Méditation pascalienne: Demystification in Cultural Theory

8/10/2019 Mditation pascalienne: Demystification in Cultural Theory

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Mditation

pascalienne:

Demystification in

Cultural Theory

University of Cambridge

Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages

Tripos Part II 2015

Year Abroad Project: Dissertation

Candidate number: 301805298

Word count:


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Table of contents

Preliminary material

Table of contents 2

Preface 3

Introduction 4

Mditation: Pascals dialectical method 7

The object of demystification 11

Qui la ramnera son principe lanantit: Foundation myths? 21

Mditation: the automatic subject 29

Epilogue: conjuncture 32

Bibliography 33


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Preface

This dissertation has been formatted according to the most recent Modern Language

Association (MLA) guidelines.

Except when the fragment number has been previously given (in which case, as usual,

only the relevant page number will be given), references to the Penses contain both the

fragment number and the page number. For example: (fr.94, 83) = fragment 94, on page 83,

of the Sellier edition.


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Introduction

La dmystification [] nest pas

une opration olympienne

Barthes,Mythologies

If the main two authors involved here are Pascal and Marx, it is because they both attempt to

show that there are obstacles to intelligibility: that is, to rendering reality and especially

social realityintelligible.

The concept of intelligibility has not escaped ideological abuse, however. In the

grand spectacle of le catch (17) where rien nexiste que totalement, the excess of

signification and the luxuries of gesture conspire to produce lintelligibilitparfaite du rel

(23): as Barthes observes, for the crowd at the wrestling match, intelligibility is heightened

to the image of Nature, which balms in full light sans ombre and exists without

contradiction (13).

But intelligibility does not stand for an inevitable component of the human

condition: it is the product of a history (Moriarty,Roland, 29).

If Pascal were to narrate this history, it would point to the Fall as the ultimate source

of the present distortion in our relation to ourselves and to God. Fragment 94 clarifies this

history in the phrase: Il y a sans doute des lois naturelles, mais cette belle raison corrompue a

tout corrompu. Here, three temporalities present, past participle, past perfect found,

respectively, the impossibility of certain knowledge (lois naturelles), the corruption of

mans intellectual faculty (corrompue:as quality), and the corruption of all that the faculty


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relates between itself and the world ever since the Fall (a tout corrompu: as action with

effects enduring to the present). For Pascal, intelligibility has been separated from its original

home; the present but entrenches its alienation from la chre patrie (fr.460, 325).

If Marx were to narrate this history, it would account for intelligibility as a social

product, a concrete determination of an individual belonging to a particular form of society

(Theses, 199). What are the conditions for intelligibility? The conditions of [mans] material

existence and these presently characterized by the exploitation of one part of society by the

other (Manifesto, 21). Two aspects of intelligibility would thereby be emphasised: the

rendering of social life intelligible to those who are exploited; social revolution as the free

development of intelligibility, as the free development of all (23).

No doubt these interpretative histories can be written differently. There is, after all, no

essential point, but only an assemblage of accounts of these authors, arranged differently

culturally and historically, with different emphases. In either case, for the present author, and

in order to set in motion the aims of this dissertation, it is clear that intelligibility for Pascal

and Marx represents an alienated present (Moriarty,Roland, 29).

Demystification is inextricably linked to intelligibility. Demystification is a

theoretical tool which seeks to render obscure relations intelligible. Its disclaimer is that

social relations and cultural material are obscure: it seeks not to bring them into full light

the grand spectacle of le monde o lon catch but to reveal the laws, contradictions,

effects, and interests involved in these phenomena. The various texts dealt with in this

dissertation emphasise certain phenomena over others as to the methods and the object of

demystification. Reciprocally, the field of the dissertation will widen its scope beyond that of

cultural theory, to theoretical discussion of concepts found in Marx, Pascal, and other

practitioners of demystification.


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Practitioners: because the author conceives of theory and practice as mutually

reinforcing, but notes the role of practice empirical research, for example as a corrective

to mystificatory philosophizing. Presently, this is an overriding concern:

All social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries which urge theory into

mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of

this practice (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 199)

The raison dtre of the two mditations in the dissertation stems from this idea of

practice: but if practice is to have any self-critical role, their purpose cannot be the sense of

an exercice spirituel, nor of pense rflchie et concentre though I would claim neither

is irrelevant to any practice. It is, rather, the Cartesian moment of personality and of

reflexivity:

ce dessein est pnible et laborieux, et une certaine paresse mentrane insensiblement

dans le train de ma vie ordinaire (Descartes,Mditations mtaphysiques, I 69).


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Mdi tat ion: Pascals dialectical method

If, for Marx, the philosophers have only interpreted the world differently (Theses,

199), these ways are nonetheless necessarily one-sided. Pascal came to this conclusion

regarding the philosophies of his day: on ne peut tre pyrrhonien sans touffer la nature, on

ne peut tre dogmatiste sans renoncer la raison (fr.164, 116). Each position entails

abandoning a certain phenomenon (nature or reason), because it cannot make room for it. In

this way, both positions are one-sided.

