Our problem here is that of subjectivity in the context of Marxist philosophy. My aim is to establish with precision whether the principles and truths that constitute Marxism allow subjectivity to exist and have a function, or whether they reduce it to a set of facts that can be ignored in the dialectical study of human development. Taking Lukács as an example, I hope to convince you that an erroneous interpretation of certain undoubtedly ambiguous Marxist texts can give rise to what I would call an ‘idealist dialectics’, which in practice ignores the subject, and to show how such a position may be damaging for the development of Marxist studies. My topic is not subject and object, but rather subjectivity, or subjectivation, and objectivity or objectivation. The subject is a different, far more complex problem. When I speak of subjectivity, it is as a certain type of internal action, an interior system – système en intériorité – rather than the simple, immediate relationship of the subject to itself.
A superficial consideration of Marxist philosophy might tempt us to call it ‘pan-objectivism’, insofar as the Marxist dialectician is, it seems, interested only in objective reality. Some of Marx’s writings can be interpreted in this way, such as the well-known passage from The Holy Family: ‘The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do.’1 The subjective is thus pushed into the category of representation, which, taken in itself, is of no importance, underlying reality being merged with the process that makes the proletariat the agent of the destruction of the bourgeoisie and constrains it to be this agent in reality – that is, objectively, in actual fact. Other writings go further still, suggesting that the subjective lacks even the importance of a representation belonging to the subject or to a group of individuals, since it disappears completely as such. We need only recall this passage from Capital:
The belated scientific discovery that the products of labour, in so far as they are values, are merely the material expressions of the human labour expended to produce them, marks an epoch in the history of mankind’s development, but by no means banishes the semblance of objectivity possessed by the social characteristics of labour. Something which is only valid for this particular form of production, the production of commodities, namely the fact that the specific social character of private labours carried on independently of each other consists in their equality as human labour, and, in the product, assumes the form of the existence of value, appears to those caught up in the relations of commodity production (and this is true both before and after the above-mentioned scientific discovery) to be just as ultimately valid as the fact that the scientific dissection of the air into its component parts left the atmosphere itself unaltered in its physical configuration.2
It seems there is no difficulty here, since everyone agrees on this point. However, the ambiguity of the phrasing deceived some, notably Lukács. This is because in this text subjectivity seems to disappear completely. Appearances are as objective and real as their underlying ground, produced as they are by the economic process itself. The same is true of reification, which is an element produced by the process of capital, and of the fetishisation of commodities, which is its direct result. So when we apprehend a particular commodity as a fetish, although we have been forewarned by Marxist theory, we settle for doing what reality demands of us, since, at a certain level this commodity is objectively and really fetishised. It is then that subjective reality seems to fade away, since the ‘carrier’ of economic relations realises them where he is, as he must realise them, his idea of them being confined to reflecting them at the level of his praxis. This is why a thinker like Lukács can advance a theory of entirely objective class consciousness. Although he takes subjectivity as his starting point, it is solely to relate it to the individual subject, understood as a source of errors, or simply inadequate realisation. He then regards class consciousness as more or less well developed, more or less clear or obscure, more or less contradictory, more or less effective, according to whether or not the class being analysed belongs directly to the fundamental process of production. For example, in a petty bourgeois, class consciousness remains objectively vague and, for reasons Lukács sets out, never forms into real class consciousness, whereas the proletariat, being deeply involved in the production process, can be brought to a complete form of class consciousness through the objective reality of work.
So, this conception pushes objectivism to the point where it obliterates all subjectivity and hence leads us into idealism. This is no doubt a dialectical idealism, with material conditions as its starting point, but it is still idealism. Neither Marx himself nor Marxism lend themselves to this. There are texts that are indeed ambiguous – by virtue of their depth – but none of them can be interpreted as though pan-objectivism were the goal of Marxism. When Marx speaks of ‘existence’ – as he does, say, in the 1857 draft ‘Introduction’ to his critique of political economy3 – he has in mind the total man, a being defined by a dialectic with three terms: need, work and enjoyment. So if we want to use Marx to understand the dialectics of production as a whole, we must first return to its ground, and to the being who has needs and seeks to meet them, in other words to produce and reproduce his life through work, and who, through the resulting economic process, attains more or less complete enjoyment.
If we take these three elements into account, we note first that the three together establish a rigorous connection between a real man and a real society and the surrounding material reality that is not himself. This is a synthetic connection between the man and the material world and, in and through this connection, it is also a mediated relationship between human beings. In other words, in this very text, the reality of human beings is theorised and linked to transcendence, to a beyond, to what is outside and before them. Human beings need something that is not them. The organism needs oxygen and this already constitutes a relationship with the surroundings, with transcendence. A man works to obtain tools that will enable him to appease his hunger and reproduces his existence in some form that depends on economic development.
