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Materiality, Form, and Context: Marx Contra Latour: SUMMER 2013
Materiality, Form, and Context: Marx Contra Latour: SUMMER 2013
Materiality, Form, and Context: Marx Contra Latour: SUMMER 2013
Hylton White
A BSTRACT: Bruno Latours critique of so-called anti-fetishism is central to the ontological turn that has spurred the recent decline of historicist approaches in the
humanities. According to Latour, anti-fetishists such as Karl Marx believe themselves
to be exposing the illusory projection of human agency onto things. This leads them,
says Latour, to overlook the actual roles and powers of nonhuman actors in constructing
actor-networks. Here I suggest that Latour has fundamentally misrecognized the
object of Marxs analysis, however. In Marxs account, the fetishism of commodities is
not an ideological projection but a historically specific form of life. A critical materialism would focus not simply on demonstrating again and again the facts of nonhuman
agency, but rather on examining the historically diverse forms of material association
that organize possibilities for agency. Marxs analysis of the commodity form as a form
of estranged interaction provides rich resources exactly to that end.
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to authors as well as ordinary readers, and exposes the texts complicity in social
conditions that it seeks to deny or disavow. (574)
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the critics belief in the uniquely scientific status of his or her own
forms of knowledge. Disposition and proposition thus merge in the
arrogant act of exposing fetishistic errors: The fetishist is accused of
being mistaken about the origin of the power in question. He has built
an idol with his own hands . . . yet he attributes this labor, these fantasies, and these powers to the very object that he has created (On the
Modern Cult 8). On this account, Marx leads the critic to portray
fetishism as a type of self-deceiving human agency. The real agent at
work in the act of fetishism is the human fetishist, not the fetishized
object. Most importantly, the anti-fetishist critic thinks the kind of
human agency at work is specifically cognitive: what animates the fetish
is the fact that humans believe in it. Critique, on this view, is a project
of showing how fetishists have been deceived by their own beliefs into
attributing powers to lifeless things. But how did fetishists come to
think so wrongly in the first place? At this point, anti-fetishists supposedly inflict Latours second uppercut. They claim scientific knowledge
to show how human beliefs are shaped by hidden mechanisms
especially the functional imperatives of social domination (On
Interobjectivity 236).
According to Latour, this two-step operation produces a
paradox. The power of things over human affairs is first exposed as a
product of misguided beliefs, after which these beliefs are exposed as
products of thing-like social mechanisms that govern human affairs.
How can critics subscribe to both assertions simultaneously, without
seeing how they controvert each other? This is only possible, says Latour,
insofar as anti-fetishists themselves believe something special about
belief, namely that beliefs drive human actions. Since their own beliefs
are scientific ones, these critics are granted the stature of world-making
heroes, while ordinary fetishists are caught in a web of illusion that
prevents them from acting freely or effectively (On the Modern Cult 1416).
One of Latours main conclusions is, thus, that the concept of belief does
essential enabling work for the anti-fetishist project by allowing critics to
paper over the cracks of a performative contradiction. Ironically, the
category of belief allows anti-fetishist criticsnot fetishists, noteto
deceive themselves about the role of beliefs in their own behavior.
Finally, what is it about anti-fetishist critique that the concept
of belief hides from view? The answer lies in plain sight, says Latour.
Once more it is an irony, but now it concerns the category of society
and operates with devastating effect against the supposedly social aims
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at large. This is doubtless because poststructuralism is a crucial antecedent for ANT. The end result is that Latours account is incoherent:
mistaken about Marx and silent on those aspects of the hermeneutics of
suspicion that derive from linguistic emphases.5
In contrast to the dualism between objects and representations
that pervades this latter tradition, historical materialism is inspired by a
completely different philosophical anthropology. It begins from a
phenomenological (and anti-dualist) focus on the problem of the subject
in its relations with the world and, specifically, the potential of the subject
to determine its relations with its activities: in other words, on freedom
as an emergent worldly condition. As Marx says in The German Ideology
(1932), the subject only develops in the midst of its relations with things:
the history of its relations with those things is, thus, the history of the
subject and its freedom (3637). The question is therefore not how to
free the subject from the world, but rather what kinds of worldly arrangements might create a subject capable of self-consciously relating itself to
itself through its relationships with objects. Far from seeking to purify
humanity of its material entanglements and dependencies, Marxs
approach to the question of freedom is therefore focused precisely on
the question of how we create ourselves materially.
