The name Kant has for many marked the origins of German idealism, if any such name can assume for itself the position of the progenitor of a movement - yet here is where Cole offers us some distinctly singular historical criticism, tracing the Hegelian dialectic to his study of what today may be the forgotten medieval dialecticians from the so called ‘Dark Ages’.
This is interesting to me at least in two ways. The Dark Ages themselves consisted at least intellectually with the rise of a certain monastic thinking which flourished in seminaries, which themselves became centers of learning since the promotion of scholarly and philosophical studies under Charlemagne.
The other aspect which may be considered were the places of learning themselves, many of which were fort like structures often in walled cities. Indeed, the earliest monasteries were often military fortifications designed to be defended - a style of architecture recognized today as the Romanesque. It is was considerably later in the Gothic period that monasteries began resembling the churches which we see today with extravagant architectural innovations such as flying buttresses and the extensive use of stained glass.
What would this mean however for the nature of thought promoted in these seminaries which were often put to work in translation, exegesis and an often restrictive theological learning? Well to shine these problems in the light of the present much of contemporary post-structuralism’s quest to de-centre the subject was a project initiated in another historical epoch with Hegel’s rejection of the inherence of fundamental apriori categories in the subject which structure experience or representation as it were.
And yet, this was a step possible perhaps only by drawing on such a history, for the Kantian critique of British empiricism is what broke ground for the realisation that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression.
A grander picture from a distance may allow us to reflect upon a question which today is perhaps less scholastic than it has ever been for it now seems to have consequences for the very orientation which critique is to take in the coming future. Namely whether the Hegelian break from Kant is what de-totalises German idealism so to speak, by surfacing what will later come to be the philosophy of difference, or whether in thinking difference the dialectic as presented in Hegel is still capable of representing conceptual morphology forced into being by propositional circumstances; and consequently whether an older reading which once might have been an accusation of a teleological strain in Hegel is worth considering.
Professor Cole may however be admittedly less invested in such a question in favour of perhaps the more generic investigation of the break of theory from what was earlier known as philosophy, a moment which while momentus and perhaps liberatory inasmuch as the binding of the subject to maxims such as the categorical imperative were brought to question, was also perhaps a sign of the times and cannot be read in ignorance of that malaise as contemporary as it was in the 19th century which Nietzsche sought to combat - the charge of nihilism.
The relation of these historical changes to the mode of production are marked, and in his own lifetime Hegel witnessed the dissolution of the system of estates and the Napoleonic wars. A changing Europe crawling out of its medieval past and into the cusp of modernity was a processual movement which unlike the Rennaissance was not built on the mere consolidation of existing trade routes. Indeed, in terms of the economic composition of sectors this was the height of what we now recognize to be imperialism, a term which Lenin did well to demarcate from colonialism as it involved the control of an economy via financialized institutions such as banks which traded upon agreements regarding the transfer of resources in colonies.
There may also be something said about the mode of production in Hegel’s own work, for which he often received payment ‘in kind’, finding himself located in feudal townships as he travelled in search of a teaching position. His resistance to these conditions may have been hastily interpreted as a mystification of them by Marx, even if we were to recognize the break which the latter draws from Hegel vis-a-vis the structure of the commodity form and the means of its circulation, money.
This historical antagonism which marked the times in a still largely semi-feudal Germany, even as it shared borders with and witnessed the French revolution bears telling impressions in Hegel’s thought, which as Raymond William’s notes is often situated at the temporal conjunction of the ‘residual’ and the ‘emergent’.
Something that I’d like to draw attention to however is the fact that the philosopher that is Hegel very much picks up on the mode of production prevalent among the people’s he refers to, agrarian labour in Ireland for instance who were living in conditions of which even by the historical feudal standards of the time were often beneath levels of subsistence as landlords had even abnegated traditional obligations to provide for their upkeep. In this sense, regarding the question of periodisation professor Cole’s eye does notice its surfacing not merely in the form of narrative but also historical exceptions or inconsistencies which solicit a review of the transitions which may have been marked, most readily recognized in the terms ‘premodern’ and ‘modern’.
It also provides a relatively newer reader with a sense of how glib the presentation of Hegel as a purely philosophical thinker who is turned on his head as it were by the historical Marx is as a reading, and here I would propose that an investigation as to how the mode of production itself surfaces or becomes reflected as it were in Hegel’s phenomenological method of concept creation may help in rectifying reductionist or peripheral differentiations often made between him and Marx, and - why not, perhaps even shine a light on the ever so fine distinction which the likes of Andrew Cole and Fredric Jameson make between philosophy and theory.
A point of insistence however in the work before our consideration is professor Cole’s tracing of the Hegelian dialectic to forms of argument already practiced in the medieval ages, and in this sense a kind of return to a tradition which may have been overlooked at the Kantian moment. This genealogy if you will, reconstructed as they often are - names Plotinus as a neo-Platonic inspiration, and examining the historical and intellectual import of this claim and how it is made in the book taken up would be a facet which my study will tend to focus on.
Regarding the thrust of professor Cole’s own work - he registers in the introduction itself the opposition encountered in modern theory between dialectics in its various guises and the genealogical method which may perhaps better be described as a streak or form of acknowledging an obligation or debt particularly regarding inspiration; as such it may not be unlike an insistence on the authenticity of an encounter without temporal mediation via which the negative is implicated - a practice which some may occasionally hold dialectics in contempt for, especially in its more historical manifestations.
Yet he goes further in positing a common root as it were for these two practices of thought in phenomenology, which left undefined and with no real reference to historical efforts to do so such as Husserl’s eidetic reduction seems to be a term used in a rather loose sense which can be interpreted only in opposition to structuralism. A division we would do well to hold suspect given the debt and intellectual inspiration that tradition bears to dialectics, whether in the disciplines of anthropology exemplified by Levi Strauss or indeed psychoanalysis and Lacan. This is to say nothing of the efforts made to identify dialectical movements in the so called natural sciences beginning with perhaps Engel’s ‘Dialectics of Nature’ (1883) to more recent efforts such as the two volume ‘Reason in Revolt’ (1995) by Alan Woods and Ted Grant. Of most proximate interest to theory itself however at least in the contemporary interpretation of the term would be the uses to which mathematicians and philosophers drawing from set theory for instance have put formalizations to as a means of explicating dialectical structures such as exceptions, inclusions and conditions in ways that may have once been too verbose for some palates, and here we would do well to mention the name Alain Badiou.
In the first chapter Dr Cole acknowledges a way in which the great anti-dialectician, Nietzsche may yet be read as the inventor of a certain synthesization in philosophy which gave birth to the genealogical style of critique. His erudition as a philologist is noticed and how this mooring was used as the allegorical hammer to criticise contemporary (in his time) philosophical fashions. The untimely dialectic as the chapter is titled would hence seem to reflect the contrarian position which Nietzsche often sought to foreground in his aphorisms, yet a reader of them would notice that irony was the least of humours lost on him. This critique however did remake philosophy in a sense, giving it a kind of vector which broke from the scholasticism encouraged via the earlier ossification of estates, even as it used linguistic forms such as the aphorism which had long been tools in ecclesiastical learning. The radical philologist at work.
In terms of how this study of Nietzsche is to shed light on the dialectic and Hegel, professor Cole seeks to begin by disentangling what we may be referring to as the dialectic by differentiating between how it has been deployed by noted practitioners - Socrates, Plotinus, Hegel etc. The latter two whom he would seek to pair as an example of what he refers to as the medieval dialectic as distinct from the Athenian one, characterizing itself via its meditation on identity and difference, and abstract determination whose meaning is not quite clear in this introductory stage.
The supposedly pre-dialectical stage of the tragedy is laid before us via a little formal analysis. Tragedy being the genre which in its dithyrambic form is born of the pen of the lyric poet who first imagines the world in his interiority in a way in which it has not been perceived before - hence prefiguring the conditions of tragedy.
Were we for a moment to consider as a juxtaposition the other possible interpretation put forth by Deleuze for instance following Nietzsche regarding the primacy of difference as opposed to identity in Greek tragedy, then we would yet have to contend with Cole’s observation which readers of Hegel would decidedly recognize of difference being a product of an effort to produce the same, and as such a failure which yet becomes knowable in its own right, perhaps bequeathing in stead a narrative which we may yet remember as a tragedy.
A question that may be posed is whether this text, The Birth of Theory offers us something akin to a genealogy of the dialectic - tracing this as it does from its Socratic origins through to its medieval mutations, to finally Hegel and the moderns. There is some evidence for this as Plotinus is recognized to be a neo-Platonist, and his prose does reflect the antagonism which Plato sought to reconcile between likeness and difference, with likeness being recognized as a form of difference being one of the better accepted contemporary interpretations. The dialectic however, if anything definitive can be said about what may have initially been one rhetorical tradition among others has tended to because of its engine of negation as it were, driven by its encounter with difference, and its efforts to sublate its principle, has tended to resist rather powerfully any assimilationist tendency which may be isolated into a strain and in this sense is not genealogical.
