The Finite Dialectic

 
In recent years there have been a slew of publications dealing with the relationship between post-structuralism and Marx. It could be argued that these works follow the lead of Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, each of which argues for a relation between Marx and post-structuralism. Or it could be that the turn to Marx, or to a relation between Marx and post-structuralism, reflects not so much a change in the intellectual atmosphere, in the old battles for intellectual hegemony, as a change in the political and economic atmosphere. The years of neoliberal restructuring of the university and subsequent austerity cuts have made it harder and harder to separate post-structuralist concerns with the nature of subjectivity, knowledge and desire from Marxist concerns with exploitation. Problems with capitalism have become increasingly hard to avoid in recent years, and thus we see a turn to Marx in academia as well as in mainstream media.
 
John Grant’s book is not about the relationship between post-structuralism and Marx, but about the contemporary relevance of dialectical thinking. This shift takes us to the core of much of the post-structural opposition to Marx: the dialectic, with its central notions of totality and contradiction. The post-structuralist thinkers that argued for the importance of Marx, such as Deleuze, the late Derrida, and Foucault, were trenchant critics of the dialectic; Marx, materialism, and the critique of capital could be salvaged, but the dialectic was forever associated with the original sins of totality, teleology, and identity. There have even been attempts to save Marx from the dialectic, to produce a non-dialectical Marx in which immanence, power, or difference takes the place of the dialectic. Grant tempers this critique of the dialectic by returning to dialectical thinkers such as Althusser and Adorno who tried to separate the dialectic from its idealistic tendencies, to produce a dialectic without a subject, totality, or telos. By bringing together the criticisms of the dialectic with the most profound revisions of dialectical thinking, Grant is able to produce a dialectical revision of sorts, in which negations of the dialectic converge with its revision. The opposition to dialectics is a determinate negation, one that retains as much as it negates.
 
Grant begins his book with an examination of the Phenomenology of Spirit. His interpretation follows Adorno and Zizek, and anticipates such works as Fredric Jameson’s The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit and Étienne Balibar’s Citoyen sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique, in arguing that the Phenomenology is less a systematic exposition of the march of spirit than of the dialectic of disjuncture between experience and concept. Grant thus breaks with what he refers to as the onto-structural understanding of the dialectic, in which the various stages are the stages of being and its conceptual articulation, stressing instead the finitude of the Phenomenology, the tension in it between experience and its historical situation (17). It is not a matter, however, of choosing the existential understanding of the dialectic, dominated by the struggle for recognition, against the onto-structural interpretation of the unfolding of being, but of recognizing that the tension between experience and structure or logic is, as Grant understands it, the dialectic itself.
 
Louis Althusser’s articulation of a materialist dialectic draws a line of demarcation against both an existential interpretation–and any humanism–and the idealism and teleology of the onto-structural understanding. This makes him an unlikely figure for Grant’s project. However, in the second chapter, Grant excavates a provocative and surprising passage from Althusser’s early writing on Hegel, a passage in which Althusser argues for the superiority of Hegel over Marx. Althusser argues that Marx’s method is predicated on an anthropology of labor, while Hegel’s dialectic is one in which there is no first time, no ontological or anthropological postulate, but every starting point, every given is negated, becoming the initial moment of a dialectic (Grant 38). While Althusser’s celebration of Hegel is surprising, the terms of this opposition are not: Althusser would dedicate the rest of his intellectual career to contesting the primacy of origin and end, as well as an anthropological foundation not only for Marxism but for philosophy. Grant is thus able to foreground the notion of a dialectic without first terms to draw a thread through Althusser’s thought, from the development of an overdetermined materialist dialectic without essences to the later work on aleatory materialism.
 