Here again, need is an element located elsewhere, and enjoyment is an incorporation through certain internal processes of what this man needs, which is precisely external being. The first connection Marx reveals through these three terms is a connection with outside being, which we call transcendence. The three elements form a kind of explosion of the self into ‘outside being’ and, at the same time, a return to and re-appropriation of the self. As such these three terms can be objectively described and, at a particular level, can be an object of knowledge. But, through a regressive analysis, they are equally related to something like a self, which denies and goes beyond itself while conserving itself. To use Marx’s terms, since work is objectivation through the reproduction of life, we are entitled to ask who and what is objectified through work? Who or what is threatened by need? Who or what puts an end to need through enjoyment? The answer, obviously, is the practical, biological organism or – if we prefer, considering subjectivity – the psychosomatic unit. So now we are dealing with a reality that exceeds direct knowledge of the self through interiority.
Let us suppose that work is carried out using a tool; there is a practical surpassing of the situation towards a goal, which implies knowledge of the goal and of the means, of the nature of the materials, of the inert requirements of the tool and, in a capitalist society, of the factory where the individual works, its standards and so on. So many different aspects of knowledge are involved here, and this knowledge is at once organic and practical, since in some cases it can be acquired by training. However, the positions we must adopt to hold the tool and use the materials are not a matter of knowledge, still less the muscles, bones and nerve links that make it possible to hold this or that position. In other words, there is an objectivity maintained by something that is beyond knowledge, and which, moreover, it might be practically detrimental to know. Let us take a well-known example: if, as you go downstairs, you become conscious of what you are doing and if consciousness emerges to determine what you do, to intervene in this action, you immediately stumble because the action no longer has the character it should.
We can thus observe that, even in cases where the division of labour in society extends to machines and where, consequently, semi-automatic machines impose piecemeal tasks on the worker, the simplest movement that a worker is asked to do is one that does not engender knowledge of the body. The required movement can be demonstrated, but the organic reality of moving, altering position and changing the whole according to the part is not directly a matter of knowledge. Why? Because we are in the presence of a system which, for reasons we shall examine, has non-knowledge as a component part and whose parts no longer appear in transcendence, but in interiority.
Let us establish a clear definition of what we understand by a system in interiority, for the sake of a better understanding of what we are talking about. A material system is defined as having an interior or, if you prefer, as marking off a domain within the real world, when the relationship between its parts involves the relation of each to the whole. Reciprocally, the whole is no more than the sum of its parts insofar as it is involved as a whole in the relations that the parts have with each other. Of course, the recognition of our organic status as a system of interiority should not lead us to forget that we are also defined by inorganic status. In this regard it is possible to understand us as a set of cells. This is what we are doing when we say that a human organism contains 80–90 per cent water. The same is true when we are subject to mechanical forces. It must also be said that the organic is not a set of specific objects in nature that supplement the inorganic, but corresponds to the particular status of certain inorganic wholes; it is a status defined by the interiorisation of the outside. This means that what the organism experiences in the form of a relation of interiority can also be understood as a physico-chemical whole. It is as though the entire physico-chemical whole were not sufficiently determined and, in some areas or sectors, this whole in exteriority can also be defined by a law in interiority.
So, at the outset at least, we can then identify two types of exteriority: first, the exteriority of within or, if you prefer, ‘on this side’ – en deçà – or ‘before’; in other words, a type of exteriority whose crowning feature is organic status, from which death can return us to the inorganic. Second, the exteriority of ‘beyond’ – au-delà – which reflects what this organism finds in front of it as a work object, a need and the means to satisfy it, in order to maintain its status as an organism. Thus, we have a dialectic with three terms. This requires us to describe interiorisation of the exterior by the organism, in order to understand its capacity to re-exteriorise in transcendent being, in carrying out an act of work or determining a need. So there is only one moment called interiority, which is a kind of mediation between two moments of transcendent being.
However, we should not think that these two moments are in themselves necessarily distinct, other than for temporal reasons. Ultimately it is the same being, the same being in exteriority, which mediates with itself, and it is this that is interiority. As this mediation defines the space in which the unity of two types of exteriority will occur, it is necessarily immediate to itself in the sense that it does not contain its own knowledge. Consequently, it is at the level of this mediation, which is not itself mediated, that we encounter pure subjectivity. And it is from this starting point, taking account of a number of Marxist themes, that we need to reach a better understanding of the status of this mediation. Does it have a role in human development as a whole? Does it really exist as an indispensable moment in a dialectic crowned by objective knowledge? Or is it merely an epiphenomenon? In putting these questions, we are not bringing in from outside a notion of subjectivity that is not present in Marx; on the contrary we are rendering explicit and taking up a notion that was already given in Marxism itself with the concepts of need, work and enjoyment, even though it went unrecognised by some idealist objectivists such as Lukács.
Why, first of all, must this mediation, which is immediate to itself, imply non-knowledge as its particular characteristic? Why must we in our praxis – which is knowledge and action together, action that engenders its own understanding – why, at the level of what we call subjectivity, must we also be non-knowing of ourselves? We shall also consider how, in these conditions, we can attain subjectivity, since, if subjectivity is in practice a non-object, if, as such, it escapes knowledge, how can we claim to state any truths about it?
