On Politics and Ontology in 'A Commonist Ethics' by Susan Buck Morss

A paper from the second 'Idea of Communist Conference' second as counted by the publisher, Verso - which incidentally has its headquarters in London and New York, does catch my eye. This paper is titled 'A Commonist Ethics'. Before I get into it, however - I should make clear that in actuality this would have been the third conference, following the first organized by Birkbeck.  The uncounted second conference of which we only catch reference of in some of these papers took place in Berlin. A volume comprising of the details of that event does not seem to be forthcoming.

And while that does not seem to introduce the paper that I have mentioned, there is a reason why I have said it catches my eye. In the typeface the 'u' in 'Communist' is removed as it were, floating above the word and out of axis. An empty space can be discerned in the title with the letter 'o' replacing it, forming the word 'commonist'.

The question raised by Susan Buck Morss however, even among communists, is hardly a common one; even as it provokes a response, framing as it were any possible comprehension of the term. 

I already am at a loss here, perhaps because of my own unconscious predispositions to begin with an inquiry - for the author does not begin her essay with a question, but a declaration, as axiomatic in delivery as it is absurd in my apprehension - 'politics in not an ontology'. 

A provocative beginning indeed, yet a provocation indeed which seems to serve as a covering - for the author explains what such a founding axiom actually means is that the ontological is never political. What is happening here? 

In the subtext there is a (not so) minor game of not as much the determinacy of the negation in question  or at least not yet, but rather where is its remainder. We may write this in propositional form as such:

1. Not all politics is an ontology.

2. Not all ontology is political.

Without developing this point, however, let us note that the author - Susan Buck Morss spots a precedent; Adorno whose work is interpreted as a demonstration of the failure of an attempt to 'ground a philosophy of Being starting from the given world. A student of philosophy would recognize the taste for nostalgia, and even an epic past that any such attempt may find itself foreclosed to. An attempt that is which would deify the world as it is, in attempting to derive or even define ideals.

A footnote represents some of the author's own thinking - 'For a post-metaphysical ontology, essence cannot be a transcendent category, but must remain immanent to existence.' I must express my own unfamiliarity with the oeuvre of the author's work; however, there is the argument that a 'post-metaphysical ontology', whatever that may be - would recognize essence in the appearance as appearance; when a recognition opens up the conceptual displacements via which we understand how that which is given integrates with a worldview, so to speak - and in this sense perhaps the appearance of essence may still be thought of as transcendent, in a sense. 

Here I cannot but broach such a point without a moment of recollection. A recollection as it were which cannot be cited as we presently don't seem to have a public record of it. Yet, it represents for any still with us, what sort of problems emerge when we start thinking possible temporalities (dare we use the singular?) for our ontology. 

The author insists that 'were the character of being... to be conceptually grasped we would not be able to return to the material world, grasping its diversity with some philosophical intuition as it were. 

So, allow me to present the case for an appearance whose character we have been unable to grasp. A character yet alluded to, or rather deployed in this text - yet whose appearance has not as of today, the 5th of July, 2022 been facilitated by the mode of production into that simple term we call a commodity. 

You may notice that I present a call, not as much for a character - though they may be welcome, as much for a text. And, this does bring us back to the question of the remainder "a perception of historical reality not as a positive order, but as a 'non-all', an incomplete texture which tends towards its own future. It is this inclusion of the future into the present, its inclusion as a rupture within the order of the present, which makes the present as ontologically incomplete non-all and thus pulverizes the evolutionary self-deployment of the process of historical development - in short, it is this rupture which distinguishes historicity proper from historicism." This is a quote presented in a paper at the same conference ; 'The Idea Of Communism 2, New York.' It cites a conference however that took place in Berlin, 2010 - a year after the first in Londo, and a year before the one where the paper before our consideration, in the collection 'The Idea Of Communism 2' is. Why do I wish to examine this paper?

The immediate, even reactionary answer is simply that the commensurability of ontology to change in historical time presents itself in the form of a narrative. The narrative as a form here is privileged in its unique ability to represent not merely experience, but the forms of subject, breaks, rhythms and other such marks which come to inscribe time, that is especially when there is a directed and purposeful act being undertaken. ironically, it is ultimately these markers, these signs if you will that makes another's experience commensurable to us - and not the experience itself, even if we may have shared it. This is how an Other represents what they mean for us.