Nietzsche himself however may not have had the biological import of this logic in the forefront of his mind when he insisted for example that there are no facts, only interpretations - polemically baiting the bite of truth which his philosophy may be thought of as a daring dance through, seeking to situate some nominal core which animated our passions, humors and instincts.
Returning to Plotinus however, the medieval dialectic was concerned perhaps less with likeness and difference as it was with unity and multiplicity, and here the prose seems to me the invocation of a witness or simply point of view which may possibly reconcile such contradictions, and here I may be tempted to point out that contemporary philosophy, if I may still use this word’s reference to homology and the possibility of identifying structural similarities arising from different origins does tend to point strongly to a kind of structural adaptation, if not organization taking place in the organism or perhaps institution in response to vectors in the field of its being.
Situating such efforts in the field of contemporary social science are not easy which often takes the concepts it uses for granted, having either inherited them uncritically from received doxa, of having simply incorporated what may appear new or perhaps advantageous in neighbouring discourses more invested in conceptual production itself and the study of narrative such as philosophy perhaps if not literature.
Theory then becomes a kind of screening mechanism for concepts assessing their productivity in the study of texts and contexts, a means via which we may examine briefly the lenses which colour the pictures we present to ourselves of the world, and perhaps our only way of inquiring whether the problems posed as such are indeed what they appear to be, or whether we may simply be reifying a point of view at the expense of a potential dialogue if not argument between perspectives, constituting what perhaps Habermasians may refer to as discursivity proper.
Can we, from these preliminary reflections posit what might be the basic or essential features of this movement in thought we have attempted to chart - known as the dialectic? In a rudimentary sense we can already see the effort to do this reflected in the Hegelian interrogation of the law of identity via an examining of its mode of presentation as it were - a section which even today is worth quoting: ‘‘A is' is a beginning that envisages something different before it to which the ‘A is’ would proceed but the ‘A is’ never gets to it.’ - A statement which seems to question the very form of the proposition itself, just as it echoes Xeno’s paradoxes of distance and why an infinity of halves would never make a whole irrespective of their speed of accumulation, itself an unpacking of why the fated arrow does not reach its target, or why the hare does not beat the tortoise.
But, parables from our childhood aside, there are implications which arise, which can only be read when the law of identity is displaced via some such dialectical reasoning. The most innocent of questions would be of course what is this ‘A’ which we speak of that is seemingly not itself? Recognition of a likeness that we see? And in this sense not -A? Or, if we dare - in the order of a different palpable, which is to say discernible to us giving us A is B? Identity, recognition and the process of transference are problems which will remain with us well beyond their formalisation in medieval philosophy and even into contemporary investigations in subject formation undertaken by psychoanalysis, but this may be an inquiry for another time.
Professor Cole for his part traces the difficulty which Plato had in articulating the notion of relative being, which these paradoxes hinge on. His primary categories being motion, rest, identity and difference.
The question of transition remains significant not merely in terms of the form of the proposition, of assertions or negations but also in the scope of its historicity and the sense which a work of philosophy may bequeath of the times and the means via which it was composed. The medieval scriptural tradition we learn, may have been many things - scriptural, formalistic and outmoded in ways which modernity may choose not to look back to - and yet it was there that a renewal of interest in classical learning re-arose in the western world, at least since the translation of Greek literature by the Arabs.
The practices of the archive were inextricably bound to these possibilities, and the practices of ecclesiastical learning, especially commentary and exegesis form much of the foundations of what in modernity we come to recognize as hermeneutics or criticism if you prefer.
It would also be tempting to read into the comparison laid before us by Professor Cole of Hegel and Nietzsche, and his insistence of a dialectical moment or should I say staging inherent in Nietzsche, even as early as The Birth of Tragedy between opposing principles exemplified in the allegorical figures of ancient gods such as Dionysus and Apollo. Though here we should remember that an antinomy is not yet a dialectic per se - and perhaps actually reading The Birth of Tragedy where the formation of the dithyrambic drama with its protagonists and commenting chorus which sings may better exemplify how a form emerges.
Yet to clarify a little on this distinction which is made between the dialectical, which I have described as the antinomic, and the dialectic itself - which may allude to some kind of synthesis perhaps in a new form for instance, a means of identifying this difference may be perhaps grasped earlier in recognising the nature of the antinomy at play. The dialectical relation alluded to between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art for instance work to further intensify each other’s impulse, to the point where a breach in either’s integral or foundational consistency can only be read in terms of a break, subversion - perhaps of a higher principle or indeed a tragedy. The dialectic however is not seemingly fixated upon a procedure geared towards a mutual intensification of principles or of practices of accumulation for that matter, a stage whose ossification in modern society Marx critiqued as capitalism.
The dialectic for Hegel at least is always the art of sublimation, of aufeben - that is a suspension of a determinate negation which arises in an encounter via the historicisation of the process of its production. This production may be very much material as in the industrial, pertaining to trade between two countries for instance - but it is always linguistic, that is to say conceptual. In working through the incoherence of an antagonism to identify the drives which may be positing a position we may be led to reconcile seemingly oppositional tendencies in ways which the attrition of the encounter itself do not readily reveal to us. In this sense, you could say that indeed the dialectic stands guilty of the insertion of a kind of temporal mediation in an encounter - if only for the process of legibility.
Of note to a reader of Andrew Cole himself would be the telling impression which his book bears of the study of his teacher Fredric Jameson who for about half a century now has been ‘translating a variety of cultural forms, past and present, into what he would call a ‘positive hermeneutic’ for Marxism, in what may to a discerning eye then appear to be modernity’s version of the medieval will to present a theory of everything. An effort, we are reminded which bears with it a history of metaphysical humiliations which acts as an index of past efforts and failures.
These gestures of the dialectic as it were, its efforts not merely to use antinomies to antimonies but to think possible alternatives in as yet unrealised futures is where we may yet discover utopian impulses in this style if not method of thought.
An argument which is advanced by Professor Cole in ‘The Birth of Theory’ is a particular reading of the difference between the classical, identified with the Athenian dialectic, and its post-classical formulation in the medieval period by the likes of Plotinus which focuses on the dialectic of identity and difference which perhaps may be read as analogous to that of self and Other.
A crucial difference which is observed in the Platonic dialectic and its more modern iterations which Andrew Cole observes in ‘The Birth of Theory’ is the way essential categories such as motion or rest are not defined merely in oppositional terms but via the act of the participation of the given phenomenon in the primal Form of motion, or rest hence enabling its identification. There is however, even in the Platonic dialectic another kind of opposition facilitated as it were via the participation or identification of a given phenomenon as these primal forms. When motion is observed we identify, that is to say classify it as an act of motion and yet that which we observe is not quite the very idea of Motion itself ie. the form is exemplicated - and in this regard remains different, just as motion is observed when we can locate a difference in position. In this sense the dialectic of identity and difference taken up via the neo-Platonist Plotinus does appear to be drawing from a strand not altogether foreign to the Athenian dialectic.
Difference itself, as a concept seems to be used differently on the cusp of modernity and the author notices how for instance, the phenomenon of identity situated in the figure of the feudal lord or master is hinged upon the difference of this figure from that of the serf or slave, inscribed as it were into the very reciprocity which characterises their relationship, and not in the participation of the lord in some form of mastery such as an experienced guild master or tradesman whom often dotted the emerging medieval manufactural estates.
The dialectic in ancient and in medieval times was not without its detractors as no doubt it has found those in modernity who would choose to satirise it and here the names Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson from the English tradition would not be out of place in providing comical examples of say a donkey who dies out of thirst and starvation because he cannot decide whether he wants food or water first. - Yet, does this bitter satire reveal something about a differentiation in how dialectical reasoning is conducted, a differentiation which can be traced to its Platonic and Aristotelian origins? An interesting question and one which the author does take up.
The consideration of contraries for example, such as in an argument between two characters requires, in my reading of its Hegelian reworking - always the possibility to question the contradiction itself, which in the terms presented may not be an authentic, sincere or correct understanding of the nature of the antagonism between the parties before our consideration. In other words, this is not merely proceeding via negation, even if as Aristotle may observe, a negation of a property tells us something about the claims of its inherence. Or, if you please the interrogation of a contradiction would reveal something about the claims of either side. Rather, and to face up to the charge of shifting the goalpost, sublation would seek to identify the moment when the claims or the contradiction presented in the encounter become mutually legible, or if it is merely our understanding in question, is able to create or recognize a concept adequate to represent the heterogeneity of forces which produces the antagonism in question.
The formalisation of these observations is occasionally presented as - Hegel, in a daring step challenged Aristotle’s laws of thought governing propositions, particularly the law of identity and by extension the law of the excluded middle term. ‘All things are in themselves contradictory'.
It has often occurred to me just how easily misconstrued a period of history may be, especially in terms of its intellectual developments. The Middle Ages, often known as The Dark Ages is caricatured as a period of regression in learning - and inasmuch as interactions between cultures was concerned this may have been true, yet as indicated earlier with the Charlemangian restoration of classical learning - even the cloistered monasteries were led to consider the place of reason in theology. In his work ‘The Divine Names’ Pseudo-Dionysus seeks to construct an argument where though conceding that enlightenment or divine knowledge occurs in the soul and not the mind, it still takes place through discursive reasoning.
