MARX BOOK DAY SIX

In order for us to understand why Marx has chosen to write the opening chapters of Capital in so strange a fashion, we must take a little time to examine certain matters of literary theory which at first seem very far from the economic, political, and historical issues with which Marx is dealing. I am, of course, not the first commentator to call attention to Marx’s striking literary style.  Edmund Wilson, the great literary critic, in his work To the Finland Station describes Marx as the greatest literary ironist since Jonathan Swift.

 

Irony is a mode of literary discourse that rests on the oldest and most fundamental distinction in Western philosophy, the distinction between appearance and reality. An ironic communication, strictly speaking, is a communication that presupposes a speaker and two audiences. The first, or apparent, audience is a group of people who believe mistakenly that an utterance is directed to them and who understand only the superficial or apparent meaning of the utterance. The second, or real, audience to whom the communication is actually directed, understands both the apparent or superficial meaning and the deeper real meaning, and knows in addition of the existence of the first or apparent audience and its misunderstanding. Thus, in a manner of speaking, an ironic utterance is a private joke between a speaker and the real audience at the expense of the apparent audience.

 

Let me give you two examples to illustrate this notion, the first, a facetious example original with me, the second a famous example derived from one of the great novels of the English literary tradition. Facetious first. This is an example I used in the opening chapter of the first edition of my philosophy text About Philosophy. For reasons that will become apparent, it was considered a trifle risqué by the editors at Prentice-Hall and so I dropped it in the second and subsequent editions.

 

A young man is having a passionate affair with a young woman from a devoutly religious family, who of course know nothing of the affair. He comes calling for her one evening, ostensibly to take her to a church social but actually to go back to his apartment with her to make love for a few hours. When he is leaving with her from her home, her mother says to her “Now dear, you be a good girl, and be back before 10 PM.” The couple go off to the young man’s apartment, and he brings her home shortly before 10. The mother is waiting at the door and when the couple return she says to her daughter, “Were you a good girl?” The young man answers for her, saying “oh yes. She was a good. She was very good.”

 

The young man’s statement, “she was very good,” is an ironic utterance. The apparent audience is the mother, but the real audience is the young woman. The apparent meaning is “she behaved herself exactly as you would have her behave.” The real meaning, which along with the apparent meaning is understood by the young woman is “you were really hot in bed.”

 

Now a real example. Jane Austen’s greatest novel, Pride and Prejudice, opens with the following famous line: “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”  Who is speaking? Clearly not Jane Austen. Nor is it what has been called by literary critics an omniscient narrator. I think we can fairly certainly conclude that the speaker is to be understood by the reader to be either the character in the novel Mrs. Bennett or else one of her circle of friends among the landed gentry in the first decades of the 19^th century. Who is the audience for this assertion? The apparent audience is pretty clearly people like Mrs. Bennett and readers, if there are any, who share Mrs. Bennett’s expectations, desires, prejudices, and blindnesses.  The real speaker is of course Jane Austen and the real audience is we, the readers, who understand with Jane Austen both the attitudes and the limitations of people like the fictional Mrs. Bennett.

 

Austen could have started her novel with the following sentence, which in one way communicates the same information but in another way is entirely different: “Women of the landed gentry in England who had daughters with life prospects that depended on their finding appropriate husbands from the available men in the neighborhood, anxiously viewed every single man of their social class with adequate financial means as a potential husband, and hence took the view, which they readily expressed to their friends, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, a view which they knew was shared by all the other women of their circle and, since they had a rather blinkered view of the world, they thought to be a view that was universally acknowledged.”

 

The sentence Austen actually begins her novel with is of course more economical and graceful than my rather clunky suggested alternative, but there is more to the matter than that.  Austen’s opening sentence expresses, rather than merely asserting, the unquestioning and blinkered self-confidence of women like Mrs. Bennett, while at the same time giving voice to the distance that Austin and, she hopes, her readers achieve from the Mrs. Bennetts of the world, thereby permitting us to experience at one and the same time the immediacy of Mrs. Bennett’s motherly anxiety and the amusement which Austen views Mrs. Bennett’s attitude.