As Michael Lebowitz argues, one-sidedness is a major thematic in Marxist thought

(vii). In one way, it is foundational to Marxs method: what is capitalism from the point of

view of Capital? In another, it is a criticism levied at the project: where is the wage-labourer

in all this?

That nineteenth-century socialist discourse promoted the opposition between the

bourgeoisieand the working-classis derived from an idea about one-sidedness and class

struggle. The opposition relates two groups of individuals as bearers and personifications of

their social interests.1Workers form unions to keep up the rate of wages(11); the bourgeois

class attempts to lengthen the working day. As Marx and Engels observe in The Communist

Manifesto:

the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and

more the character of collisions between two classes. (11)

1That the various interests of the proletariat should be progressively equalized is, in my view, contentious.

For this reason, the question of individuals and interests is returned to throughout.


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One-sidedness both limits and sustains this conflict of interests: sustains, because each

group only promotes its particular set of interests; limits, because neither group can accede to

the perspective of the other. Hence the revolutionary theoretical task: the subject of Capitalis

Capital, so as to reveal to the proletariat the perspective of capitalism (Lebowitz, viii). This

is the aim of demystification in the critique of political economy.

We have managed to contextualize the concept of demystificationwith reference to

the thematic of one-sidedness.Now we shall elaborate a problematic.

What is the object of demystification in this context? Importantly, class struggle is not

self-produced: it is the product of the capitalwage-labour relation, the labour relation unique

to capitalism. Marx develops the concept contradiction to express the inner and necessary

connection or laws which make it prone to crisis(Capital Vol. 3, 331). It is thus internal to

this relation and not to class struggle that the contradictions of capitalism are to be located.

To demystify Capital is essentially to reveal these contradictions. Overproduction, for

example, is described as the fundamental contradiction: as the productivity of labour grows,

the consumption of workers cannot keep up (Lebowitz, 12). The result is periodic crises,

which can be interpreted as modes ofappearance of structural contradictions, contradictions

brought to the surface(Osborne, 20).

Pascal, too, has a concept of contradiction. Its sense, however, is rather that of

contestation. The philosophical context of fragment 208 is the argument of universal

consent as a mark of truth (Descotes and Proust, 2011). Against this argument, the fragment

reads: Contradiction [read: contestation] est une mauvaise marque de vrit (151). The

criteria of truth and the criteria of contradiction are lexically ordered: the first is not

reducible to the second, it constitutes a qualitatively different ordre (fr.339, 229).


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By what method could one relate both terms: that of contradiction as inner lawand

contradiction as contestation? I want to suggest Pascals method of dialectic, since it relates

back to our thematic of one-sidedness. The method, as articulated by Moriarty, is that of

juxtaposing opposing perspectives, each of which enables the perception of someaspect of reality invisible from the other. They do not themselves, however,generate a resolution: they need to be resolved and placed in their truerelationship by a revelation external to the process of human reason. But theopposition prepares us to conceive the need for such a revelation. (Early Modern,n.63, 134)

To paraphrase: in the present case the opposing perspectives of the respective concepts of

contradictionare inherently one-sided. Each concept enables the perception of some aspect

of reality invisible from the other:

On the one hand, if for Pascal Contradiction [read: contestation] nest marque de

vrit, Marx can show that contestation can, in a major way, be taken as a source of

truth: since crises are that which periodically reveal the logical and essential

contradictions in the capital-labour relation, and thus are the loci of potential

contestation, in the sense of resistance or revolution.

On the other hand, if for Marx these contradictions, which stem from immanent

laws (332), arenot to be confused with their appearance on the surface (337)the

level of crises, which reveal Capitals nature Pascal can radically claim that the

obscurity of social reality does not cease there: a more radical gap between ourselves

and the world is at work, problematizing the attempt of theory to go beyond forms of

appearance.

It is in these precise considerations about truth and resistance, about intelligibility

and social realitythat the two concepts of contradiction each render visible some aspect of

reality formerly invisible to the other.


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To reflect: by deploying a particular method, a problematic has been generated whose

concerns results will be brought to bear on further considerations. This problematic will now

be worked out through considerations of the object of demystification in certain

demystificatory discourses and the kind of problems of intelligibility they raise. 2

2 Note the underlying assumption of this mditation: the practice of distinguishing concept and method, and

uprooting them, so to speak, from their soils. This is a central theoretical concern. Consider, for example, the

employment of Pascals dialectic method outside of a guaranteed framework of revelation: is the method no

longer fit for use or can it dispose one today to conceive the need for such a revelation (Moriarty, 134)?

Compare Iris Murdochs attempt, in The Sovereignty of Good, to transpose prayer as an attitude towards the

Good in ethical and aesthetical life (53-54).