Pseudo-Dionysus also provides us with a presentation of the dialectic of identity and difference via the notion of dissimilar similarities, a means via which we attune ourselves to paradox. To those who appreciate dialectical reasoning, an early account of the now seemingly contemporary problem of the radical, or why not - divine otherness of the Other is found in the work of Nicholas of Cusa. Indeed an account which does not seem wholly alien to the Islamic non-description of God is offered - “that the creator is neither anything nameable nor any other thing whatever”. Or in other words is ‘Not-Other’.
Regarding the dialectic of identity and difference an interesting way we may think of it is via Hegel’s own terms for it, ‘in itself’, and ‘for itself’ - here ‘in itself’ would coordinate not merely with identity but with a sense of multiplicity or differentiation in identity, and hence ‘for itself’ would refer not merely to a distinction from oneself, but also a sense of purpose or determinate association that one has with an object - but most markedly a consciousness of it or self-consciousness if you prefer.
Perhaps an example of mediation par excellence even if it is not recognized as such is the Kantian differentiation, a purely conceptual one mind you - between noumena, or things as they are in themselves, and phenomena or things as they appear to us. The possibility the structure of this conceptual antinomy present to the other is of significant note as their consideration of any given phenomena may be entertained and a possible opposite or anti-thesis offered without making the terms of the debate about some foundational essence.
A temperament we should note which marks the criticism of his position against the Middle Ages, which while we may have defended as not entirely dark if only because of the developments of a monastic scholasticism, were yet a period of territorial suspicions, plague and a diminishing of the trade which had enabled the earlier Renaissance.
Professor Cole provides us with a rather significant reading of the issue which Hegel takes up against Kant. Especially why he remains an idealist. The subject for Kant remains an idealism for it depends on an Other to be grounded, or which is perhaps posited if only to be overcome. Hegel takes a different stance when in his dialectic of lord and bondsman he posits the movement when consciousness masters itself and is not subject to the Other as self-consciousness.
Also interesting though for decidedly historical reasons, is the fact that feudalism itself seemed to continue in Germany well after Hegel’s death in admittedly mixed forms amidst the emerging capitalism. Further, this seems to have arisen from the bed of Hersschaft and Grundherschaft, or lordship and landed lordship which were practiced in Germany which even Marx only took partial account of.
Along the way we are taken through the reception of Hegel’s work in 20th century France, particularly via Alexandre Kojeve’s lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit - amongst whose pupils included Sartre, Merleu Ponty, Foucault, Althusser and Derrida. As a statesman, who was involved with the French ministry and one of the chief planners of the European Common Market, a step which was later instrumental in the formation of the European Union, it is perhaps illustrative of the social situation in Europe after the second world war when we read his account - “ to speak of the ‘origin’ of self consciousness is necessarily to speak about the risk of life” or it is to speak about “a fight to the death for pure prestige”.
The insistence of the feudality of the Hegelian dialectic and it's situation or rather arising out of the Middle Ages is pointed and I think it is worth noting professor Coles’ reading of the conception of freedom as it were, operative in a period before feudalism and the Middle ages - in other words in the times of slavery. It is a conception not operative by an antagonism towards the Other. Nor would it involve a sense of the mediation required in adjudicating on competing claims to a land. To quote Hegel himself - “Greek freedom of thought is excited by an alien existence; but it is free because it transforms and virtually reproduces the stimulus of its own operation.”
It would be well to remember that the serfdom arising out of feudality, which in many cases may have been indescribable from slavery was still a station of life which provided an opening into freedom and perhaps the dreams of modernity.
We are introduced briefly to the disputes over ownership in feudality, particularly as witnessed in rival claims to land. Yet, perhaps more significant especially in any phenomenological sense would be his attention to the changing or should I say the subsuming of an earlier mode of production by a feudal or proto-capitalist formation. This would be particularly evident in the parceling and specialisation of labor tasks, not unlike the latter Taylorization of the economy which would leverage scales.
The dialectic of lord and bondsman, is worth tarrying over - even if this has been done by significant names in the history of philosophy, for if nothing else we are speaking about, already - if no one has noticed, changes in subjectivity as brought on by the enmeshment of the individual in discrete modes of production, even as there may be historical coincidences in the temporal unfolding.
The lord in his freedom enjoys a surplus afforded to him by his position, a surplus which the bondsman lacks. This we are told, is a surplus to the means of life. The bondsman, on his part, at least in feudality enjoys the security of an estate - but perhaps does not recognize his freedom in respect to the lord. The question we are left with is hence whether he achieves self-consciousness?
It is vital to note, that with the emergence of a bourgeoise - that is a class which makes their living from trade and not via the ownership or labor on land per se that we encounter a terrain of human experience which peers beyond the veil of the dialectic of lord and bondsman.
The book before our consideration does, in such a manner introduce us to the dialectic of possession and labour. To quote - ‘Labour is the work of possession, an act of the will to shape one’s surroundings. “To impose a form on a thing is a mode of taking possession”’. Like Marx anon the advent of large scale industrial labour, Hegel drew his examples from agriculture, often with the tilling of soil, rearing of animals, ‘preservation of game’, and indeed the means via which one material may be made to produce effects on another… Here, I must admit my own unfamiliarity with the entirety of Hegel’s oeuvre which professor Cole commands at least as evinced via references, yet what I would draw the attention of the reader to is what may yet be described as a kind of temporality which we may glean in the phenomenology which allows for a glimpse into a time prior to industrialisation, large scale mechanisation of services, and hence perhaps closer to the world of handicraft - a tendency which some have observed in professor Cole’s teacher, Fredric Jameson as well.
And while we mention style it would be elucidative to recall that possession itself transforms via our engagement with it, from that which we give form - to an aspect of ourselves, or so would go a simplistic reading of the beginnings of Hegel’s dialectics. Yet the transition which we so easily have laid out here is opaque to the impasses between how self formation actually works, and how for instance a serf living under feudalism, and a bondsman with relative autonomy working in a house, may think of freedom differently. Jameson was once asked at the end of a now rather famous lecture, ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity: Time and Event under the conditions of Post-Modernity’ whether theory tells stories, and here - his initial response was well no, for what would then be the plot? Here, I think we may possibly offer a response to that question which his former student does well to notice - that in discerning the relation between bondsman and lord, in feudalism, especially as that mode of production was tied to working on land, there appears to have been a form of society, or rather ties - which may very well have been able to play on the ambiguity which the meaning that the word ‘plot’ entails. One’s whose narratorial and spatial extesionality were in all likelihood not lost on Fredric Jameson whose initial field was indeed French literature.
In terms of the advent of social formations which we characterise in any terms with civilisation and all the incongruities which this term has borne - feudality, was identified by Hegel as the settlement which induced the martial barbarian nomads into what we may today identify with a nascent gentrification, or in professor Cole’s own words ‘pacified by possession’. And here, I am tempted to add - we may actually witness the transition of a people from an anthropological group approaching what Marx may latter identify with ‘relations of production’ proper.
Would we be wrong in pointing out that the system of estates, the practice of lordship and landed lordship, and indeed the dependence of the lord upon estate and serf to be recognized as a lord, often entailing multiple hierarchies, formalised under the now familiar clergy, aristocracy, military, traders, and workers - was conducive to practices of sub-infeudation which did much to damage the coherence of an estate, to say nothing of its relation to others? We are brought to consider this via professor Cole’s scholarship and here I would observe that this was a problem as apparent in medieval Europe as it was in India.
The intimations of associations between those of a similar station, or trade if not tilling the same soil, independent of the instruction of the master is perhaps where we may trace the beginnings of what Marx would come to call class consciousness. And we would do well to remember that Europe was emerging into a historical moment where the church held considerably less power upon the cusp of modernity and the dissolution of the system of estates at least in France in the fires of the French Revolution.
Also of note particularly for those interested in the concept of labour are the ties between lord and bondsman, of the latter who holds his station via working on the thing-hood or property of the former. This is characterised as ‘negation’ by Cole for no amount of labour can make his come into possession of it. Indeed, this point is emphasised, “the bondsman ‘relates himself negatively to the thing’, because the thing is not his…”
These summations I hope have been able to represent the argument which professor Cole puts forth as to why we should think of Hegel, not merely in terms of idealism - which he revolutionised after Kant, or in some de-historicised rubric which is often levelled against the discipline of philosophy. Hegel was, as demonstrated in his works incorporating elements of the medieval dialectic just as he was situating this to the realities of lordship and bondage in the Prussia of his time - which was decidedly feudal. This does not make him a historian, even if we may look to his work today as an intellectual history, and indeed he was the philosopher who identified the history of philosophy as the philosophy of history, beginning from the phenomenology of perception, a task as intricate and as grand as it sounds which can only be witnessed in the singularity of the texts he has bequeathed to us. It is, in today’s light perhaps fitting that we look to the Hegelian moment, not as the end of philosophy as many once did, but as professor Cole titles his book - ‘The Birth of Theory.’