Such a reading brushes against the grain of Althusser’s project, the trajectory of which moves from defining a materialist dialectic to rejecting dialectics in favor of a materialism of the encounter. However, Grant’s method, which focuses on the tension between experience and system, the articulation of concepts and their limits, makes it possible to see a dialectic of sorts in Althusser’s aleatory materialism. As Grant argues, Althusser’s aleatory materialism is understood to be dialectical not just because it works through the oppositions of contingency and necessity, event and structure, but ultimately because of its articulation of fundamental concepts. Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli is said to articulate two fundamental principles: the first thesis is that nothing changes, that history can only be instructive if based on invariants, while the second is that everything changes. These two theses demand a dialectic in which the concrete situation, what Althusser once labeled the conjuncture, can only be understood as the particular way in which the latter negates the former, the particular combination of change and invariants (56).
 
Grant’s final point is not just that Althusser was dialectical all along, but that his later theoretical production can be read through his early idea of a dialectic without content in order to argue for a dialectic that emerges in the tension between contradictory theses. This makes possible a rereading of particular moments in contemporary theoretical and political debates. The subsequent chapters take up “experience,” “ideology,” “totality,” and, finally, transformation, all of which have come under scrutiny and critique by such thinkers as Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault. Grant does not deal with concepts abstractly, simply stating that they have migrated from the “hot” to the “not” list, juxtaposing them with the new terms of “language,” “discourse,” “multiplicity,” and “deconstruction.” Rather, each chapter is structured around a particular determinate negation, a particular textual moment where the abstract opposition between terms must necessarily give way to a more nuanced, or dialectical, relation. The question of experience is read through Foucault and Derrida’s debate over madness and Foucault’s attempt to present a history of madness, while ideology is read against Deleuze and Foucault’s attempt to dispense with the notion altogether. In each case a specific theoretical intervention is used to illustrate the unavoidable nature of dialectic thought. The debate about experience, about its discursive construction, reveals the impossibility of absolutely deciding for or against experience, of maintaining some originary experience prior to its discursive construction or of a discourse that constructs all experience in its wake. There is a dialectical relation in which experience and discourse, the concept and what exceeds it, are constantly shaping each other. Similarly, Foucault and Deleuze’s attempt to dispense with the category of ideology, to have done with its sharp distinction between appearance and reality, ends up reintroducing a concept of masks and mystifications. Despite his opposition to ideology, Foucault argues, in a central passage of The History of Sexuality, that “power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself” (86). Rather than dispense with ideology, with the opposition between appearance and essence, a dialectical treatment seeks to grasp the reality of appearances. These particular interventions illustrate that a dialectic is at work even when it would appear to be absent. Grant takes on Foucault, an anti-dialectical thinker par excellence, to argue that the relationship between power and resistance can be thought of as a dialectic in which negation is determination (and vice versa). As Grant writes,

 

For both Foucault and Hegel, nothing is constituted purely on its own terms, but always in relation to what limits it. Power and resistance, then, have a paradoxical relationship in that they serve as the limit of the other, and yet in doing so they motivate and incite more of what they intend to check or restrain. Such a relationship is eminently dialectical.

(138)

Once removed from its onto-structural position, from the march of spirit or some ultimate argument about the contradictory nature of reality, once the dialectic becomes a dialectic, it becomes all the more ubiquitous, inserting itself in every place that a concept, or problem, is set against its opposite which determines and defines it.

 
I have suggested that Grant’s dialectic can be seen as part of a turn to Hegel in writers such as Balibar and Jameson. I mention these two authors specifically because their respective turn to Hegel is one that foregrounds the finitude and partial nature of the dialectic. Balibar has also pursued a reading of the Phenomenology in which it is no longer the speculative teleology but the dialectical moment that is stressed. Balibar stresses that Hegel’s various historical portraits, such as those of Antigone, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution, are not simply the reflections of an erudite and totalizing knowledge, but demonstrate that there is no meta-language of spirit; spirit, the collectivity, can only be expressed in specific cultural and historical moments. These moments see themselves as absolute, see their historical condition as the ultimate condition. This universalization ends up being their negation. The dialectic exposes the partiality and contradictory nature of each of these moments; it is, as Balibar argues, the original form of ideology critique (284). Grant’s use of the dialectic comes closest to Jameson’s in Valences of the Dialectic. Jameson argues, against Althusser, for the merit of an idealistic dialectic. As Jameson writes,