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The object of demystification

Is the question of demystification one of invisibility? Our presentation of Pascals

dialectical method has been couched in the terms of visibility (a term perceives some aspect

of reality invisible to an opposing term). The couple invisible/visible in fact occupies a

prime place in Marxs philosophical heritage. The difficulty in rendering reality intelligible is

formulated by Kant, for example, in precisely these terms:

lintelligence la plus commune, qui, comme on sait, incline fort toujoursattendre derrire les objets des sens quelque ralit invisible agissant par soi, maisqui en revanche corrompt cette tendance en se reprsentant immdiatement cetinvisible sous une forme encore sensible, cest--dire en voulant en faire un objetdintuition, et qui ainsi nen est pas plus avance. (135)

There is a tendency to suppose some kind of law unavailable to perception which acts

behind the objects of the senses: this is corrupted when we present the invisible in a form

amenable to the senses.

But there is more involved than mere sense-perception. Of course, the ralit

invisible, as noumenon, is never available to human perception. Yet the text suggests that the

obstacle is not merely that our knowledge is limited (to phaenomena), but that human

judgments override this by interpreting what is visible as precisely those laws we have no

knowledge of. The obstacle to intelligibility thus lies in the interpretative faculties of thesubject. In this way, demystification would have to respond to a problem more fundamental

than that of visibility: to the level of our judgments.

Some of the terminology of Capital might suggest that Marx merely translates Kants

vocabulary into a critique of political economy: the subject who interprets the visible as the

invisible reality agissant par soi (135) becomes the political economist, whose concepts are

mere translations of the forms of appearance of the capitalist mode of production, not


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perceiving the ralit invisible in its laws. This is to some extent correct. However, Marx

does not have reference to a transcendental subject as Kant did, but neither is it a problem

merely of interpretation. To employ a term that will subsequently become clearer, if political

economy presents social and economic relations upside-down, it is because of reality itself.

To demonstrate this, we might have brief recourse to Marxs Critique of Hegels

Doctrine of the State, the subject of which is the constitution of the state on the one hand and

the family and civil society on the other, as according to HegelsPhilosophy of Right.

The critique has two points: on the one hand, empirical facts, such as the family and

civil society, are transcended, because Hegel only considers them in so far as they are

dependent on the state; they are denied reality in themselves, because they exist in eternal

necessity to something beyond them. In reality, the family and civil society are the

preconditions of the state; but in speculative philosophy [Hegel] it is the reverse (Marx,

Early Writings, 62). The state is thus reified, representing the self-sufficient act of the Idea.

But, on the other hand, it is the state that generates empirical form, since this reality [the

state] has to transform itself into real objects in order to exist (Colletti, 19). For Marx, this

represents an obvious mystification(70).

The two points of critique are also couched in the logical terms of subject and

predicate. Firstly, Hegel inverts the usual relationship of subject and predicate (where the

universal [is] the predicate of some real object and soa category or function of that

object so thatnow the universal (the state, the Idea) exists in its own right, is self-sufficient

(Colletti, 19). Secondly, Hegel conceives the empirical world as a manifestation or

embodiment of this Idea, and thus a predicate of the predicate, not a predicate of a subject

(Colletti, 19-20). These two positions are distinguished in the Economic and Philosophical


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Manuscripts as uncritical positivism3 (deny the empirical world; true reality only in the

Idea) and uncritical idealism (restore the empirical world as manifestation and meaning of

this Idea) (Colletti, 23).

So, the source of mystification in Hegels theoryis that it reifies the state into a self-

sufficient substance and transforms the empirical into merely the means by which the state

exists. Interestingly, Marxs subsequent gesture is to explain the failure of political economy

by the same token, since it

[substitutes] for the specific institutions and processes of modern economygenericor universal categories supposed to be valid for all times and places; thenthe former come to be seen as realizations, incarnations of the latter. (27)

As a conceptual tool employed by Marx in his critiques, the subject-predicate

inversion thus employs the fundamental terms of classical Western logic (subject, predicate)

to show up the mystification at work in the Hegels Philosophy and classical political

economy. This is where the terms naturalized and historical enter the picture4: the state

3Interestingly, the first position is employed by Lefebvre in the concept of illusion de la transparence (36)one

of two mutual reinforcing illusions which conceal the fact that lespace (social) est un produit (social) (35).

Lefebvres critique of the illusion of transparencyrecalls Marxs critique of uncritical positivism, in that the

illusion posits that in space, action and thought have free rein, and speech and writing can fully grasp their

objects (37). For Lefebvre, there is a problem of intelligibility in the theoretical programme. Demystification

in this case, of philosophical illusionsis in this way practically linked to reflexivity.

4The terms are commonplace in discussions of ideology and in demystification. Mythologies, for example, has

as its object la mystification qui transforme la culture petite-bourgeoise en nature universelle (Barthes, 7)

while for Bourdieu it is lhistoricisation qui permet de neutraliser, au moins dans lordre de la thorie, les effets

de la naturalisation, et en particulier lamnsie de la gense individuelle et collective: lhistoricisation is thus

the major critical conceptual tool in la science sociale (262). Eagleton also discusses the terms naturalizing

and universalizing (9).