As Marxist’s, if we can still call ourselves that unreservedly after the Frankfurt School, to say nothing of the Russian and Chinese experiments - a near theological proposition we may entertain is whether commodity fetishism as we recognize it today is a distinctly capitalistic phenomena set apart from or alien to the feudal world. This may seem unlikely in considering the religious practices, congregational and liturgical which were very much a part of the medieval world. However, in terms of the social consciousness which characterises a break from the feudal world and the advent of capitalism proper, Marx and Engels had this to say in ‘The German Ideology’ - (in feudalism) ‘the social relations between individuals appear as personal relations, and are not disguised as social relations between things.’ This is what Marx observes to dissolve in capitalism - ‘the definite social relations between individuals assumes here the fantastic form of relations between things. It may be another matter to say that today this break as it were may be interrogated for relations between individuals of the determinate kind may still persist even if they do not characterize the norm perceptible in the public sphere.
This obfuscation as some have called it, or transference to update the lexicon with a psychoanalytically inflected vocabulary between or rather from determinate relations between persons to their transubstantiation into relations between things - which is perhaps a rudimentary definition of commodity fetishism is recognized to have its origins in the practice of medieval eucharist.
In approaching the matter of the sacrament we come across a section in the text titled ‘The Thing’ with all its allusive ambiguity and darkness. And here, professor Cole seems to be theorising on the act of exchange. The idea of the equivalence of two commodities expressed symbolically in a third which serves as a medium being the essence of how Marx were to represent commodity exchange for instance. A reader of philosophy may note that the notion of a commonality between two things or entities for that matter does have its precedents in Plato and his conception of the Khora. Yet the crucial Marxian break with idealism, or perhaps I should say a break - is his insistence to substantialise this third, and in the words of professor Cole ‘enfold it within the commodity itself’.
A relatively novel observation by him (Cole), at least as far as dialectics and the exchange of commodities are concerned is the proposition that “the twofold thing which is the commodity subsumes the ‘third thing’.” Here, we must notice that the third thing being referred to in this case could not be the medium of exchange itself, because the commodity is a ‘two fold thing’ in the sense of it possessing both a use value and an exchange value only via the existence of the medium of exchange, an argument which Marx uses to express the historical coming to be of the form of money itself so as to mediate between incommensurable quantities or qualities as expressed in commodities. Further, these aspects of a commodity are incommensurable only because they are at least two parties present who both desire different commodities, hence creating the conditions of any exchange. In what sense hence does professor Cole claim that the twofold thing which is the commodity subsumes the ‘third thing’? One possible explanation would be that there may have been an expenditure, investment or the extension of credit which was necessary or responsible for the production of the commodity in question itself, which in assuming the singularity of the form it does subsumes the semblant of its origin - and here we may, I suppose be tempted at considering genealogical inspirations were we to consider forms of debt apart from the monetary.
We are pointed out indeed to Marx’s invocations in Capital to identify the likeness of the situation which individuals are placed in the allegory of commodities, or should I say their exchange. And need I remind anyone who is reading - or perhaps watching this that generically, capital may be thought of as a social relation, and those familiar with the relevant bodies of literature will not miss the extent of conceptual influence discernible in this text, by professor Cole’s teacher Fredric Jameson.
However, to return to our study itself - the idea or perhaps notion of the khora, attempting to encapsulate via its Marxian mutation the duality of the commodity, as a thing with a use and also an exchange value, may also be recognized in the Christian sacrament or indeed fetish of transubstantiation, namely of bread and wine representing Christ. Here, professor Cole notices the commonality or indeed communion which comes to be in the sharing or partaking in this sacrament, an act or a ceremony as it were which binds the congregation, symbolically effacing the separation of Jesus Christ as person who died for our sins and the holy spirit which lives within us. And while the sense of participation may be gratificatory we would do well to remember the Althusserian lesson that this gesture effectively seeks to pass over and bind an impossible gap. The idea of the son of god, as subject intervening in the affairs of man to rid us of our sins in an act of sacrifice, in whose event we recognise ourselves as redeemed is, the beauty of its poetics aside - an act of symbolic short circuiting and indeed perhaps the pinnacle of the example of how ideology can function via an act which we Lacanians will readily recognize as one of disavowal.
What may yet be of enduring interest however is the Hegelian transformation of the dialectic of identity and difference to one of transubstantiation. An operation, if not mutation which was undoubtedly touched by the Medieval spirit of the times and with it of a monastic Christianity.
For my part I will hold that there is yet much philosophical investigation to be done in the surfacing of fetishism, and I do mean surfacing - for before Marx spoke of this term Hegel yet referred to it, perhaps congregationally as a feeling. And with so much rather staid criticism often peddled against what is a straw-man interpretation of 20th century Marxism, or as some structuralists would have it - state socialism, it would be significant to note that the sense of value is indeed and will remain subjective, even if our subject were to go on to determine the relative magnitudes of their exchange in discrete commodities and services.
I would also note that it would be of real sociological interest to examine the cited writings by Hegel of the transformation of early Christianity which is depicted and prior to the formalisation of the Church, must have been a folk religion - to the emergence of what he refers to as private religions which do incorporate perhaps a forced yet on that account fetishistic worship which does not see itself in friendship with all of life’s feelings. This seems almost to depict Christianity’s break with pantheism - and perhaps one day we may glean as to how Spinoza may be located here.
Hegel’s own perspective on this phenomenon or transition if you will is mixed. As a systematic thinker he would no doubt be able to appreciate the formalism that fetishism enables. The whole notion of sanctifying bonds, the processual commemoration of an event etc. after all seem possible only via these ties. Yet, beyond the peasant rebellion, a key criticism of the Protestant challenge to Catholic orthodoxy was precisely on the count of ceremony. And posterity would have it that Hegel did for Protestantism what Aquinas did for the Catholics. Further however and immanent to Hegel’s own work, and perhaps most apparently so in the Phenomenology is the very appreciation of difference beginning in the act of perception itself noticing that which one observes and that who observes - this movement and the enunciation of its self-contradiction proceeds in a manner unformalizeable by a pre-established ceremony for it moves precisely in the medium of breaks, or that point where a form of recognition is inadequate to the content of perception - forcing the cognition of a concept capable of articulating the present antagonism, synthesis or indeed harmony. Gillian Rose perhaps a century later may have characterized this as disremption.
The Lutheran conception of the Host for instance is presented as an example where adoration and enjoyment are manifested, and not necessarily together. Indeed there is a sense of objectification in the sacrament - the elevation of a partaking into a rite symbolising communion; a significance which the very fetishism in question marks out as realisable perhaps only privately. This process clearly seems to spell out that the very formalism in question be it Protestant as it cannot sufficiently expel the charge of ceremony which it once may have levelled against the Catholics, but perhaps the question of whether it is empty is also to be taken into consideration.
This is the sense of medieval Christianity which informs my reading and it is easy to imagine a severe Marxian criticism levelled against it - perhaps from the mount of the commodity fetishism inherent in such religious objectifications. Catholic Churches for instance in Medieval Europe were often wealthy establishments and alters occasionally were adorned with jewels and gold signifying the wealth of the establishment.
Indeed, closer to where I write from - a prominent sociologist Shanker Gopalakrishnan presents a critique of the recent prominence of the RSS in not very dissimilar terms, levelling the charge of the thingification of pujas and the merchandise which goes into its ceremony, be it posters of gods, clay lamps, incense sticks and other such signs. More worrying however institutionally is the establishment of a school system - Vidya Bharathi designed to bring tribals into the fold, where it has often been found that the line between education and a religious indoctrination untouched by scientific or historical scrutiny are blurred. He alleges that they serve mostly to provide a medium of income to acharyas or teachers and that students attend mostly to avail of the promissory mid-day meals. Indeed the acharyas continue drawing a pay even when education is not underway leading us to suspect that they rather than the students are the real target of the Vidya Bharathi schools opened up in tribal areas.
In returning to the concept of the commodity however and its fetishistic nature as in Marx, or the communitarian feeling referred to by Hegel, we would do well to recall that even in Capital the accumulation of value is what takes place in ‘the hidden abode of production' - and here we must understand this to be referring to the private sphere, whether it be living chambers or indeed a workshop. This spatial segregation as opposed to it being in the public sphere is I suppose another difference which is observed between this fetishistic or indeed reified undertaking - if only in terms of its separation from the site of its production, farms, kitchens etc. and what may have been common practice in earlier communal times or indeed in barracks, messes and other forms of communal dining. The point is not to archive the forms in which such meetings take place but to recognize that the notion of the eucharist is indeed tied to practices of consumption as practiced in any society and of course is representative of the reality of transubstantiation which is very much underway in our private dwellings as they are in our processes of production, and as such symbolic.