But we do not even need to resort to statements of philosophy
here. When Marx puts forward the theory of the commodity form as
fetish in the opening pages of Capital, he does so in order to comprehend not social life in general, but one specific, historically relative form
of it: societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails (125).
And he understands this form of life, for reasons we shall see, as one in
which activity is specifically resistanteven unsusceptibleto influence
by processes of intersubjective or cognitive mediation. The last point is
fundamental. At the very point where Marx invokes the concept of the
fetish, his argument diverges most dramatically from approaches to
social analysis that, like Rousseaus, explore the ways in which forms of
collective thought legitimate oppressive institutions. Latour thus misdescribes Marx so profoundly that his assault on anti-fetishism simply has
no purchase on the Marxist critique of commodity fetishism.
How Do Objects Associate, Historically?
Near the opening of the most extended version of his argument, Latour positions Marx in the iconoclastic Protestant tradition by
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selectively quoting the famous lines from Capital in which Marx says
we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious
world in order to find an analogy with the fetishism of commodities
in capitalist society:
In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings
endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the
human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of mens hands.
This I call the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as
they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the
production of commodities. (qtd. in Latour, On the Modern Cult 10; see Capital 165)
With that Latour rests his case, if not his accusation. But of course, the
passage makes nothing like the claim Latour reads into it, namely that
the fetishism of commodities projects the illusions of minds onto
things. Latour cuts off this important passage not just from the argument that follows, but even from the balance of the chapter it concludes.
The effects of this are decisive, since Marxs account of capitalism is
designed to be read as a whole. In the very next line, for example, Marx
writes, as the foregoing analysis has already demonstrated, this fetishism
of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the
labour which produces them (165, my emphases). However, even a careful
reading of the cited passage in isolation shows that Marx is not
asserting what Latour would have us believe. What makes two things
analogous is not that their parts are identical, but that there is an
isomorphic structure in the ways those parts are arranged. When Marx
compares the products of labour to those of the human brain
attending religion, he is not proposing we understand the fetishism of
commodities as something the mind has created. He is saying that in
the fetishism of commodities, as in religion, we see a kind of activity
displacing its own human subjects. In this instance, displacement
issues not from what those subjects believe, but from the peculiar
social character of their acts. In the detail just as much as the bigger
picture, Latour simply misrepresents what he is describing.
In the bulk of this chapter on commodities, Marx assembles a
complex set of relationships between iron and coats, producers and
political economists, and ultimately value, temporality, and the lives of
things, both magical and mundane. In other words, he provides a
detailed account of what Latour ought to see precisely as a type of
actor-network. Take this well-known passage, in which Marx claims
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that the metabolism of labor into a product, far from being a reductively physical act, is diverted through the manifold of associations
converging in the commodity form as form:
It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of
nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for
instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to
be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it
changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet
on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and
evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were
to begin dancing of its own will. (16364)
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Nor is it the property of a thing as such. It is literally a structure of relationships associating things with one another. As a structure of association for things, it also brings human actors into peculiar kinds of
secondary relationships. For Marx, however, being brought into relation
through material things is not the source of the problem. On the
contrary, as makers of useful things, human actors potentially relate to
others precisely through the properties of things that allow for the interchange of needs, desires, intentions, and skills (13134). This has nothing
at all to do with fetishism. In fact it is the necessary material condition, as
Marx writes in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1927), for the
flourishing of a self-conscious subjectivity in rich relations with others
(7278). In a setting in which the means of production have all been
turned into capital, however, human actors find little opportunity to
engage in this material sociality, except as the producers of things that
circulate as commodities. But as makers of commodities, human actions
do not follow from the plans that subjects have for themselves, for things,
or for other subjects. Instead they act as agents of an expenditure of
different proportions of human labour in general (Capital 142): the
quantities of labor-power that capital has bought from them. In other
words, human actors are brought into relation here as elements of
capital. As producers of commodities, their ties to their own activities
and to those of other actors are extensions of the agency of capital itself
(Postone 14857). This is the fetishism that attaches itselfreturning
to those lines that Latour misreads, but noting now the full force of the
impersonal constructionto the products of labour, so soon as they are
produced as commodities.