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appears to be founded on natural, eternal laws undetermined by history, while historical

conditions (the family and civil society) are reduced to its manifestation. Compare Marxs

discussion of the concept of production in the Grundrisse: the aim of political economy,

Marx claims, is

to present production [] as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternalnatural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeoisrelations arethen quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in theabstract is founded. (The Marx-Engels Reader, 255)

Marx elaborates by explaining that political economists will argue that there is no production

possible without an instrument of production No production [possible] without stored-up,

past labour. Yet, by identifying capital asan instrument of production, aspast labour,

they conclude that capital is a general, eternal relation of nature (224). The mystification is

clear.

But the inverted logic involved is grounded not in Hegels discourse, nor in political

economy. Marxs crucial gestureas a response to our initial point of departure: the question

of the source of upside-down reality is to propose that the inverted logic runs through

reality itself. It is no longer a problem of discourse or interpretation. Hegel was simply

translating the current state of affairs:

Hegel should not be blamed for describing the essence of the modern state as it

is, but for identifying what is with the essence of the state. (127)

Political economy likewise, identifies what iswith the essence of labour in general, because

reality appearsthat way to them (in the surface-forms of capitalist economic relations).

It follows that the source of mystification is built into reality: Marx makes it clear that

the veilis not added by bourgeois interpreters of the social life-process, i.e. the process of


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material production.5Instead it belongs to this process, which therefore appears to political

economy as what it really is (Colletti, 38). This allows Marx to develop several critiques

which are no longer interpretative issues but concern the nature of contemporary social

reality. For example, with reference to private property: the reification of private property, as

the universal bond of the state (178) and its very constitution, entails inverting the

relationship between man and property:

the state appears as private property, whereas private property should reallyappear as the property of the state. Instead of making private property into an

attribute of the body politic, Hegel transforms the body politicinto an attributeof private property (180).

Likewise, the state itself is an estrangement and abstraction, a reified body over and above

civil society. The next development is to demonstrate how civil society develops into the

division of society into private interests.

To summarise: Marxs argument is a critique of Hegels inverted logic, whose

mystical character is explained with reference to the reality of the modern state and of civil

society. Mystification is built into reality.

Two issues, relevant to demystification, can be gleamed from our recourse to Marxs

Critique.

Firstly, Hegel is described as the interpreter (151) of the role of legislature in the

modern state. Indeed, his uncritical, mystical method of interpretation is the keyboth to the

riddle of modern constitutions and also to the mystery of the Hegelian philosophy (149).

5The idea of a veil in reality is also found in the theme of the Dieu cach in Catholic liturgy which inspired

toute une conception du monde at Port-Royal. Sellier cites a letter of Pascal to a certain de Rovannez in

October 1656: Il est demeur cach sous le voile de la nature, qui nous le couvre jusqu lIncarnation. []

Toutes choses sont des voiles qui couvrent Dieu. (28)


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Hegel is even described in a singularly aggressive passage as thoroughly contaminated by

the wretched arrogance ofPrussianofficialdom (196).

The question this gives rise to is the capacity of critique. In this sense, Adornos

problematic of transcendent critique and immanent critique becomes relevant (Bernstein,

18). Now if the critiques position outside the social totalitythe transcendent critique is

condemned for its lack of inwardness, sympathy and attention to particulars, i.e. to the

specific objects of cultural production, is not the alternative immanent critique, which

aims to correspond to realityand to embody the contradictions, pure and uncompromised

in the inner-most structure of the specific content of the objectin some way epitomized by

Hegels method itself (18-19)?To Marx, the section on The State in Hegels Philosophy

does literally embody his encounter with reality: this is how it appearsto him, and thus how

it really is.

Of course, Adorno would not endorse Hegels kind of idealism. Hence why a

resolution of the immanent and transcendent positions is necessary, which takes the form of

the non-position of dialectical criticism (19): The dialectical critic of culture must both

participate in culture and not participate (20). In Adornos terms, demystification would

have to work externally of and internally to its object.

As we have seen, it is through a critique of Hegel that Marx is able to point to the

abstraction of property from man, of the state from individuals. This latter abstraction is

expressed in the distinction between political life and civil society mentioned earlier. The

second insight to be gleaned from the Critique is that the nature of the individual in civil

society has changed. This shall now be considered and developed with reference to

contemporary society, Pascal, and the concept of alienation in both Pascal and Marx.


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For Marx, the change in the social nature of individuals is due to the division of civil

societywithin itself into classandsocialposition (147).Civil society does not sustain the

individual as a member of a community, as a communal being as it did previously in the

Middle Ages: there is no substantive good that joins individuals but only private interests that

estrange them (147). Class distinctions which existed before under absolute monarchy

remained political; now, with democracy, they become merely social differences in private

life of no significance in political life (146). Hence why the representative systems that

developed alongside the modern democratic state are contradictory, and in two ways: the

formal contradiction is that the deputies of civil society are not connected it its electors

by any instruction or commission; the material contradiction, that there is no public

interest, as Hegel imagines, but only particularinterests(194). Class distinctions pertain to

the sphere of civil society andto the sphere of political life. They are thus doubled: as private

interests within civil society with no political meaning (the material), and as an illusory

public interest (the functioning of formal, abstract politics). The individual is thus socially

transformed: the same subject[i.e. man] is given different meanings, entailing the creation

of a double subject: in Marxs terms, an allegory [has been] foisted on it(149).