 

Let us look into this matter little more deeply.

 

It has become a commonplace in recent philosophical discussions that language has many functions beyond that of the assertion of propositions, among them the asking of questions, the giving of orders, and the expressing of feelings or attitudes. It is perhaps less obvious that the complexities of the mind – the interrelationships among conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings, the ambivalences and ambiguities, the projections, introjections, displacements, and transferences that are the mind’s characteristic modes of operation – impose a corresponding complexity on our uses of language.

 

If it were always the case that I either believe a proposition or do not, have an attitude toward some matter or do not, intend to issue a command or do not, then simple declarative, expressive, or imperative language would suffice for the accurate rendering of thought into language. But what if the reality is more complex than that? For example, what if I can, in some sense, both believe a proposition and not believe it, all at the same time? Indeed, what if there can be one part of me that believes it, and another part that does not, the part of me that does not believe having won the upper hand after an internal struggle? If I wish to give expression fully to this complex situation, what linguistic resources do I require?

 

To begin with, I must find a way to speak in the voice of that part of me that has won out, and does not believe the proposition, in order to convey the fact that it has won out – for in the struggles of the mind it is control of the authorial voice, the “I think” of the unity of apperception, that is the prize. As Kant tells us, the “I think” can be attached to all my representations. It is the implicit frame of all knowledge claims, and the identity of the “I” who asserts the proposition is an ineradicable part of what is being asserted. Speaking in that voice, I must say that I do not believe the proposition, while at the same time saying that a part of me does believe it, a part that once controlled the speaking voice but no longer does, a part, however, that is still a part of me. And all this must be said in such a way as to convey what it is to assert a proposition against the resistance of a part of me, so that my asserting of the proposition is not confused, for example, with the placid, unstressful asserting by one for whom the contrary proposition never had any significant valence.

 

If I were to say, for example, in a neutral, impersonal voice, “A part of me believes such and such, but the real me does not,” then I would, by this locution, distance myself so completely from the part of me that still believes as implicitly to deny that it ever had been a part of me at all. Rather, I must convey the fact that I arrived at my disbelief through a criticism of my earlier belief, and that the belief lives on in me, defeated but not obliterated or extruded. Imagine, for example, that I have been raised in the Catholic faith, and have arrived at my present atheistical condition through a lengthy and painful process of questioning and self[1]criticism. The symbols, the myths, the liturgy, the language of Catholicism retain for me, as for many lapsed Catholics, a residual power that I cannot wholly subdue, and whose direct and indirect effects in part define who and how I am.

 

If I am asked, “Do you believe in God?” how can I answer in such a way as to communicate this complex state of affairs, with the weights and resonances of the several portions of my religious condition given their proper magnitude? Simply to answer, “No, I do not” would be, strictly speaking, to lie. It would be to lie by omission, but to lie nonetheless. Such an answer in no way distinguishes me from one who has had no religious upbringing and who has never believed. To say, “I once did, but I no longer do” comes closer, but still misrepresents the true situation by treating the remnants of Catholicism as no longer present in me, as having been externalised and destroyed. We might think that a true, though tedious, answer to the question would be a thorough unpacking of the situation in flat, declarative prose, more or less as I have been doing in these past few paragraphs. But that really will not do. To speak that way is to invent a voice that is neither the voice of the victorious portion of myself, nor the voice of the subdued portion, but is the voice of an external observer, a scientific reporter, a neutral party not implicated either in the original Catholic faith nor in its rejection. It is the voice of the cultural anthropologist describing native customs, of the social theorist denying complicity in the popular culture of his own society by his very manner of reporting it. Insofar as I purport to be voicing my religious condition in that voice, I am lying. In all likelihood, I would be deceiving myself at least as much as my audience. What is more, the declarative unpacking of the complexities of my loss of faith would entirely miss the sensuous immediacy of feeling that is an essential part of my present rejection of, and residual clinging to, Catholicism.