The argument being made in its entirety is a rather simple one, that the unspoken associations which are made be it in the guise of feeling as in Hegel or fetishism as in Marx regarding that which may be desirable in a commodity - its use value as recognized, and including the rules which may be placed upon its consumption or appropriation constitute what we have been trying to describe above. As such it is to be noted that it is a rather flexible and encompassing notion which may be used to represent things like the etiquette of seating at a table to practices inherent in the making of a commodity, even as simple as a recipe. In all, there is a bond between the Hegelian notion, inherited from Christianity of the Eucharist and the Marxian concept of the commodity. This bond is not without its own discrepancies however, for if you recall Adam Smith would define a commodity as any artefact of thing which can satisfy human want but which its owner would choose not to consume themselves but rather trade. The Eucharist however is tied to the act of its consumption.
Marx’s transposition of the early phenomenological moorings of the Hegelian thing - be it the Eucharist as it may, or merely an association is stark - for it presents perhaps for the first time what we now recognize to be a critique of political economy - to quote “The mysterious character of the commodity form… reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers.” This observation is what leads to the notion of alienation which has been so central to Marxism which later the Frankfurt School would develop on in its critique of ideology, yet the careful reader may notice that it was already immanent in the dialectic between lord and bondsman which Hegel speaks about in his Phenomenology, encapsulating the expropriation of produce by the lord inherent in the practice of feudalism. The nature of the reversal in question however is worth stating for while in the dialectic of lord and bondsman the former learns about his dependence on the latter and hence the reversal of roles occurs in a sense without any systemic transformation, even if feudalism as a system via this very process creates its own exteriority as it were which is to be the class of traders who would go on to form early mercantilism. In Marx the exteriority of the products of labour from their producers is real, and in this sense he does mean ‘commodity’ in the very literal sense of the term. What is hence laid before us then is the process by which these commodities assume the forms which they do, a process contingent upon the present state of social organization or as is commonly termed the division of labour.
Bear in mind that even with the formation of mercantilists out of what could possibly be described as the medieval burrows, the system of estates and indeed even the later guild associations do appear to bear down historically with the rise of mass production and the first factories. As such what we are offered is very much an account of the transitions in the mode of production, and not a subjective realisation of responsibilities, debts, obligations or bonds etc. The chief problem which now emerges, or rather which the classes can take cognisance of for the first time at this historical moment is that of distribution, and it is within capitalism as such that the issue of overproduction and hence consequent crunches in the economy become a mainstay.
To not get carried away by the economics and in returning to the subject of our consideration - this book, The Birth of Theory appreciates the receptivity which Hegel has for early Christianity especially the folk currents in the movement. Indeed, there may be some who are tempted to read the Phenomenology as a dirge of the formalisation of our attempts to knowledge, at our efforts of arriving at a moment just right to catch the genesis of a movement in its nascency like the three magi’s may have done as the story goes.
The formalization of the church was no doubt one such step, and a significant one at that - at least in the reading which professor Cole offers us, for with this we get liturgy and of course the sacrament and its milieu so dear to Hegel and in which he appears to speak to. This readership however, if I may call it that is what changes with Marx who finds his people as it were in the formations of the Middle Ages, the trades burrows which may perhaps be thought of as an earlier kind of union formation, and of course the rise of capitalism and the classes. Marx is very much a historical thinker. One who is attuned to the losses which accompany the disremption of feudalism, and not just its liberations. And it is precisely in an effort for a people to find a semblance of that justice which may have once been that the congregation which may once have been a workers togetherness assumes the radicality necessary to rebel against the terms of their engagement. In this sense we may say that there is always a sense of renegacy inherent in the proletarian movement, at least in its relation to the estate if not classes.
Dialectics itself and its relation to Christianity and the sacrament too find their expression in Marx’s work though one may need a nose to locate it. The antinomies of production and consumption for instance are bound to each other structurally, and in them the perhaps earlier mediatory Hegelian moment of communion finds its place. Each providing for the other what will be either the object to be consumed or the subject that is reproduced. This marking the bond which signals them as parties to an exchange, an exchange which is also the composition of them as such.
Regarding the commodity itself, there are signs of the difficulty of translating wertkorper and warenkorper into exchange and use value respectively for what this translation neglects is the meaning of the common suffix ‘korper’, from the Latin corpus - meaning body. And this indeed is a point of focus in Marx’s work for even in his most basic example from Capital where x yards of linen are equal to 1 coat, the possibility of such an equation being written is predicated on the assumption that the linen in question may be tailored to a coat, ie. that the material is capable of being worked upon to assume the form in question. In this regard we can see how literally Marx enunciates the becoming subject as it were which Hegel formalises in distinct steps or rather stages in logic in his Phenomenology. The use value of a substance, its warenkorper is hence a function of our ability to work it into a form amenable to us - this being the ‘form giving fire’ Marx refers to in the Grundrisse.
If you notice, it is precisely this changing of a quantity into a quality, a matter or material into a substance, the giving of it a determinate form that characterises the negation of the Aristotelian law of identity in logic. It is also what Engels would later observe to be one of the three elementary laws of dialectics. This transubstantiation as it were is of course aligned metaphorically with the poetics of sacrament, in Hegel. In Marx it is to become the process via which the body is given form - and here it is discernible in what sense Marx refers to the body of a commodity, particularly the duality it represents in the aspects of its use or exchange. And here, to jump the gun a little bit - the immanent contradiction this produces, the necessity for human social formations to think a medium which can facilitate this exchange between incommensurables, that is commodities of distinct use values desired by mutually amenable parties. Money being the commodity whose only use value is exchange, functioning as such as the medium between all other commodities, in whose measure they find and determine their own relative worth vis-a-vis each other.
Societies in which relations between people are mediated by relations between things are principally what constitutes societies where fetishism reigns, this being the veil of illusion or indeed ideology which is often referred to. While there may be the possibility of communion which is discernible in the Hegelian sense - consideration will remain key, of difference, and of the other which we Lacanians now do read to be another symbolic order, and not merely a nominally representative other such as the play dough of a normative discourse in which case it would be merely an empty category.
And speaking of the Lacanian intervention or should I say borrowings from Marxian theory in recent years, particularly the hypothesis that it was Marx who invented the symptom, being here the homology between the structure of the commodity and the structure of dreams in psychoanalysis, we should point out two things 1. that this is a homology strictly from the analytical position, in the sense that the only way either of these structures become amenable to analysis is not to dive immediately into the essentials of political economy hence pointing out that the magnitude of value in a commodity is measured by the amount of socially determined labour time which went into its production, or in the case of dreams that the ambiguous neighbor and figure who appears only obliquely is a sexual metaphor for a lost desire, opportunity or chance at acquaintance which the subject chooses not to remember. Rather we should recognize that these as such are in our apprehension of them essentially surface-level phenomena and even behave as such. When confronting a commodity what opens it up for analysis is the question of how it assumes the specific form it does embodying the possible utility it may serve. Similarly, with the structure of dreams, the idea is not to reduce every chance oddity into a sexual innuendo as the crass caricature of Freud may go, but rather to historicize the form of appearance of the figures as such so that we may place the symptoms presented adjacently and help the patient make sense of the disparate sequences which are recalled which often seem disjointed and disconnected, much like aspects of our lives in this increasingly compartmentalized and post-modern world.
2. And this is the interesting intervention which professor Cole points out in his reading of Hegel, Marx, and Zizek; if following Zizek we were as orthodox Lacanians to accept that it was Marx who invented the symptom, let us name it - alienation. And if the symptom assumes the form which it does in modernity, characterised by what others in the analytic field have described as a split subject, and which Deleuze and Guattari perhaps recuperatively term schizophrenia than the social transition which gives body to the expression of the symptom as such is that of feudalism to capitalism. This transition however, as we learn - was already being wrestled with by Hegel himself who lived in the time of the French Revolution in its infancy and Napoleonic France whose wars he was witness to in frighteningly close proximity. Can we not make a case that it was Hegel then who invented the symptom in a presciently Marxist manner? To place it even more elementarily - if in the history of philosophy, since Aristotle all the way to Kant the question of the singularity in the sense of the unity of the subject, its coherence so to speak, and what the Christian mission spoke of as the soul was understood to be self identical, the philosopher who formally and with immense argumentative passion exhibits the contradictions in the law of identity is undoubtedly Hegel - the first truly historical philosopher, in the sense of a thinker who could rise above the constituted forces of his own moment and attempt to represent a transition in thought which was necessitated by developments as they were unfolding, developments which could not be encapsulated by the concept of the serf, who had to realize his independence, and ultimately which could not be contained by the ancient regime which had to give way to a republic.
The change of political orders as it were is also reflected in the bodies of literature produced in these periods - namely Furstenspiegel or literature of council for the ruling class - the word literally meaning ‘mirrors for the princes’. This genre as it were - perhaps exemplified in works such as Thomas Munster’s ‘Sermon to the Princes’ may be thought of as a precursor to the disciplines of political economy and of course figures such as Adam Smith. This comparison between the two genres is central to the development of much literary criticism and a task which would enable to better historicize the kinds of temporalities in practice, while also alerting us to the persistence of the medieval in the modern.