There is thus a crisis of form and meaning, at the intersection of formal equality as an

abstract subject, material interests which divide individuals, and political life as separate and

disconnected. Marx argues, rather, that it is only by starting with the essence and true

realization (150) of the subject that we can authentically determine what should be

predicated of it. Real form and real meaning (149) wouldin this case coincide.

Has Marx committed himself here to an ethical demand: to commence with the

realization of man involving terms like essence and (human) nature and to then see

whether the alleged subjects (the state, private property) are its real predicate[s]? (150)

No answer will be attempted now, but there are two suggestions to be made.


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Firstly, this crisis of forms and meanings could plausibly be related to the Marxist

notion of alienation. The disjunction between forms and meanings is a source of

estrangement and an interpretative error: it is to interpretan old view of the worldin terms of

a new one (149). Hence the dislocation of Hegels interpretative terms: the substantive

notion of public interests(only previouslyvalid) and their referent, civil society as actual

estrangement and internal division.

Perhaps we could interpret Osbornescontemporary account of abstract social and

economic forms in capitalist societies with these terms.Take the notion of collectivity:

Collectivity is produced by the interconnectedness of practices, but the broadestforms of interconnectedness and dependencies that are produced exhibit the

structure of a subject only objectively that is, in separation from bothindividual subjectsand particular collectivitiesof labour at the level of statesand beyond. (24, emphasis added)

Moreover, the dominant forms of economic subjectivization such as the constitution of

individuals as constituents of variable capital and consumers of commodities are now

accompanied by forms of financial subjectivization individuals as subjects of loans,

credit-card debtetc. (24, emphasis added). The similarities with Marxs critical vocabulary

(italicized) point to a possible dislocation between the political potential of the concept

collectivity, which was only previously valid (an old view of the world), and the

essentially abstract nature of capitalist societies. This is what alienation would thenexpress. Perhaps our (political, sociological)formsand concepts lag behind, are at odds with

the experiential meaningof deeper entrenched alienation, subjectivization and division within

society. Theory can only play catch up if experience is not made to slow down.

The second suggestion is to relate Marxs formulation to Pascal. In fact, I want to

suggest that the problematic is perhaps the reverse, i.e. an inversionof Marxs formulation

with which he condemns Hegel. This would now read: to interpret a new view of the world


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interms of an old one. Since we are dealing with modern political authority, the Discours

sur la condition des grands proposes itself as a pertinent text, for it deals with a

contemporary political problem for Pascal. The Discoursconcerns the grounds of political

authority. Addressed to a contemporary noble, it involves these propositions: there is no lien

naturel (230) which attaches the soul and the body of the king to his condition; royal

authority is [un] tablissement humain. Yet the admiration of the king by le peuple is

founded on a misrecognition of this noblesse as une grandeur relle (230). This is an

illusion since it is only (but nevertheless importantly) a grandeur dtablissement(231). If

there is no intrinsic quality to the rulers of this world, then only an imaginary relation

sustains their power: this involves the misperception of an imaginary quality as essential

and natural, whereas authority itself is a historical construction, dictated in the past which

could have [been] imagined quite differently (Moriarty,Early Modern, 116).

To recall the theological context of the Fall: depuis que [lhomme] a perdu le vrai

bien, toutgalementpeut lui paratre tel(fr.181, 134). I want to suggest that alienation, in

the way we interpreted it via Marx (a crisis of form and meaning), expresses at least to some

extent the fallen subject as Pascal conceives it. It as if the form of the framework which

lhomme inherited from before the Fall has lost its determinations: the justice of earthly,

political authority now appears as mans vrai bien, to fill the gap. And this distortion, to

recall the Discours, is then doubled, due to the misrecognition that founds social reality:

earthly, political authority appears essentialised and ahistorical. In this way, it is intelligibility

itself which is alienated. Only la foi can found knowledge of le vrai bien and it would

have to exceed the radical alienation of human intelligibility.

A central disjunction between form and meaning the new political forms of the old

world; the old concepts of the new Fallen worldseems to offer itself as a way of conceiving


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alienation in relation to intelligibility, the term with introduced this section. An answer

now suggests itself to our initial questionwhy demystification? in relation to Pascal: for

the very reason that political authority foists its own form and meaning on subjects, filling la

marque et la trace toute vide (fr.181, 133) with its own distorted content, and exploiting

thereby the central misrecognitions of the social imagination that, in reality, sustains its own

power. In short, a demystifying critique is necessary precisely because God is absent

(Moriarty, iek, 128).

To the question of how political authority sustains itself we shall now turn.

Qui la ramnera son principe lanantit: Foundation myths?

All political authority has an initial act of foundation, and that act is an arbitrary

usurpation. Usurpation was the midwife to Rome, who was born in red blood and fratricide.