 

Consider now what might be accomplished by means of the adoption of an ironic voice. Asked whether I believe in God, I might reply – employing, ever so faintly exaggeratedly, the singsong tone of the Apostle’s Creed – “I believe in God the Father Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth and in Jesus Christ…” These few words, uttered thus, would capture, for an audience capable of understanding what I was saying, the entire state of affairs: that I once was an unreflective communicant of the Roman Catholic faith, that I no longer am, that I view my former beliefs with amusement, rather than with superstitious fear, but that those beliefs, and the associated rituals, still have some power for me, so that what I now am and believe can only be understood as a development out of that earlier, credulous state. To a naive audience, it would of course appear that I was simply answering the question in the affirmative.

 

Since this point is, in fact, the pivot on which my entire argument turns, I shall belabour it a bit at the risk of growing tiresome. The literary complexity of an ironic reply to the question, “Do you believe in God?” is required by the complexity of the speaking subject who gives the reply. If the self were substantively simple, so that either it believed or did not, asserted or did not, and so on, then simple declarative discourse would suffice. Even if this simple self had emerged from a complex process of development, in the course of which first one belief, then another, first one passion, then another, had held sway, even then, so long as the product of the developmental process were simple, unambiguous discourse would suffice to express its present state. The complexity of the historical development of the self would require no special complexity of expression, so long as that complexity were fully represented in the unified nature of the present ego.

 

However, if the speaking self is complex, many-layered, capable of reflection, self-deception, ambivalence, of unconscious thought processes, of projections, introjections, displacements, transferences, and all manner of ambiguities – in short, if the history of the self is directly present as part of its current nature – then only a language containing within itself the literary resources corresponding to these complexities will suffice to speak the truth.

 

In the example we have been discussing, the immediately experienced tension between the antireligious conviction to which I have won my way by an inner struggle and the old, defeated but not banished faith that still asserts its claim upon my allegiance is a part of what I actually believe. It is false to suggest that I believe the proposition “There is no God” neutrally, unambivalently, purely assertorically, but also that, as an added and separable fact of my consciousness, I am experiencing certain inner feelings that can be characterised, phenomenologically, as feelings of tension or conflict. The tension is a tension in the belief, in such a manner that my belief differs in its nature from that of a complacent atheist who has never known God. It would be strictly false to say that we two believe the same proposition, and it would be manifestly obvious that we might fail to communicate with one another if each of us were to say to the other, in turn, “I do not believe in God “

 

The Socratic distinction between appearance and reality has been called into question on the grounds that it presupposes an “essentialist” ontology. To call the straightness of the stick the reality and my perception of it as bent an appearance is to presuppose that there is an objective ground for the claim that the straightness is an essential property of the stick and the bentness a mere subjective mode in which that essential property manifests itself. The same ontological presupposition, it has been argued, is implicit in the theses that profit, rent, and interest are appearances of surplus value, that cultural and political institutions are appearances of, or manifestations of, the underlying social relationships of production, and that the inner essence of history is class struggle. Such ontological claims, it is said, make philosophical sense only on the fundamentally religious premise that being is the product of a purposeful creation, inherent in which is the telos of the Creator. Without such a premise, there is no ground for calling one aspect or element of the world truly real, and another aspect or element merely appearance. Marx, the anti-essentialists observe, frequently speaks in this essentialist way, but he thereby merely manifests the influence of his Hegelian education. They conclude that insofar as we wish to follow Marx in the establishment and development of a scientific theory of society and history, we must put behind us these last philosophical echoes of religious mythology, and develop a theory of capitalism in which the distinction between essence and appearance plays no role.

