Four Theses on Dialectics

We want to address this question in an oblique way-not by thinking about the state of the discipline, but by thinking about the conditions of and for thinking today. We present here a set of theses that we hope might help to re-imagine the role and scope of philosophy or theory in the age of fi nance capitalism; the links between these theses and (the politics of) literary studies will be left open.  e sources of these theses are as eclectic as a music collection: they bear with them the traces of broken relationships, misdirected enthusiasms, the inevitable, short-lived fascination with the new, the enduring infl uence of old favourites that one cannot get past.  ese theses should not be taken as prescriptive.  ey might be read in the light of Friedrich Schlegel's conception of his philosophical fragments-as scraps or remnants of a total system that could never really exist. Fredric Jameson has recently described his own critical practice as a "translation mechanism, " a theoretical machine that makes it possible to convert other discourses into the central political problematic that animates Marxism (Zhang -). We conceive these theses in much the same spirit: as grasping towards a mediating code rather than as a set of truth-claims.  e utility of these theses will thus be determined by their ability to help produce a philosophy politically rather than politically rather than politically conceptually adequate to fi nance conceptually adequate to fi nance conceptually capitalism-a philosophy or theory that takes up the political challenge of

Dialogue and Universalism

In a period in which capital has been on the offensive for many years, using debt and financial crises as rationales for wielding austerity to hammer down wages and social services and terrorism as an excuse for attacking civil liberties, it is important to realize that the origins of this long period of crisis lay in the struggles of people to free their lives from the endless subordination to work within a society organized as a gigantic social factory. In both the self-proclaimed capitalist West and socialist East the managers of that subordination, whether in private enterprise or the state, repeatedly found their plans undermined by people who refused to play by their rules and who elaborated activities and social relationships that escaped their control. The refusal of their rules meant crisis for the managers; the elaboration of other ways of beingwhether characterized as the crafting of civil society or as autonomous self-valorizationmeant crisis for and freedom from society-as-work-machine. As always, the capitalist response has involved instrumentalization and repression; basically its managers have sought to harness what they could and eliminate what they couldn't. For a long time instrumentalization was most obvious in the West and repression was most obvious in the East, yet both were always at play everywhere, and everywhere those responses were resisted and often escaped. It was that resistance and those escapes that led to the unleashing of the monetary weapons of financialization and their current employment to convert crisis-for-capital into crisisfor-us. It is in past and present resistance and escapes that we must discover both our weaknesses and our strengths in order to overcome capital's current offensive and to elaborate new worlds. It is the overall thesis of this paper that Marx's labor theory of value still provides vital aid in helping us understand these historical developments. behooves me to note at the outset of these remarks that I have come to the analysis and politics that I will set out here through a personal trajectory that has passed through science and economics on the one hand and a variety of engagements in social struggles on the other. Although I entered college bent on refining my scientific skills, I left it with a Ph.D in economics. The transition from the one to the other came about in response to participation in the American Civil Rights and Anti-war movements which led me out of the laboratory, into the streets and into a search for some intellectual framework for grasping the tumultuous events in which I had been involved. I was drawn to economics because it seemed to deal most directly with the structures against which the civil rights and anti-war movements were struggling: those of an economic inequality organized, in part, through racial hierarchies and those of an American imperialism that sought to extend that inequality globally in a post-colonial world where pacified pools of labor could be pitted against existing militant ones. Unfortunately, economics turned out to provide, indeed to have always provided, since its beginnings in the self-serving writings of the mercantilists, not only a justification for such a world but strategies and tactics for creating and managing that world. What it lacked in the 1960s when I was studying the subject in school, were any direct ways of grasping the struggles against that worldthe struggles in which I and millions of others were engaged. Eventually some economists would try to adapt game theory, operations research, thermodynamics and chaos theory to handle the contestation that repeatedly frustrated the strategies implied by their elegant theoretical modelsbut never with much success. Even before I completed my Ph.D I decided that economics was very much part of the problem and not part of the solution. Casting about for alternative approaches I wound up studying Marx and, to a lesser degree, Hegelboth of whom were familiar with what economists call the classical political economy of the 18 th and 19 th Centuries. My interest in Marx was obviousbecause his entire life and work were dedicated to overthrowing the capitalist grip on the world, he inevitably dealt with the struggles that subverted and threatened to transcend that world. My interest in Hegel was less obvious. On the one hand, a course on the Hegel's Phénoménologie de L'Esprit at the Université de Montpellier had drawn my attention to his analysis of the master-slave relationship, but it was primarily to his Science of Logic and Philosophy of Right that I turned in trying to make sense of Marx's exposition of his labor theory of value in the early chapters of Volume I of Capital. In both cases I discovered how these two authors grasped not only the dialectics of class struggle, but also, in their different ways, the tendencies of capital to infinite expansion and totalization. But whereas I found Hegel's analysis, however critical, to be ultimately accepting of capitalism, I found in Marx not only an analysis of capital's efforts to endlessly reimposed its dialectic but, more importantly, an analysis of the struggles that repeatedly ruptured, subverted and, sometimes strove to create post-capitalist futures in the present. 38 The rationale for such expenditures was provided by studies that demonstrated how much of the early post-WWII growth in the US economy was due to improvements in the quality of both capital and labor. 39 Although, as I have mentioned, capital was able to shape public education throughout the 20 th Century, the student movement of the 1960s seriously reduced the legitimacy of business influence in schoolsa situation corporations have been trying hard to reverse ever since. 40 While the economists discussed, of course, other parts of the government were sending in police and military troops to quell the uprisings. 41 The expenditure of money on hiring workers, of course, is only part of the expenditure by business of money as capital. Other monies are spent on the means of productionfactories, tools, machines, raw materials. In Part I of Volume III of Capital the circuit of capital M-C-M' is expanded in a way that makes this explicit: M-C(LP,MP). .. P. . .C'-M'.