The thematic of usurpation is important to several accounts of how political authority


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founds and legitimises itself; it is through it that we come to a certain idea about ideology

and the role of demystification. Of course, Romulus killed Remusis a myth in itself, as one

of many ideologies with which the early Romans conceived themselves. In this way, I want

to tie together two threads: the reality of usurpation and the role of ideology, which will form

the node of this reflection on foundations.

The approximation of ideology to myth could seem to say nothing more than that

ideology is a fiction, or a falsehood. This cannot be the case, since ideologies can be true

albeit at the same time fulfilling a particular kind of deceptive or mystifying function within

social life as a whole (Eagleton, 7). In this way, a formal study of myths becomes possible:

myths as ides-en-forme.

InMythologies,Barthes conceives the concept of mythe so as to make sense of how

labus idologiquefunctions(7). As a discipline, la mythologie belongsboth to semiology

(concerned with forms) and the ideology (concerned with ideas in history) (219). Conceded

that ideas have an active political force (Eagleton,6), the aim is to study how they function

as mythes to mystify the interests of those who deploy them. This mystification is more

complex than the metaphor of the screen (employed alongside discussions of false

consciousness, for example)would have it (Eagleton, 11, 15).Strictly, le mythe necache

rien: sa fonction est de dformer, non de faire disparatre (229). Form is motivated in in

myth, precisely because it functions to deform its raw material so as to make appear natural

the (historical, social) interests of the class that deploys it.

How does it do so? There are two steps: firstly, an usurpation or superimposition

which is strictly linguistic; secondly, a naturalisation or depoliticisation, which relates to the

context in which the myth circulates and relates to wider customs and beliefs.


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interests) behind an image of Nature, by not naming itself (the process of ex-nomination),

thus enabling the bourgeoisie to maintain its dominance in a different guise (248). The

question of intelligibility is linked with the question of interests: if bourgeois interests appear

natural (because detached from real, social interests) and depoliticized in the cultural material

it employs, Barthes offers critical tools for demystifying its products, so as to reveal the

means by which political messages achieve dominance.

The example given by Barthes of ex-nomination is the myth of the nation. The myth

recurs also in Marxs discussion of the So-Called Primitive Accumulation. In the pre-history

of capital (875), it is noted that defenders of the systematic theft of communal propertyand

the theft of the state domains, which made the way for the capitalist mode of production,

had recourse to a certain idea about the wealth of the nation,in order to conceal the bloody

methods actually employed (Capital Vol 1, 886). Marxs use of parenthesis and irony

throughout the expos has a similar force to the sarcasm of Barthes semiological analyses:

the former undercuts, the latter demystifies through parody and hyperbole. However, Marx is

comparably less interested in how the notions function, more in its truth-content. For

example: the expropriation of the agricultural population is defended in one passage cited by

Marx as anadvantage which the nation should wish for, since there will be a surplus for

manufactures which itself is one of the mines of the nation : after the first use of nation,

Marx inserts the following parenthesis: (to which, of course, the people who have been

converted do not belong) (888). The parenthesis is used here in order to show up the

concept of nation as unfounded. In short, the central battleground is the narration of the

history of Primitive Accumulation, played out in the chapter between actual history on the

one hand and bourgeois historians on the other (874-875). If the nation serves an

ideological end, it is that the concept it promotes discursively conceals the real interests of


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those who deploy it. Both concept and form here are motivs, as Barthes would have it:

ideology becomes a matter of falsehood and myth in discourse.

We might pause here to ask: Does the discursive notion of ideology (ideology as

myth, political message depoliticized) exhaust the experience of domination for subjects in

capitalist society? Though Barthes at least early Barthes refers to the context and

customs which sustain myth and to how they may be read, one might argue that no account is

given of subjectivation: what does it mean to speak of a consammateur du mythe (237)?

How is this subject constructed?

The difficulty underlies the account of the silent compulsion of economic relations

in the same section of Capital:

The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which byeducation, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of

production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist processof production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance (Marx, 899)

Domination is fundamentally economic: the workers dependence on capital, which springs

from the conditions of production themselves sets the seal on the domination of the

capitalist over the worker. The point here is that the laws of capital appearas natural and its

power guaranteed by the ordinary run of things(899).The same concealment that Barthes

points to in mythe is here built into the very natureof capitalism. Here is in seed form the

idea of false consciousness.

Our conceptsideology, usurpation, foundationcan thus be related in two ways:


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1) Barthes conceives of ideology6as myth, which functions via the usurpation

of the signe;

2) Barthes and Marx show ideology as concealing real foundations: the

foundation of social interests and the foundation of capitalist production.

We can relate the remaining pair of terms usurpation and foundation via a

discussion of the contemporary foundational notion of the political (Valentine, 49) as found

in iek. The insight to be gained here is that it offers a critical elaboration of the concept of

false consciousness: in short, by relating the foundation of authority and the amnesia of its

violent origins with mechanisms of belief.