And that would be, I think, the meaning and the function a return to Hegel today, as over against Althusser. The latter is surely right about his materialistic, his semi-autonomous levels, his structural causality, and his overdetermination: if you look for those things in Hegel you find what everybody knew all along, namely that he was simply an idealist. But the right way of using Hegel is not that way; it lies rather in precisely those things that he was capable of exploring because he was an idealist, namely the categories themselves, the modes and forms of thought in which we inescapably have to think things through, but which have a logic of their own to which we ourselves fall victim if we are unaware of their existence and their informing influence on us.

(454)

Grant, like Jameson, in a kind of dialectical reversal, takes Hegel’s weakness, his idealism, as his strength: it is precisely because Hegel focuses on ideas, concepts, and categories that his work is so useful for working through them. It is a matter of what Jameson calls a dialectic without positive terms, in which what is stressed is the contradiction, the negations that determine, and not the resolutions or progress (48). Grant does an excellent job of demonstrating the need for a dialectical treatment of some of the longstanding oppositions in the debate between Marxism, or Marxisms, and post-structuralism, the futility of being for or against categories and concepts for analysis like experience, ideology, and totality, not to mention being for or against the dialectic itself. These concepts and their limitations are indispensable for critical thought. Experience and its construction, the event, and totality are not positions that we might pick once and for all, but must be worked through according to their specific determinations and contradictions.

 
We can ask, finally, about the political import of this discussion—what does it offer besides a way out of some longstanding theoretical debates and impasses? Grant’s book is not one that simply works on philosophical and theoretical questions, assuming that the political effects will follow. It is a book that takes intervention in the politics of the contemporary moment as one of its essential provocations, reflecting on Obama’s election, the tea party, and the current economic recession. By and large these function as interesting and provocative examples: Grant’s argument that the tea party is as suspicious of the collective power of the people as it is of government, ultimately advocating a privatization of the political, is insightful, as is his argument about the dialectics of structure and event in different understandings of the current crisis (144). Their merit is to remind us that the real contradictions, the ones that matter, are not between Foucault and Derrida, but between the different understandings of the people and power. These readings of political situations are not political prescriptions, but interpretations of the dialectics of existing politics. They retroactively unpack the logic of what has taken place. The owl of Minerva still flies at dusk, even if the sun has just set. The understanding is still retrospective. Grant does offer proposals, proposals for a general dialectical understanding of the relation between creation and transformation, negation and affirmation, already at work in every political situation.
 
Grant has done much to recommend the idealist aspect of the dialectic, the examination of the negation and contradiction in concepts and categories in the tension between experience and logic. However, the turn towards a materialist dialectic in such thinkers as Althusser was not simply a rehashing of the metaphysical opposition between idealism and materialism, but an attempt to move beyond the retroactive gaze of Hegel to grasp the overdetermined contradictions of the present, contradictions that can be acted upon (106). Which is to say in closing that the dialectics of concepts, the idealistic dialectic of Hegel, albeit unmoored from its speculative grounding, may need to be complemented by a materialist dialectic, a dialectic of the forces and contradictions of material life. This would entail a return to the Marx and Hegel question, but not in terms of mystical kernels and rational shells, in which the materialist dialectic is separated from idealism, but of a dialectic of forces combined with a dialectic of concepts and logics. It would no longer be a matter of emphasizing the difference between the notion of a materialist and idealist dialectic, but of seeking the point of articulation between the two, the place where the dialectic of concepts and experience confronts the dialectic of forces and relations of production. Grant’s book does much to make this possible, liberating Hegel’s dialectic from its ossified image as purveyor of totality and teleology, but it leaves in its wake the conceptual work of connecting this understanding with its historical moment, with the material, rather than logical, situation of our experience.