Special Issue, 'Dialectics and World Politics', Globalizations, 2014

The question ‘What is dialectics?’ is notoriously difficult to answer. Theoretical obfuscation and ideological baggage have fostered widespread misunderstandings of the concept. This article is intended to go some way in providing an answer, though one offered as a heuristic in which further developments can be made, rather than as doctrinaire statement of first principles. This introductory account of dialectics proceeds in four steps. It begins with a basic definitional and conceptual outline of dialectics before offering a brief philosophical history of dialectics in Eastern and Western philosophical traditions; its reemergence from scholasticism through Kant and Hegel; its vivification in Marx’s thought (and subsequent decline under ‘Diamat’); and its development in Western Marxism and on into contemporary political philosophy. The third part then explores the more modest engagements with dialectics that have taken place within IR theory before closing with a discussion of some of the ongoing tensions and key themes in dialectical thought. These center on the question of understanding dialectics as a process of reflection and an objective logic traceable in human praxis, highlighting the ongoing critical and revolutionary essence of dialectics.

Special Issue 'Dialectics and World Politics', Globalizations, 2014

2018

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC-ND License at the time of publication. chapter 14 An outline of systematic dialectics-General appendix A systematic-dialectical method for the investigation and exposition of the capitalist system

2011

In the first three E-seminars I made efforts to explore the nature of and the functionality of the first three specialties; research, interpretation and history. For the main part of that exercise I accumulated data with the intention of exploring the nature of the follow-up to Bernard Lonergan’s achievements. The fourth specialty, dialectics, is that challenge to make a judgment concerning the nature of the questions I raised and the interpretations that I have offered concerning the nature of the follow-up. In order to set the stage for establishing a position I bring forth some of the relevant points expressed in my first three seminar essays.1[1]

This essay explores the philosophical reasons why successful attempts to overturn domination and dogmatism only seem to result in the emergence of new forms of domination and dogmatism, and thus in political disappointment. It is argued that the epistemic key to this problem is to be found in Pyrrhonian scepticism. To begin, the way dialectic developed so as to be understood, in Hegel, as a response to this problem, is examined. How this was then forgotten in Marx is explored through Lucio Colletti’s flawed critique of Hegelian Marxism. The essay concludes that political thought, if it truly aspires to overturn domination and dogmatism, should address itself directly to the sceptical problem by adopting a Left Pyrrhonian dialectical strategy.

International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2018

The dominant forms of thought today exist as either deconstructive or metalinguistic structures. Here we attempt to situate dialectical thinking as a constructive meta-mediation of this opposition between deconstruction and metalanguage. Dialectical thinking offers us a way to think about the processual nature of reason itself as a force of thought mediating being. In this mode of understanding we attempt to think the possibility of articulating the meaning and importance of 'metaontology' defined as the ontology of epistemology. In a metaontology we treat the structure of concepts not as reflecting external territory (map is territory), nor as existing at a distance from external territory (map is not the territory), but as having their own territory (geometry) (i.e. maps as territory). We attempt to approach metaontology by reflectively observing the singularity of the author's own internal territorial map, revealing a 'quadratic twisted circularity'; and also the movement of the symbolic order itself, revealing a possible invariant unsymbolizable real. From these reflections we dive into the foundations of dialectical thinking, starting with Plato, and then exploring modifications introduced by Hegel and Lacan. Finally, we offer a dialectical structure of knowledge for the 21st century. This offering is meant only as an offer, a consideration, for how dialectics can be deployed at the location of key antagonisms in the contemporary field. The hope is that future dialecticians will be able to utilize this logic to engage in crucial intellectual interventions.

In the introductory Part I outlined the main argument of this book, which problematizes the question of positioning within organization theory. I argued that the question of positioning organization is related to the concept of hegemony, which describes the project of positioning as impossibility. A conception of the impossibility of organization, however, is not part of a so called postmodern project of political relativism. Instead, it opens up and even demands possibilities of radical social change that involve questions of political strategies of organization. In Part II of this book I will discuss a range of philosophies that will allow me to conceptualize the impossibility of organization. As will become apparent, impossibility has something to do with speculation, and all philosophies discussed in this part of the book are speculative in nature in the sense that they negate, or deposition, established positions and explore possibilities of affirmatively creating new positions. I will argue that it is this simultaneity of depositioning and repositioning that characterize the event of politics described by these philosophies. Part of what I try to do in this book is to read between the lines of what are sometimes regarded as different philosophical traditions in order to make productive use of them. This 'making use' can be related to Benjamin's (1999f) conception of reading, which, in his view, should not be aimed at trying to reveal the origin or true intension of a work. Instead, reading is always a translating of text, which must be understood as an affirmative destruction of an author. The aim of Part II is not to present the wholeness of philosophical texts. Instead, I will see these texts as fragments that need to be translated. For Benjamin, this is the only way to do justice to a text: to destruct and translate it into a new text. The destruction of philosophical texts attempted here aims at exploring the philosophical understanding of the event of politics, which is of importance for conceptualizing the impossibility of organization and formulating a political project of repositioning organization theory.