To use a term from iek, the object of Marxs discussion on Primitive Accumulation

was the ideological battle in narrating the origins (the pre-history of capital) (For They

Know Not What They Do, 203). This question of origins for iek is situated within an

extended analysis of the symbolic, which argues thatthere is an act of concealment inherent

in any field of symbolically structured meaning, because the symbolic order always

presupposes and precedes itself (203). It is the symbolic order which sustains political

authority: but given that we are always-already embarqus, to use the adjective introducing

Pascals pari (fr. 680, 461), in this field of meaning, it is impossible to adopt an external

attitude to it. How, then, can one narrate [its] origins? The problem can be translated,

though not without modification, into phenomenological terms as the attitude naturelle

which regards the world as allant de soi (Bourdieu, 250). In any case, the common concern

is clear: authority not only conceals its origins, but establishes a field of meaning which one

6Strictly speaking Barthes use of the word idologie in refers to a particular discipline (Mythologies, ??).

However the use of ideology here is to be taken as a general term, as Eagletons introduction to Ideology, which

was referenced at the start of this section.


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cannot exit. There is no Archimedean point from which subjects, who do not have the

privilege of historical discourse (like Marx), could narrate political authority.

How does authority come to be? The pseudo-historical narrative, or genealogy as

laid out in fragment 668 is insightful in this context (Moriarty, 113). It begins with tous

les hommes voulant dominer, et tous ne le pouvant pas, mais quelques-uns le pouvant, until

a kind of survival of the fittest establishes a precarious peace. Because les matresne

veulent pas que la guerre continue, the submission of the weak must become permanent

(443). Hence, force relies on manipulating the imagination of the conquered, in order to

naturalise itself: peu peu leur pouvoir est apparu comme naturel, et les conventions

juridiques ainsi tablies ont pass pour la justice. (Sellier,Port-Royal et la littrature, 32)

Arbitrary convention is passed off as justice. At the beginning was violence, but the

permanent establishment of authority requires a kind of amnesia of this primordial

usurpation (Moriarty, 12/9): Il faut la faire regarder comme authentique, ternelle et en

cacher le commencement si on ne veut quelle ne prenne bientt fin (85):this is the insight

of fragment 94, from which iek takes his cue. Intriguingly, the fragment articulates both

the narrative about the vrit de lusurpation and a more anthropological description: the

role of la coutume, for example, which exists in all places, derives its power par cette seule

raison quelle est reue (fr. 94,83). Likewise, la justice is ce qui est tabli(fr.530, 363).

In this way, our conclusions concerning political authority in theDiscoursare now concretely

related to subjective experience, and we have moved from an idea of ideology in discourse to

the subjective mechanisms at work in the constitution of authority. The appearance of

arbitrary conventions as natural and eternal relies on the distorted mechanisms situated in the

human subject


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Today, the purest example of this is surely money: it functions only if there is trust in

the social link. [] its worth is purely reflexive, the result of peoples belief in its worth

(iek, ciii-civ).

But money has real effects: for the homeless woman who has none but nevertheless

recognises its value, it is the difference between a meal and the shelter of a department store

entrance on the Faubourg St. Antoine.

This is where Bourdieus concept of la double naturalisation is important. The

legitimacy of the established order is facilitated by the almost automatic way it functions:

there is a double naturalisation qui rsulte de linscription du social dans les choses et dans

les corps(260). This naturalisation is a mechanism by which the ordre socialestablishes its

sociodice, but functions only to the extent that bodies and things are inscribed, overridden

and penetrated by social relations (262). And this has real effects: in the order of emotions,

for example. If Barthes and Marx considered the myth of the nation, for example, in relation

to discursive ideology and the concealment of real interests, this is not the whole picture:

cest que la nation, la race ou l identit, comme on dit aujourdhui, estinscrite dans les chosessous forme de structures objectives, sgrgation de fait,conomique, spatiale, etc.et dans les corpssous forme de gots et de dgots,de sympathies et dantipathies, dattractions et de rpulsions, que lon dit parfois,viscrales. (Bourdieu, 260)

The spatial organization of cities, for example, represents a mechanism by which dominationenforces itself; the nation will be inscribed in the articulation of its suburbs, in the

arrangement of communities. Ideology cannot be limited to the order of ideas and action, but

extended to consider conscious and unconscious mechanisms of domination and legitimacy.

This is one of the central insights that Bourdieu reads back into Pascal.


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The scope of demystification has widened considerably. En filigrane, this section has

aimed to put forward the thesis that as ideology is interpreted anew, so too are the methods of

demystification. We can now make a distinction by resuming in our initial terms: in its

limited sense, the foundationof political authority entails an initial act of usurpation; in a

name other than its own, ideology conceals this act and its real interests. In its broad sense,

foundation is the reality of a variety of mechanisms by which usurpation is forgotten and

ideologypenetrates our bodies, daily.


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Mdi tat ion: the automatic subject

This mditationbears on the constitution of theoretical discourse.

Its inspiration is Marxs analysis of the general formula for capital . This is the

movementM-C-M: the boundless drive for enrichment orbuying in order to sell (Capital

Vol 1, 254, 248). In the presentation of the formula, there develops an account of the subjects

involved within the sphere of exchange. The possessor of money is both a concrete person

endowed with consciousness and a will who in the sphere of exchange bears (Trgen) the

movement, thus becoming capital personified, or simply, a capitalist (254). To be sure,

that capital is personifiedmeans that a social soul can occupy a physical body: in this way,

capitalist relations condense on individual subjects.