 

I embrace this critique of essentialism in the terms in which it is enunciated. I am quite unprepared to readmit into social theory the religious superstitions that were, with such great effort, driven out of philosophy. Nevertheless, I propose to build my entire interpretation of Capital on the objectively grounded distinction between appearance and reality. Clearly, a good deal will have to be said to justify such an undertaking. I can lay the groundwork for my later discussion by drawing out a significant implication of ironic discourse. In defining irony, I referred to the “real” audience and the “apparent” audience. There are two features of ironic discourse that justify this way of speaking. First, of course, we have access in ironic discourse to the intentions of the speaker. Discourse creates a world that is purposive in its objective nature, since it is the product of intentional acts. But this is, by itself, not enough to justify the locutions “real audience” and “apparent audience,” for the speaker’s intentions might be frustrated, or indeed might be inherently unfulfillable. The truly crucial feature of ironic discourse that justifies the appearance/reality distinction is the asymmetrical relation between the two meanings of the utterance and the two audiences that receive it. Irony is not ambiguity. The second, or real, audience hears both meanings and knows that there is a first audience that hears only the first meaning. What is more, the second audience’s knowledge of the double meaning, and its awareness of its privileged position vis-à-vis the first audience, is a part of what it understands when it hears the utterance. Thus, the real audience’s understanding does not merely replace that of the first audience, it incorporates it and transcends it. From an analysis of the first audience’s understanding alone, we could never reconstruct the entire situation of ironic communication. But from the understanding of the second audience alone, we could. Thus, the second audience’s understanding can legitimately be called epistemologically higher, or superior, and an account of the communicative situation from the standpoint of the second audience can be considered objectively more correct.

 

Furthermore, from an historical or developmental standpoint, the understanding of the second audience can only be a later stage than the understanding of the first audience, for leaving to one side collective amnesia, a movement from the understanding of the second audience to that of the first would represent not merely a change in “point of view,” but an unambiguous loss of knowledge and insight. No one could first learn that the stick is straight but looks bent because of the difference in the refractive indices of water and air, and then move by a process of education, cultural development, or scientific evolution to the unreflective belief that the stick is, as it appears to be, bent. Irony is a mode of discourse, hence it is the product of an intentional act. Nature is not a mode of discourse, nor is it – setting to one side the illusions of religion – the product of an intentional act. But society occupies something of an intermediate status. Society is not the product of a single conscious, purposeful agent – not God, not History, not Objective Spirit, not even Man – but it is the collective product of countless purposeful men and women in their complex interactions with one another. If we can successfully defend the claim that the political economy of capitalism has an irreducible element of collective communication, and if we can demonstrate that that communication has something very like an ironic structure, then we may find that we have sound objective grounds for deploying an appearance/reality distinction without the philosophically objectionable essentialism of religion or religious philosophy.

 

Perhaps I can conclude today’s episode of this serial book by telling a little personal story that captures something of what I have been trying to communicate. My first wife, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, was raised in a Catholic home and although by the time I met her she was no longer a practicing Catholic, she still retained some of the affect and instincts of her former faith. In the late 1970s, when we were living in Northampton Massachusetts, I was for a period of time the Cubmaster of the local Cub Scout pack, to which both of my sons, Patrick and Tobias, belonged. Most of the little boys in our group were Catholic, as were the women who served as den mothers. We met each month in the basement of a local Catholic Church. One of the boys in the Cub Scout pack, Eddie Scagel, had completed some program for Catholic Cub Scouts and the priest decided to celebrate a mass to mark the occasion. While I was downstairs preparing for the meeting, everyone else was upstairs taking part in the mass. I got done early and went upstairs to see what was going on just as everybody lined up in two rows in front of the altar to receive the host. To my horror, I saw Patrick and Tobias at the end of one of the lines. I was about to rush forward and drag them off the line when I thought to myself, “what the hell, it is not real anyway, let them go.” When we got home that night, Cindy asked me how the meeting had gone. I answered gaily “it was great. Patrick and Toby received holy Communion.” The blood drained out of Cindy’s face and I thought she was going to faint. She might no longer be a good Catholic girl, but the religion still had a hold on her.