to understand social life. Marx’s so called inversion of Hegel, whereby what was perceived as the universality of thought is transferred to a universal social form outside the head, is characteristic of the attempt at drawing out an ontological notion of the totality of society whilst retaining the dialectical and scientific force of the thought form. Here contradictions in social life can be reflected by contradictions between the categories of understanding of social forms. The materialist notion of totality allows for the division of domains between scientific thought constructs and social objects whilst retaining, through totality, the notion that both should be connected to the same set of limitations or determinations. In much the same way, systems that have differentiation as their dynamic principle tend to posit an original and simple totality as origin. However the more the system differentiation progresses, the more the usefulness of the concept of totality diminishes. Equally by making complexity the definitive form of the totality, its heuristic power is exhausted. This is the point of chapter three and the discussion of sociology, functionalism and structuralist Marxist totalities. In the second part of Chapter Four, sociological and Marxist descriptions of the post-modern are revisited. The utility of post-modernity as a periodisation is considered in respect to what it implies about the organisation of society at the level of the economy and the politics of class. The debate over the post-modern is key to the connection between the critique of subjectivity and changing forms of subjectivity.

Chapter Four continues the discussion of postmodernism but this time in respect to the social origins of its theory. The politics of Situationism and feminism form two small case studies, before proceeding to analyse the post-modern thought of Antonio Negri in more detail. In this section the questions of subjectivity and the political are combined to critique the interpretations of post-modernity that see it as representing the impossibility of subjective orientations to change. In concluding this section on Negri’s productivist ontology of the social the concept of multitude is developed in antithesis to the conceptions of sovereignty implied by the discourse of the autonomy of the political.

The final chapter begins by developing the critique of representation implied by the concept of multitude. After this the relation of totality and subjectivity as a political relation is re-examined, to show that in negative dialectics, totality relates to interiority and a peculiar form of belonging. It is a political conception that has lost its power to express positive and constitutive forms of combination and solidarity.