However, the true subject of the relation is strictly neither the capitalist nor capital:

the subject is value:

The money [M, M] and the commodity [C] function only as different modes ofexistence of value itself, the money as its general mode of existence, thecommodity as its particular or, so to speak, disguised mode(Marx, 255).

Valueis the insidious and sinuous subject which pumps the blood of exchange. To study the

forms of appearance assumed in turn by self-valorizing value leaves us with capital is

money, capital is commodities; yet in truthvalue is here the subject of a process which,while assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, [] changes its own

magnitude. This occult ability to add value to itself is the kernel of Marxs argument: it is

the source of mystification (255).

Consider further the designation of value as the automatic subject. Value works

beyond human control (automatic) and asserts its identity in the form of money. In the


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social relationship of exchange, then, the subject is not the capitalist, despite her

consciousness and will. Value is the dominant subject of this process (255).

I want to suggest the concept of the automatic subject as a kind of theoretical

manifesto, in the vein of Bourdieus promotion of practical self-criticism: the process of

self-criticism is, as it were, a necessary personal condition for any kind of communication

on ideology (iek,Mapping, 270)

A concrete example is needed.

In a note to his essay La domination masculine, Bourdieu analyses the philosophical

discourse of Sartre in Ltre et le nantThe passage in discussion is Sartres description of

the female sex as a trou visqueuxwhich is shown to operate via a triad of metaphors: the

hole, and specifically the mouth; viscosity; and the image of the bees sweet death (more

sucre) as it drowns in jam (15). In order to relate the analysis to la domination masculine,

Bourdieu suggests that the foundational oppositions of masculine mythology come to the

surface in objectivized form in the philosophical discourse of Sartre. There is an

objectivation inconsciente de linconscient masculin (15). As with value, the automatic

subject,the fundamental oppositions of masculine mythology take on7desformes, aprs

transformation, dans le discours philosophique; a phantasme priv is sublimated into an

intuition fondamentale du systme philosophique, whereby philosophical discourse, like

value, lays golden eggs (Marx, 255).

7 The verb in French, revtir, means both to put on (as in clothing) and to invest, to endow (with authority,

for example). The literal and figurative senses condense in fragment 123: cet habit, cest une force (97). The

notion of investment is also important in the conception fonctionnaliste des rgimes politiques in Port-

Royal: dans tel tat particulier, il fallait reconnatre comme investi indirectement par Dieu le rgime qui

assurait la paix, grce un consensus(Sellier, 33).


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The point to note in all this is that there is an automatic subject at work as much in

the general formula for capital as in theoretical discourse. Self-criticism would entail a

demystification of discourse to reveal how this subject functions in any given text.

Adorno conceived of social research in practice as an important corrective to

philosophical discourse. The construction of interpretive models and categories that

reconstruct its object should be paired with empirical research. This was the double demand

of sociology: reflection on the concept of society and confrontation with facticity (Mller-

Doohm, 284). The double demand is only possible, however, if sociology remains conscious

of its own limits as a particular discipline, i.e. to take up a self-critical position vis--vis its

own categorical and methodological instruments (285). In Bourdieus insistence on the

practice of self-criticism, and in the concept of the automatic subject, there is perhaps a

sketch of how to respond to the demand.


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Epilogue: conjuncture

Demystification deals with objects that are obscure. It may be an erreur scolastique

to project this obscurity onto contemporary experiences, as constitutive of life for subjects

in capitalist societies. But, to amend a phrase of Bourdieus: As soon as we think in [ the

terms of demystification], it becomes clear that the work of emancipation becomes very

difficult(Mapping Ideology, 270).

The capacity to resistance today runs up against the distortion of individual social

relations. In Act V, sc. iii of Le Mariage de Figaro, we find a definition of this individual.

Here is Figaro, se promenant dans lobscurit. He expresses the failures of his professions,

the burden of censorship, unemployment, and his anger towards the Count for reneging on his

denunciation of seigniorial privilege. Vous vous tes donn la peine de natre, et rien de

plus: the play might herald the demise of privilege and the rise of a new system of value

(money) in pre-revolutionary society(Pucci, 64). But it is nevertheless an account of real

distortion. Despair is directed at individuals: Quavez vous fait pour tant de biens!

(Beaumarchais, 224). Competition fosters division: chacun pillait autour de moi (225).

Figaro finds it difficult to subsist, perdu dans la foule obscure(224).

Bourdieu has elsewhere noted the discourse of blame in his observations on racism

(La domination masculine, 12). Just as the nationor race is brought to bear on individual

subjectsone only has to think of the experiences of immigrants so too the injustices and

havoc of capitalism cower behind the neoliberal fantasy of the free individual.

With compassion, the task is to demystify the obscure relations that constitute what

we are, in order to practice, in solidarity, what we ought to be.


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