Generically, it is important that we recognize Furstenspiegel to be a canonical body which is to be included in the literature of education, even if it does not always bear with it a narrative as the bildungsroman did, it is still very much concerned with bildung or education. Also, a central reason why this passage meditating on the genre of the Furstenspiegel seems to have been introduced was of course to compare it with what this theme is to become in political economy, yet centrally it marks Hegel’s awareness of the ceaseless reckoning of the modern with the medieval. Indeed this would be what the later Marxists would come to call uneven development.
The section on Hegel and Bakhtin even provide us what may be recognized as a prescient theory of discourses, beginning with characterisations of individual genres such as the epic - in whose exaltation the modern form of individuality seems impossible, to the compilations of medieval parody which accept and in turn resist the other’s word, heeding and ridiculing it as it were.
Instead of narrating professor Cole’s observations from Rabelais and his work - I would rather like to share with you another interesting continuation between the generic literature of the medieval ages and that of modernity, namely allegorical literature. This body of work, shedding its divine garbs becomes infinitely more pliable in the hands of modern masters, even if the sense of miracle and morality plays from the English middle ages still lingers. Shakespeare, an ardent favourite of Marx was a success for many reasons, but chief amongst them was his ability to appeal to and represent distinct sections of the audience, particularly their class distinctions as well as limitations to each other. Differences which the daily lives and interactions between such characters would in normal circumstances be foreclosed to them. The ability of such a work to touch upon seemingly universal themes for it to be remembered years later is not as much a function of its ability to represent mere experience per se in a realist mode, but to make us cognize the coordinates within which our grasp of realism itself are conditioned - coordinates which Marx recognized as ultimately in their horizon political and economic. Allegory however, as any work of representation requires a character, scene, or perhaps even plot to stand in for a constitutive body - representing them as it were. This socius is what makes the character for instance, in question relatable - and this is a practice which drama of all the literary arts self-consciously takes up well into what we may now choose to recognize as late modernity, in plays such as Look Back In Anger by John Osbourne.
Regarding the project of dialectical criticism itself, perhaps exemplified at least for native English readers in the late 20th and early 21st century in Fredric Jameson - whose historical singularity as an index of past efforts at this project, ranging from the Frankfurt School, to the Budapest School, to the most recent Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, to say nothing of his classificatory remarks on French theorists ranging from Sartre to Deleuze still conceal what must be admitted as something akin to an institutional scaffolding which such a hermeneutical and explanatory system, again to say nothing of its revelatory potentials - has in store.
A statement singled out by his former student Andrew Cole is worth citing here “It is clear that the most influential and elaborate interpretative system of recent times has been that of psychoanalysis, which may indeed lay claim to the distinction of it being the only really new and original hermeneutic developed since the great patristic medieval system of the four senses of scripture.” - As significant as such a statement may be in itself, it is yet elucidative of the conditions of its very enunciation which in both cases were very much institutionalised in distinct ways; with the clergy in the earlier and amidst the loosely aggregated body of professionals who constitute the analytic community in the more recent, both clinical and otherwise. We must also state here that both these bodies are marked by schisms of historical significance be it the protestant revolution or indeed Lacan’s own break from the International Psychoanalytic Association. As such they are testaments to the forms of associations often required to systematically pursue an inquiry in the open field that is society, associations whose very formalisation allow them to pursue the singularity of the pursuit while heeding the lessons of past investigations which serve as case histories chronicling symptoms and the conditions of their appearance, if this is not too limited of me.
The point of historical criticism is never reducible to the mere historicization or the contextualization of this or that event, in the scale of things, though that certainly helps. To be able to appreciate how a movement in the development of a practice came to be what it is offers the vantage of knowing the forces which it seemed to be contending with, be they military, economic, political or amorous - a four fold model which in its substituting of the military for the scientific, unfortunately in today’s times with the war in Ukraine seem to be the only real progressive unfolding of the scientific pole which constituted one of Badiou’s four conditions of philosophy. The possibility of placing the past, the present and the future in their affective synchronicity permit for forms of mediation, or dare I say dialectical interventions which can offer trajectories which these moments in themselves may not have been able to readily recognize, and in this sense Jameson probably distills some of the Benjaminian legacy of brushing history against the grain to reveal what unthought possibilities lay dormant - seeds as it were which may yet inform the present for the time to come.
The Jamesonian gesture in the history of dialectical thought, if any such summary may be made - is one of ideological critique for certain, but it proceeds via unraveling the false consciousness inherent in any mystificatory model, an operation which we see was very much commonplace in the medieval ages as it appears to be in capitalist modernity. If via this he manages to unearth the utopian elements expressed in often newly emerging literary forms whose narratorial structure has to mutate to take into account changes in the mode of experience, whose breaks often act as forerunners to those in the mode of production - then we may perhaps see his work of criticism in the light where it seems to be most willingly received these days, that is as an archeology of the history of consciousness.
The work of literature in itself is often the product of a literary if not poetic imagination, a way in which figure and allegory are often drawn on by an author to stand in for certain influences, be they associational or obfuscated in the lived experiences they draw on. Where does that leave historical interpretation if we were to persist with professor Cole’s reading of Hegel within the problematic of historical and literary interpretation? This in itself is not a novel question and William Von Humbolt as well as Von Ranke would have their own digs at it. Admittedly, even the latter would see literature and philosophy as perhaps informing historiography but not tethered to the ‘real’ as strongly as to the ideal. As such these influences were to inform the process of history writing which was to be staid and strictly prosaic - a form of narration as it were which a literary scholar would readily identify as one which is informed by a very particular kind of interpretation.
Hegel of course comes in sharp relief to this as to him poetry is historical because it is ideal. Yet professor Cole goes a step further than that, to quote him “Poetry, that is, expresses not historical trivia but the concept of a historical period that makes conscious what it fundamentally is at that moment.” In a sense this summationary gesture is what is essential for the periodisation of literary movements such as Romanticism, Modernism etc. which in any case are often the material which inform historical scholarship and interpretation.
It is also, some may find briefly refreshing to have an adjudicatory air in a work of criticism which can often indulge in so much wishy washy juxtapositions without any sense of a veridical sentence, present in Cole’s account of the debt which the juxtaposition of genre and history owe to Hegel. To quote ‘…in particular to his idea that genres are like concepts, adequate or inadequate (in the philosophical sense) to the contents in which they emerge, grasping or failing to grasp the conditions of their own emergence.’
Politically, looking on the developments and indeed the very possibility of reading Hegel today especially in the English speaking world, a figure who deserves to be cited is T H Green, a professor of philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford who was responsible for introducing Hegel and Kant into the curriculum, and this of course meant questions regarding them in examinations etc. And indeed, we are informed of the complementarity inherent between literature and philosophy - a complementarity which as it were has its own history, independent of the governments of the day, and the effort of arranging these, the epic, drama, novel chronologically, that is presenting the content of the experience rendered in them as approaching and presentable in the form they appear in as such as part of a reflection of the human will to representation which congeals or perhaps is shaped into configurations which become recognisable collectively in distinct historical moments which may be divided into stages, not unlike the Leninist scaling of revolutionary movements, is an archive worth taking note of in any intellectual history. This nascent movement towards what is unmistakably genre criticism, a trajectory which Fredric Jameson were to inherit owes this debt of initiation to T H Green.
We are also introduced to Bosanquets, a student of Green who wrote a rather unfashionably titled History of Aesthetic in 1892, going against the grain of much of British philosophy at the time, yet a crucial stepping stone for the beginning of historicising genre criticism and hence moving out their reception from essentially idealised even if emotively sensitive categories such as those used by Aristotle in a similarly titled work, or the Indian theory of rassa for that matter.
I think today we may be able to see how there is a subversive edge to aesthetic theories which seemingly intrude on the more staid questions of ethics, if not the stately ones in politics. It also re-introduces what was essentially a defining feature in any rhetorical operations - the art of solicitation; a matter which most salesmen would readily agree with and perhaps for these very reasons a mode of observation and inquiry which traditionally did not find place in what must still have been a very much Victorian England.
Let us be clear here, when we are referring to genre this is done not to invoke it as some kind of jurisdiction, though the practices and body of work which may be recognized as the detective novel for instance may yet be summate-able into a fixed set of tropes and accompanying plot details which may be discernible in such works irrespective of the media of its appearance in, rather like a signature if not tracks.
It is important that we identify this for as is commonplacedly known today in the information age it is knowledge itself which forms a commons in almost all major industries - and I think Elinor Ostrom may have been recognized in the discipline for her contributions to this very argument, particularly in the way internet businesses today encroach on content already shared in public domain sites, much like the enclosure movement of the commons in yesteryears.
