Proletariat — Feel Like Runnin’ Away

I used to be in a rap group—the Proletariat. I recently stumbled on this.

Hegel’s Closed Dialectics and Marx’s Open Monism

Hegel writes, “What is rational is real; and what is real is rational”¹, to which François Laruelle responds: “The real is communicational, the communicational is real”², but why? Why this distinction? Is it a distinction? What’s at stake? In other words, what’s the difference between saying that something’s “rational” and that it’s “communicational?”

Because Hegel wrote in the Enlightenment, or “The Age of Reason,” it should perhaps come as no surprise that, throughout his work, one sees Hegel valorize rationality. One might contend that Hegel banalizes reason—above, the “rational” simply appears as a dimension of reality—but there can be no doubt that Hegel’s environment is one in which the “highest” use of reason tends to be seen as a great virtue. Hegel’s own conformist tendencies³ at least ought to suggest that Hegel sees himself as no great rebel with regard to the Enlightenment tendency to valorize reason.

By valorizing reason, Hegel both supports the conformism implied in his work and he provides a telos to “human progress.” Because, as Hegel claims, reality tends to unfold in a rational manner, one would be foolish to rebel against social developments. Historical progress will continue to push reality forward toward the endpoint of the overall rational, or good. While Hegel allows what he calls “contingency” into his system of thought, that contingency is always treated as the contingency both by which the future is unknowable and by which the the past can, in the present, be made legible.⁴ Hegel’s contingency, then, can be understood only retrospectively; in the present, contingency appears either as chaos or as an open question. Because one can’t know what the future brings, conforming to the established, and rational, forms of life is reasonable; again, to do otherwise would be foolish. If one accepts Hegel’s argument, then it has the effect of closing down argumentation: Hegel’s system is all worked out; Hegel appears to have proven that human progress is reasonable and good. Hegel’s telos leaves nothing to argue over. For Hegel, contingency is an out-of-reach contingency that determines the interactions that appear in the “real” world.

One could go so far as to say that Hegel’s thought surreptitiously reintroduces a kind of dualism through a back door. If the rational good of historical progress is at the bottom of everything, then it’s what Marx calls a “fetish”—unilaterally producing the effects that we know as the world. By this conception, the world changes because the rational history of human progress determines the effects experienced on the surface of the world. This rational progress, then, is what one might call a “deep structure” (or, again, a “fetish”) and what appear to us as human conflicts are really only that structure’s effects. No one ever really intervenes. Until historical progress pushes things along, then, the things, and even processes, of the world are fixed and static. If, in Hegel’s account, it’s historical progress that brings about change, then Marx and his followers offer a very different conception of change and contingency.

Laruelle, following in Marx’s footsteps, reopens the possibility of meaningful difference at the level of people’s behavior (and, more generally, of real-world phenomena). The “communicational” entails no telos; there’s nothing at the bottom of the communicational aspect of the real (or, for that matter, of the real [or mediational] aspect of communication). By emphasizing the material, the processual, and the practical, Marx binds everything to everything else. Every interaction is one by which phenomena meet one another in a context that is surrounded by a broader context, ad infinitum. By this conception, objects and processes are not epiphenomenal to any deep-lying cause.⁵ Crucially, if Hegel’s conception of reality is determined by the motor of historical progress, Marx’s engine is one of social interaction—class struggle. Without flattening phenomena so that all phenomena are equally effective and/or productive, Marx construes all phenomena as having the potential to affect others. Any process entails interactions and choices.⁶ One could never predict that any development will be better than that which came before it. Nothing is guaranteed. History becomes something over which people must struggle.

If all this is true, then Marx is more monist than is Hegel. Rather than bracketing off the ultimate cause of all reality, Marx makes the world’s dynamism immanent to the world of interactions. This is partly because the communicational aspects of all things aren’t presumed to communicate toward the ultimate utopia of liberal rationality. In fact, things can, and often do, go awry. Refusing to conflate means with ends, then, a Marxist might rightly claim that revolution must be communicated and communication must be made revolutionary.

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1 Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of Right, London: Chiswick Press, 1896, xxvii.
2 Laruelle, François. “The Truth According to Hermes.” Parrhesia 9: p. 22.
3 Hegel. G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
4 In Hegel’s own words, “The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” The Philosophy of Right, xxx.
5 I ought to point out that some very old Marxists weren’t themselves very Marxian. While Marx’s conception of “mute compulsion” could imply (indeed, did imply to many very old Marxists) that Marx construed capitalism as a kind of fetish, Marx’s own consistently monistic methodology, as well as the historical, and complex, way by which he conceives of capitalism ought to dispel the notion that mute compulsion complicates Marx’s monism. Marx, Karl. “Capital, Vol. 1.” Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996.
6 This might best be seen in Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of “practice.” Because Bourdieu’s concepts keep in dialectical tension the relationships—between the subject’s inner experience and encounters with the outside world, the scale of the person and of the social, symbol and referent, and so on—they’re useful for explaining how forms of capital help to mediate the ongoing formation of any habitus—that is, both a subjectivity and a culture, or sociality. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of  a Theory of Practice, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977.