It is difficult to emphasize the importance of this last sentence. The author herself in realizing the out of jointness or contradiction in the argument does go on to cite Marx as a possible exception who in his early work, commonly known as 'The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 1844' - actually seems to explicate a social ontology which nudges towards a moment of revolution. For our purposes however let us return to the quote presented by Althusser's student - Balibar, Etienne. 

Even, if we are returning not to the quote itself but its corresponding footnote. ...incidentally, this formulation is not incompatible at all with much of what Negri - with whom Zizek has a fundamental philosophical disagreement, which I return to in a minute - writes on the issue of historical time; indeed both authors are continuing a line once opened by Ernst Bloch."

This is a sentence of some import for if what we are still talking about is our relationship to our labor and the e ownership of commodities. Zizek, the Hegelian sees in the products of our labor aspects that influence our distinctly philosophical, aesthetic, scientific and amorous capacities. Negri however would choose to rather not use an article to mediate relations, as a mass-produced artifact is not conceptually capable of representing the anomalous configurations of the multitude whose time is enslaved and domesticated as it were, in their production. This difference in methodologies however, between Zizek and Negr, may call for a closer examination - which I why I propose a reading of Balibar's paper, as company to the conference where he takes up precisely this issue. Balibar's paraphrasing of this debate is represented by him in the terms which each side would focus on - 'ideology' in the case of Zizek, and 'productive forces' for Hardt and Negri. Reductive yet still representative of the kinds of inflections at stake, even if we are referring to not a particularly engaged perspective. Further, if each of these were to be thought as incomplete sets (as Balibar reminds us, that any collection, indeed any sets are) - then in terms of representing what lies unsaid in these categories which may strengthen either's case inasmuch as it may enunciate a genuine revolutionary Marxism; Balibar's account here cannot hope to be comprehensive of as this is at least not the explicit aim of his paper. 

Also, in his - Balibar's account of Hardt and Negri reading Marx without the emphasis on the Hegelian element of dialectical synthesis - we are left with an interpretation which would portray him as an individual mediating class relations with plainly political interests of superstructure; in other words a modernist Machiavelli. A reading which, in whose mediatory moment at least, his contemporary, colleague and once collaborator - Pierre Machery, may be more compelling. I shall leave this as it stands here without splitting hairs amidst our fellow Althusserians. 

Similarly, in depicting Zizek's argument as compromised because of a 'dependence' on sublime terror, perhaps prior to the state itself - what the philosophers here ignores is that the moment of irrationality or fixation is actually identified by our Lacanian at the level of the psyche, before its manifestation of any superstructural violence; whose telling symptoms I might add, Zizek does much to point out in cultural discourse prior to any riot on the streets. 

Balibar also reads further into the history of operaismo or workerism, tendencies that may not be unfamiliar to many of us in the developing world today. Such as the confrontation between the 'technical' and 'organic' composition of labor. A confrontation which I will remind any budding workerists was very much alive in Marx, even if they were not already subsumed into classes. For Marx actually read these as tendencies operating in the mode of production itself, as components whose composition yielded the nature in which surplus-value is extracted from an enteprise. 

In returning to Susan Buck Morrs proposition, I would like to present that Marxism - which I would present as a distinctly communist tendency within the labor movement, inasmuch as it examines the mode of production to be the site of politics, has always been ontological. 

Having presented this modest rejoinder. I would accede to the author's claims that this ontological tendency, perhaps expressed in the early Marx, which the author does provide an autobiographical excerpt from - does not by itself provide a political orientation. Towards this end, I presume - the author does champion forms of reportage operational today, made possible by hand-held cellular devices. The medium of the first-person eye-witness report becoming transmittable globally has allowed masses of demonstrators to mobilize and even cover events that were crucial in the overthrow of regimes deemed to be repressive. Arab spring will be remembered for this. As indeed will be the years 2009 - 2011 which witnessed riots in Athens and London, Anna Hazare's hunger strike, and Occupy Wallstreet, movements whose narratives were put together constellating something of a historical background to these conferences we have been reviewing. For a theorist like Susan Buck Morrs these events indicate the validity of a Marxist diagnosis and critique of capitalism, just as they point out live developments which earlier movements in its name have simply not scrutinized; seemingly an argument against revisionism.