But to return to our phenomenology and especially its unique Hegelian inflections, I’d like to offer a quote from Cole’s book - ‘There needs to be, again, mediation to counter any assumption about immediacy and presence, whereby history always present in a work as a kind of content, can be illuminated by way of “explanation…from the outside” (Macherey) irrespective of genre; or as Hegel puts it ‘the historical information that “is firmly fixed in our minds” when we set about to read poetry historically.’ And here, though it may be vulgar of me one can probably see how such elucidatory explanation - which may be one way of defining criticism, attests to something akin to an autonomy of genre from history, even if this be in bad taste. And provocatively worded it would seem - for was not the great thunderclap of the dialectical tradition to ‘always historicise’ as it were now seemingly adding to the rather cliched duality of analytic and historical thought?
To appreciate what this problem actually has to teach us we may have to turn away from interpreting any text in itself as it were, and begin to ask what it means to think of a text for itself. Were genre to be thought analogically to caste for instance as just another category in which folk are included and excluded, what would hence be invisibleized are in fact the relations between them. And as may be apparent, it is precisely here and not always in a self-definition or identification that the historical force behind such movements are witnessed. And hence it would come to be that satire would come to define itself in retroactive opposition to ‘high-brow’ literature, how the bourgeoise would come to present itself as a challenger to the nobility and I am sure by now you follow the logic at work and can think of your own examples.
There is yet another way in which the ossification of such categories veils us from the realities of the people who often traverse through the ambit of their mediatory recognitions. Hierarchy would remain a defining feature it would seem, perhaps invisibilized in class even if most pronounced yet readily apparent in the segregation of any items really, from export quality to factory rejects, and indeed in the pre-modern and rather hereditary notion of caste. It was Ambedkar, the constitutionalist and great anti-caste champion from India who actually noticed that regarding the struggle for intersubjective recognition, often a function of the ability of those practicing an occupation to unionise in any case, censuses particularly those of caste actually tell us very little. For they would say nothing of inter-caste mobility unless a compendium of historical changes in the censuses were to be compared and even here the account would be one of statistical inference. Nothing bespeaks hierarchy as strongly, or attests to the will to overcome it then the struggle of mobility within these ‘categories’ which indeed represent forms of address, affiliation, practices and terms of employment.
Indeed today, following Jameson’s rather Hegelian reading of literary criticism to say nothing of the psychoanalytical lexicon, we may be inclined to read both history and literature as symptoms, were one to entertain some anti-foundationalism so fashionable among various readings if not misreadings of that body of work often recognised in America as post-structuralism. This would be an admittedly post-Marxist reading and I doubt whether Fredric Jameson would entertain it himself, for it risks reifying genre from history. Or so it may appear for history itself, now as in the nineteenth century is a function of historiography - a minor dawning which various official and canonical historians are coming to terms with today, perhaps not without some influence from the subaltern school, and as such we may be tempted to think of it as perhaps the nineteenth century’s form of expression which in modernity per se may assume the form of literature; an interpretation which Macherey would do much to provide a clear eyed perspective into.
The only missing piece in this picture would be of course to recall the Althusserian break with the French Communist Party, which perhaps lies at the genesis of what we more readily recognize today as Western Marxism which sought to set itself in opposition to certain Stalinist developments. Here, the essence of the argument lies in recognising that our very epistemology is inflected if not to some extent determined by the mode of production, in whose engagement with we mutually recognize retrospectively our class positions. Classes whose products and services cater to the milieu that is society in ways which are not merely individually but historically distinct - that is exist in traditions which have their own breaks and continuities. Namely, politics, economics, ideology - which today may include all sorts of entertainment but also religion, infrastructure etc. appearing as symptoms of this immense singularity.
The task, nay - the effort of sublation is not easily graspable without a semblant of trust and indeed exchange between parties who are often mediated between and this may provide us a hint of why Hegel, the inheritor of the tradition of German Idealism were to take an interest in British Political Economy and Adam Smith. For forms of mediation, contingent on the mode of production would be partially blind-sided were they to ignore the system of exchange contingent on the mode of production in any historical moment. Sublation itself however, as it were is not mere recognition but a comprehension of the requirement for a product to assume via its own negation, a new kind of adequacy which can perhaps yet be best described as a kind of form, even if or rather particularly when we do not as of yet have a name for it. This is when this historical dimension of dialectics is vital for we often see precursors to what may be a dominant tendency only in retrospect, and if Hegel held fast to his rather aesthetic pronouncement that the owl of minerva would take flight only when the eaves of dusk are falling, then we may perhaps recognize today as literary historians the perhaps dejected spirit in which certain French scriptural traditions from whom perhaps the name Derrida acts as a kind of emblem, behold before an unsurpassable threshold the sense that the letter which was to be sent to the address has seemingly always already arrived.
This closure as it were or aporia if you prefer is itself not without precedent, even if at that historical moment - when Walter Benjamin wrote his Theses on the Philosophy of History, published in 1942; a sense of a utopian return which may conjunctively be a sojourn seemed possible to the messianicly informed Judaism which influenced perhaps the most celebrated of our precursors. However, his work and the Weimar Republic of the time may perhaps be left aside for another occasion.
The appropriation of the methods of literary criticism in the writing of history would function principally, at least for a complete outsider as a way in which the nature of consideration as well as the sources of data, ie. what constitutes a narrative are augmented. This may mean a study of customs or household mores for instance as apposed to purely “historical” texts - which perhaps an institutional historian may reify into an instrumentalist use of a historical catalogue even if it were to serve some revelatory function in terms of classifications, terminology and jurisdictions which inform legislation or law making per se.
Andrew Cole’s own work reaches out however to a more explicitly English speaking audience, and he does present the early grounding which the conjunction of aesthetic theories and social history seemed to have in Oxford by continuing his study of the discipline in the commentary of Leslie Stephen who incidentally, apart from being a mountaineer and critic, was the father of Virginia Wolf.
In a rather tongue in cheek moment another Oxfordian, Courthope is also cited - who in his English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, all the way back in 1903 seems to have been making a case which does not seem very much unlike Althusser’s symptomatic break with vulgar Marxist readings that some may have labelled economic determinism. To permit for a quote - “…the same changes take place with regard to political, economic or religious as well as in regard to literary investigations.” And while this may be prosaically put the structuralist Marxist school which profoundly influenced Jameson and who Althusser was vital to, are precisely those who would continue to search for congruities in the structural developments in the distant levels of the economy- forces of production, relations of production, the juridical, political, ideological and of course cultural. In more recent times followers of the Ljubljana School of psychoanalyses for instance may recognize this gesture in Zizek’s use of the concept of a homology, that is a structural similarity observable discretely and having distinct origins, a concept he borrows from biology where it was originally used to account for how distinct species managed to evolve such similar organs. Jameson himself however would attempt to think these interelationalities that may be structurally similar, that is conceptually nameable between the economic and aesthetic registers, the latter including art but also cuisine well into the second decade of the 21st century, and here for partly selfish reasons I must cite his lecture “The Aesthetics of Singularity: Time and Event in the Conditions of Post-Modernity” delivered at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, at their annual Georg Forester lecture in 2012 again.
Returning briefly to the history of criticism in the English speaking world, another figure worth citing and who we are introduced by the text to is Vida Dutton Scudder, another rare Oxford Hegelian who tried to produce a social text via the wedding of literary and social history. Significantly, she was also one of the first American women to be educated at the university, and I suppose paradoxically went on to become both a saint at the Episcopal Church and an icon in the history of lesbian intellectuals. She was also an organiser for the women’s trade union league.
In keeping with some strands of Christian Socialism, she refused to ventriloquize Ruskin and Arnold’s orientation of culture for the working classes and would rather insist that ‘art knows no class’. Rather than drawing on the theories of political economists she would insist on ‘collective experience’ to inflect a socially informed criticism. And regarding the criticism itself, for her this would lead to a collective experience which is not only synchronous, as professor Cole tells us, but also transhistorical - daring as it were to draw together the medieval and the modern.
What mattered for these British Hegelians was not a systematic ontology of spirit as provided by Hegel but a decidedly more political orientation which sought to chart a line of progress to more adequate forms of narration, and socially to more just forms of government. It was also however a matter of ‘an author seeking soul’ as we are told, and we should recall that this was a period where the circulation of print culture was much more diminished than it is presently.
We as Marxists, if I may yet use that term after the seeming eon of scrutiny this body of work has been put to, whose own originary depths themselves appear to cast a lustrous glean attracting generations of thinkers - are left with a troubling proposition which may require some familiarity with the figures who have done much to carry forth the Hegelian revival in literary criticism.
If Lukacs presents in the relations of production, the possibility of a class consciousness which may reveal the historical location of individuals vis-a-vis each other - perhaps presentable in the historical novel which can replace the epic as an index of a time which breaks into what we yet dare to call modernity, and if Althusser is viewed as a response to this by highlighting the struggle in forms of organisation and their reciprocally indicative if not determinative relation to the mode of production, and Macherey is placed as some mediating yet medieval synthesis of the latter’s deadlocks and the former’s syncretism which yet remains concrete - then perhaps, at the cost of if not as a result of this rather caricatured triad; dialectical criticism is at an end.
