Ancient Society and the New Politics: from Kant to Modes of Production Fredric R
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Criticism Volume 58 | Issue 2 Article 8 2016 Ancient Society and the New Politics: from Kant to Modes of Production Fredric R. Jameson Duke University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism Recommended Citation Jameson, Fredric R. (2016) "Ancient Society and the New Politics: from Kant to Modes of Production," Criticism: Vol. 58 : Iss. 2 , Article 8. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol58/iss2/8 ANCIENT SOCIETY At a time when the so-called “death of theory” has alternately been AND THE NEW celebrated or lamented (and com- POLITICS: FROM pensated by the revival of academic KANT TO MODES philosophy and its barren subfields OF PRODUCTION such as ethics and aesthetics), we Fredric R. Jameson may well be grateful that the most original and exciting Japanese the- orist of our time, Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: is finally becoming more widely From Modes of Production to known in what we used to call the Modes of Exchange by Kojin West. With the ambitiously named Karatani, translated by Michael Structure of World History, indeed, K. Bourdaghs. Durham, NC: Karatani’s new work arrives in Duke University Press, 2014. English at virtually the same time Pp. 376, 1 illustration. $94.95 as its publication in Japanese. Not cloth, $26.95 paper. only is it a new turn in his own work and preoccupations, it opens some welcome new paths for our own theoretical and political discussions, reviving a number of crucial but virtually abandoned debates and (hopefully) starting some new ones. Structure of World History critically rereads a number of classic texts in new perspectives, combines new uses of current theory, and reopens the traditional debates on modes of production in new and more pro- ductive directions, taking contro- versial political positions, as well as philosophical ones, particularly on the relationship of Immanuel Kant to Marxism; in short, not only does it revive a much-maligned approach to history (world history, the philosophy of history, etc.), it also intervenes in economics, Marxology, theory, and philosophy itself. Criticism Spring 2016, Vol. 58, No. 2, pp. 327–339. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.58.2.0327 327 © 2017 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 328 FREDRIC R. JAMESON Karatani’s preceding book For the more standard “enlight- Transcritique: On Kant and Marx enment” view, Kant subscribed to (1995) had already proposed a new a view of so-called transcendental approach to Kant, one unusual realities as being fundamentally and unexpected even in the midst unknowable (however much we of what looks like a generalized may still require them ethically). Kant revival. We are far from the The figure of the parallax, how- days in which Jean-Paul Sartre ever, suggests that we can none- remarked that any return to Kant theless deduce the position and always marked a regression to pre- the volume of such realities, as it Marxist and anti-Marxist positions were, blindly and by indirect com- (a proposition that surely retains putation, even where we can never much of its relevance). It is at least confront them directly or in some not true of Karatani, whose stra- unmediated way. The shift at issue tegic move lies not in using Kant here is one from metaphysics to rep- against Hegel and the dialectic, resentationality, and it has indeed but rather (at least on my reading) seemed to me a useful index to the one who invents the dialectic in the difference between modernity and first place by way of the antino- postmodernity: for modernity, this mies, thereby confirming the more failure of knowledge or representa- traditional dialectic’s impatience tion was an agonizing experience, with the pettiness of the law of which in literature and philosophy noncontradiction and abandoning alike led to grandiose schemes and the attribution to Kant of the 1763 forms for its evasion—forms that refutation of the existence of nega- constituted a kind of triumph over tivity in nature as such. it. For postmodernity, this particu- Two more interesting features lar “death of god” is no longer so of Kant emerge in the earlier fraught with anguish, and the anti- book: the ideal of the world representationality of the parallax republic, which becomes central has seemed to offer a new form of in Structure of World History; and representation as such at the very the overcoming of the impasse moment of its impossibility. of the Ding-an-sich (thing-in- But the other (non-Kantian) itself) and the unknowability of originality of Transcritique—and the real by way of the figure of the one that led most directly to the parallax, an attractive astro- the present work—was a revision nomical conception that seems to of Karl Marx that seemed to offer be making its way in contempo- a new kind of political praxis— rary philosophy (for example, in namely, the cooperative move- Slavoj Žižek’s work) as a result of ment at the base, or dare I say in Karatani’s speculation. the interstices, of actually existing ON THE STRUCTURE OF WORLD HISTORY 329 capitalism. Some will remember of production, which does interest that Lenin’s very last writings were me greatly and to which I devote devoted to cooperatives and to the the rest of this discussion. praise of Robert Owen. Others will Let me briefly summarize the object that the central polemic of history of the problem, which Capital—at least on the left and Marx himself alludes to as fol- against Proudhon—was the slash- lows (in the 1859 preface to A ing and omnipresent attack on Contribution to the Critique of the idea that circulation could be Political Economy): “In broad out- the central framework for under- line the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, standing capital as such let alone and modern bourgeois modes of for changing it: production, for production [Produktionsweisen] Marx, always comes first, and new may be designated as epochs value cannot be created in circula- marking progress in the economic tion. The very subtitle of Structure development of society.”1 The of World History would seem to syntax thereby implies that these suggest that Karatani thinks oth- four modes of production would erwise, and to that effect I quote a be completed by a fifth—namely, crucial sentence from Transcritique: that from which progress has been “While capital organizes social made or, in other words, primitive relations globally, the moment to communism. Meanwhile, the very overturn capital—inexorably at the thrust of Marxism as a theory and same time as following it—is folded a praxis alike suggests the need to within, namely, in the process of specify a sixth mode of production, circulation” (293). This would seem the one that closes off the series of to be a serious practical issue, par- “antagonistic forms,” as he calls ticularly inasmuch as the dominant them, and brings “the prehistory ideology of our time—free-market of human society” to an end— dogma—is clearly a fundamentally namely, socialism or communism. circulationist one. This is, however, clearly a list and But I’m not personally scan- not even a description, let alone dalized by this heterodoxy, this a theory (or “philosophy of his- heretical—and indeed traditionally tory” as it is contemptuously called heretical—displacement of Marxist nowadays). But what people did orthodoxy. What interests me more not know for eighty years was that is the way in which Karatani has Marx had indeed written a sub- arrived at this point (which in his stantial account of these modes of formulation I hasten to say is nei- production in his 1857 manuscript, ther anti-Marxist, post-Marxist, or that trial run of Capital, which we indeed pre-Marxist)—namely, by call the Grundrisse (floorplans) and way of the whole matter of modes which was not published until 1939. 330 FREDRIC R. JAMESON Nonetheless, and in whatever unique historical facts or events to form, it is surely this list of the fun- philosophical or theoretical frame- damental structures of human soci- works or abstractions—universal ety that has earned Marxism (and history then becoming one more Hegelianism before it) the most example of that bad thing called virulent contemporary attacks on totalization. On the other hand, it its alleged teleology and its imputed is precisely fear of Eurocentrism idealistic reading of the meaning and its universalism, the sense that of history as such. To be sure, real other cultures and their histories, historical developments account their specificities, are being reduced for the widespread appeal of such to a single matrix, that is a fantasy of attacks, not least the omnipresence Western provenance. I believe that of late capitalism (which Francis we can locate the scandal here in Fukuyama thought could justify geography itself, in the contingen- the relevance of a slogan such as cies of our own unique globe and “the end of history”), as well as the its spatial configurations. (They are collapse of state socialism, which contingent only from the historical seemed to invalidate Marxian perspective and not from the geo- teleological notions of the ways logical or astrophysical one.) Thus, in which socialism was coming universal history turns out to be into being within capitalism itself. an attempt to philosophize geog- Scarcely irrelevant either is the con- raphy, to make philosophical sense temporary emphasis on state power out of its unique spatial folds and and its emergence (or omnipres- configurations. Thus, Hegel felt ence) in so far as that casts a differ- obliged, in the greatest and most ent kind of light on the other end of scandalous of all universal histo- the sequence of “modes of produc- ries, to find dialectical meaning in tion”—namely, on the notion of so- the landscapes in which his various called primitive communism.