This is necessarily a very brief account of Marxs argument
and one that will be familiar to many readers; but let us note three
evident points. First, Marxs argument, once again, has nothing to do
with projections of illusory representations. Second, Marxs critique of
the structure of capitalist activity has nothing to do with ridding
human life of material entanglements. Quite the opposite: the problem
with the fetishism of commodities is exactly that it works to dematerialize the material conditions for a flourishing of intersubjectivity.
Third, what makes this condition pathological in Marxs view is not
that it contradicts the pure condition of the human (as if the human
were not itself historical in his account). It is rather that it crystallizes a
self-contradictory structure of activity, the effect of which is to disconnect the subject from its own materializations.
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placing it carefully in the world of all its historically particular connections. But the missed opportunity is also clear. Restricted by this intellectual framework, Latour cannot see the world of objects sitting right
in front of him in his own historical setting: commodities that associate human activity in a non-subjective mode. No amount of focus on
the translation of subjective designs will show him the formal pathways
where commodities separate subjects from the material conditions of
their intersubjectivity. To see that would require attending to how the
commodity form, as form, arranges subjects and objects in a historically specific kind of relationshipthe one that critical theory labels
capital, or the fetishism of commodities.
In other words, a materialist account of the existing world
could build much more from historical materialism than it can within
the narrow confines of Latours atemporal cosmology. To do so, it
would have to adopt a conception of the historical existence of the
commodity form. It would have to move away from the metaphysical
abstractions of the interplay between plans and things, toward a historically grounded account of the work of the form in associating activities. It would thus have to do the hardest work of all in critical theory:
holding to a rigorous sense of sociohistorical relativity. For this is where
the question of illusion really emerges in the course of Marxs critique.
It is not that human subjects are unable to see themselves and their
human agency in the products of their labor. They quite correctly see
that their productive acts are actually dictated by the impersonal
dynamics of political economy. What occludes itself is the fact that this
is one historically relative form of life. It is not so much that human
work is hidden here, as that this is a peculiar way of arranging the
interaction of human activities. The mode of interaction is what
appears, illusorily, as natural fact, as an outgrowth of necessity instead
of historicity. By refusing to theorize social form as such, Latour ends
up simply replicating the way that the society of the fetishism of
commodities presents itself: as the only way of life we can possibly have.
Context Follows Form
And so we return to the question of critique, suspicion, and
context. How does our discussion of the fetish help us rethink the turn
away from historical context as the ground for critical inquiry in the
humanities? In the passage with which I opened this essay, Felski correctly
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NOTES
This essay originated in a panel on Things of Nature, the Nature of Things, convened
by Sarah Nuttall at the fourth Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism (see
White). My thanks to her and the other participants in that session. I am also very
grateful to Lauren Goodlad and Andrew Sartori for invaluable editorial guidance, and
to Jean and John Comaroff, Bernard Dubbeld, Charles Piot, Achille Mbembe, Catherine Burns, Julia Hornberger, and an anonymous reader for comments on earlier
versions.
1
Broadly speaking, the ontological turn refers to a movement away from
questions of representation, discourse, subjectivity, and identity, and toward a new
attention to the roles of material and other nonhuman agencies in constructing
concrete events, collectives, and forms of life. In anthropology, for example, this has
inspired new experiments in posthumanist or multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and
Helmreich). In literary studies, book history is related to the same trend. One of the
signature features of this movement is its explicit repudiation of critical questions and
its unabashed embrace of an empiricist agenda.
2
On ANT, see Latour, Reassembling 117; Callon.
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