Is there a possible and here properly post-modern future for the dialectic in Jameson’s efforts to resuscitate the assimilatory tendencies of medieval monasteries in their revival of classical learning and consequently the dialectic as evinced in Archeologies of the Future? This is a question which Cole is led to consider as we confront what is referred to as figuration as opposed to conceptuality’s and here I must profess my own ignorance of the matter and even whether they form anything like an antinomy at all unless that is we were to interpret figure as image.
And here we are perhaps at the surface where it must be admitted that at its nascency which here may also be read as its most underdeveloped form philosophy touches art as the concept, as in any dialectical operation meets its other.
In the work of literary history which professor Cole bequeaths to us a periodising gesture is discernible. The movement, a Hegelian revival in literary theory - beginning with Bosanquet, Courthope and Scudder, at Oxford - and of course the later much more famous Frankfurt School. The nations and contexts which divide these two groups are of course telling, and perhaps it is not imprudent of me to read in the former Christian socialists and in their resistance to conceptual thought, particularly the efforts of its systematisation, in favour of the liberality afforded in literature a lack of appreciation for the reasons why Hegel and perhaps more orthodox Hegelians had to think conceptually, placing this privileged medium as apposed to picture thinking - a task we will do well to recall even Wittgenstein struggled with in his later years.
At the risk of sharing too much I would also commend the acuity of Andrew Cole’s reading of Jameson especially regarding certain antagonisms which would appear to be immanent to the dialectical tradition itself. How much value for instance is one to accord to figuration, as elucidative it could be in potential. Also is there perhaps a correlate to the literary method of reading history which Hegel employs to what later structural Marxists named historical materialism, implying that it was with Marx proper that dialectical materialism arises? There was an intellectual milieu in France on the eaves of May 68’ when such a step was perhaps called for and Althusser, Macherey, Balibar and others sought to isolate this reality by seeking to draw concepts specifically from Marx’s prose. A practice of institutional mediation which took very seriously a lived experience that institutions themselves could be dissolved - and hence it was necessary to engage with the protolinguistics of the parties running them. The vulgar response to this of course was the cry ‘Do structures walk the streets?’ written on the walls of Sobourne if not elsewhere, a stance of the student’s movement which in their effort at forming solidarities with workers will come to have echoes in Italy in the 70’s India in the 2014 - 17 and of course in England and the US later (2020) who were to witness some of the largest student rent strikes in their history.
I would however like to place a minor objection regarding the use of the word ‘figuration’ here, for it appears to allude to both image and characterisation without mediating between the two. This is not to say that these categories are conclusive with a diagram being case and point. However, it would remain a struggle even for a Marxist to be able to form concepts entirely independent of narrative and ‘figuration’. There may also be discernible a sense of discomfort which the practice of conceptual thought has to figuration, as Cole were to observe in Jameson’s later work - “conceptualisation is disconnected from figuration, with concepts given to modern thought and figuration to characteristically premodern or “fantastic mode” ”.
And after all it may be said that this is a quibble for we have this book - The Birth of Theory to thank for reminding us of the deep allegorical inseamings of the dialectic which Hegel draws from the Medieval Ages and Plotinus. And would not allegory given the suppleness of its allusive potential not be the conceptual form par excellence which can represent both figural thought and indeed stand in for if not name character such as in satire? Such would be the subtleties which perhaps a sharper criticism may find and I would invite studies in such directions among the departments and scholars who see its potential.
My adventurism aside Cole may well have seen further than us all if time were to be thought as some pure extent of magnitude for he goes back to the very origins of the phenomenological style, in Aurbach under whose supervision Fredric Jameson wrote his doctoral thesis and of course the former’s own reading of Plotinus in which may be gathered what is identified as a practice of philosophy which ‘takes the point of view of the concept, while stopping just short of their personification.
Hegel’s own incorporation of not the mysticism itself which the neoplatonic tradition may have been syncretic to in early modern Europe amongst its barricaded monasteries often in fortresses - but the phenomenological style of its presentation that informs his prose is noteworthy and perhaps any true genealogist may some day care to notice such insights, unless of course a dialectician has already beaten them to it. As for The Phenomenology of Spirit itself, that great masterwork which seemingly culminates the period, marking the end of the old world and the beginning of modernity proper, comparable in its scale only perhaps to the absurdity of a deaf Beethoven composing the 5th Symphony - the work carries with it this expository medium, at the point where its evanescence if forced to confront that very historicity whose rupture this text was written amidst, finished as it were with Napoleanic cannons bombarding the city of Jena. The concept which may be adequate to a situation, drawing from and responding to a context that carries forth the negativity of observation - this may be my fly swat sentence which describes these efforts at a retrospective literary criticism of that text here - which in any case is not the matter of consideration of this study.
In returning to my citation, Fredric Jameson in response to the question regarding whether theory tells stories responded, “well maybe it does but where would be the narrative of it?” A rather formalist interjection here may be - well we could perhaps begin with the plot - yet the philosophical if not properly epistemological question remains as to how would the events and the details be disclosed to our dear reader, and of course who would narrate it. Here is where we may perhaps discern the kind of post-modernity which theory seemingly lives in and also perhaps the faintest sense of why Andrew Cole and Fredric Jameson find precedents to such gestures in the pre-moderns.
And what of that great avant-gardeist challenge to dialectical thought which Deleuze and Guattari present, which rhizomatticaly extends beyond philosophy itself and has been adopted by anthropologists? In many ways they come up against the problem of figuration, especially in its opacity - an issue which a close reading of Derrida may too yield even if it is in the guise of aporetic deferrals included to produce a difference. Deleuze and Guattari are in many regards thinkers of the concept still, and it is not a coincidence that they level their case against Hegel. What is yet appreciable about their stylistic innovations and we should know how important that is within French theory - is their ability to explicate a life of a concept in its becomings, from the difference which it makes or rather embodies for itself as an affirmation whose advantageous pleasures as it were make negation and the other notions of tarrying with history that Hegelians often do so many dried leaves which are swept away.
And indeed we must recognize as Cole does the affirmationist potential within Deleuzian thought which I may hazard to yet call genealogical - in a good way as perhaps an exemplary demonstration of what that practice or style if you prefer can yet offer. Its difference from the dialectic itself however should still be marked for as we are told 'What is Philosophy?’ may yet be read as a plea for figuration, a plea which once you are able to interpret figure as character we may readily recognize as a facet which any novelist for instance works with, to say nothing about, newspapers, magazines, and of course television and internet media today, the latter which has seen some rather spectacular applications and here I would leave a reference to Nick Land and the erstwhile CCRU at Warwick. Is this enough to say following Cole that this plea for figuration is what the dialectic itself was in the Middle Ages but is no longer in Modernity? I am less sure about that conjuncture yet there may be formal studies that may yet shed some light on that question.
The question of time is that shy and rather avoided figure it would appear which much dialectical thought, though it operates in its medium often avoids as such for to speak of it without predication would be perhaps the ultimate obfuscatory and dehistoricizing gesture. Yet, were we to follow the Plotinus of the statement ‘The knowledge of future things is, in a word, identical with that of the present’ then we can see how the charge of a teleology is occasionally levelled against the legacy of dialectical thought - and to be frank about it, the Leninist staging of modes of production corresponding with stages and indeed theatres of revolution does seem to tread this path. The question of teleology however is essentially a retrospective gesture, in deed - and as a recognition afforded by thought. To think of purpose undialectically would be to ignore the past, and to ignore the work of the very traditions which make possible a desire in the present - that vitalistic force so dear to even anti-dialectical thinkers. I believe a quote from a concessionary chapter is indicative of what a more adequate position may be - “…What I am after here, rather, is a a kind of dialectical interpretation which thinks in the historical terms itself which the dialectic invites us to think - drawing our attention to the conceptual and the figurative relays between the past and present, in which retrospection is not modernising, or condescending, of the past as it presents itself to us in its telos, the present, but instead a way of acknowledging where the past figuratively exceeds its own time and space, its own concept to make a future for itself in our own time. A past demanding recognition now.”
A small aside may be placed here which in some ways links the Jamesonian and Cole’s approach to what may broadly be described as the spatialisation of the dialectic, amidst a phenomena which is both a product of and a critique to Jameson’s work in this field - that is the disappearance of time. For figuration, whatever else it may be as has been indicated by the examples here, is necessarily spatial unlike narrative, chronology or repetition - and in this sense is something akin to a map to use an everyday analogy, but also perhaps - as with all maps, pegged upon a vocabulary if not taxonomy.
The process or should I say the ground broken through by Jameson’s work - if you will, the drive towards a cognitive mapping is a procedure which as we have indicated works with allegory; figural, national but above all narratorial, but what may this mean when the question of world making itself is at stake as any science fiction writer for instance has no doubt come up against. This is where Cole acknowledges the Heideggerian concepts of ‘ready-to-hand’ and ‘present-to-hand’ which here indicates the presence of totalities to us in our working with them, and the occasions when they break down and hence require our attention or care. A movement or duality as it were which history writing and indeed institutions incessantly come up against. Though I fear here I would be truly extending the capacities of this study and it would be best to break off my considerations.
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