All this can be clarified very simply, but only on the basis of extremely simple situations. Let us take the case of the anti-Semite. An anti-Semite, a man who hates Jews, is an enemy of Jews. But it is also fairly common for anti-Semites not to declare themselves as such. In the context of a mass social movement, such as the one fostered by the Nazis in 1933, he may find the courage to state his position: ‘I hate Jews’. But otherwise he does not behave like that. He says, ‘Anti-Semitic? Me? No, I’m not anti-Semitic, I just think that Jews have this or that fault and that, consequently, it’s better to prevent them getting involved in politics and to restrict their commercial contact with non-Jews, because there’s something corrupting about them’, and so on. In short, this man presents us with the character of a Jew, which he claims to understand, but he does it insofar as he himself does not understand that he is anti-Semitic. This is the first stage. We have all met people who have said the nastiest, most disagreeable things possible about Jews, while claiming that they are doing so in the name of objectivity, not subjectivity. A little while ago a friend of mine, a Communist friend – Morange in Paris – told me that long before the war he was in a Party cell where one worker systematically opposed everything he said. This was not in any way an ordinary discussion, although one could have taken place. It was not a manifestation of incompatibility between a manual worker and an intellectual, as sometimes happens, since in the same cell there were other intellectuals with whom this worker got on very well. The worker said, ‘It was really a physical thing, I just don’t like him!’ One day, this worker went to see him and said: ‘Listen, I’ve realised why I didn’t like you all that time, it’s because you’re Jewish, and now I realise that it was because I hadn’t got rid of some of the prejudices that are part of bourgeois ideology. I didn’t see that at first and your example has helped me. I’ve realised that it’s the Jew that I hate in you, because I’m anti-Semitic.’
Note the change. At this moment a kind of contradiction between a general attitude and a particular attitude – a contradiction which, unfortunately does not work in the case of a petty bourgeois on whom there is no brake acting to prevent him expressing his anti-Semitism – a contradiction between general communist humanism and a particular attitude leads to a considered realisation. But you will note that at this moment anti-Semitism as such is being eradicated. True, there is a passage to the object, but it is at the moment when the worker recognises his anti-Semitism that he is very close to shedding it. He may find this difficult, he may think he has shed it but fall back into it in the end. But ultimately he is nevertheless close to shedding it, because anti-Semitism is no longer the subjective construction of an object, a relation of the inside and outside with an inside that does not know itself; it suddenly becomes an object before his eyes, before the conscious thought of the person practising it. Of course, he is then free to make his choice accordingly. This distinction between the anti-Semite as subjectivity apprehending an object that is the Jew and an anti-Semite reflecting on and apprehending himself as an anti-Semitic object has something truly destructive for the subjective itself.
What has really happened? This man did not know that he was anti-Semitic, just as we do not know that there is oil beneath the surface in a particular region or that there is a particular star that we have not yet discovered. And, just as one day we can discover the reservoir of oil or the star, so a man can discover that he is anti-Semitic. But we need to examine this more closely. In the case of anti-Semitism, discovering it means discovering a ‘reservoir’ that is a residue of bourgeois ideology, in order to eradicate it. But the knowledge connection established between the discovered star and the astronomer does not alter the star in any way. Were we to suppose that this relationship did alter it, we should be falling into idealism in one way or another, insofar as we would be thinking that, in itself, discovery through knowledge acts on the object that is known. In reality, discovery through knowledge establishes a connection of exteriority with the known object, a connection that does not abolish distance. Of course there is an element of interiority in play; but because knowledge seeks to match an idea to its object, the more it develops the more its difference from the known object diminishes. We could even say metaphorically that perfect knowledge would be the object functioning with the subject inside it making it function. Perfect knowledge of an oil well is the oil well. There is no alteration.
If, on the other hand, we consider the action of knowledge on the worker who had previously ‘innocently’ been anti-Semitic, we can see that it radically transforms the known object insofar as he is obliged either to stop accepting that he is a Communist worker, or to stop accepting that he is an anti-Semite. Something has happened that has completely transformed him. He has built up two systems – in other words, he has summed up his Jewish comrade in exteriority by saying he is Jewish, and he has just summed himself up by saying ‘I am anti-Semitic.’ The words go far beyond the work he has done on himself; they reclassify him, establish him in objectivity as part of a group and introduce an axiological system of values, which promises him a future and enables him to commit himself. If he is anti-Semitic, that means he hates all Jews and that next week, if he meets one, he will detest him. In value terms this means that he is not the man who shares the values of his comrades, since, on the contrary, in the name of their values he is himself condemned.
This second stage, this second totalisation, leads to commitment, to objective conduct; it involves a value judgement, appears as a relationship to the entire community and puts the future at risk. Gone is the time of subjectivity, when the only object was the individual taken for a Jew. Does this mean that he was not anti-Semitic when he did that? Naturally, insofar as we understand that he retained within him a residue of bourgeois society, of bourgeois ideology that he had not managed to dispel, then yes, he was. But insofar as there was a ‘reservoir’ within him that made him anti-Semitic, then no, he was not. He was simply making a subjective attempt to orientate himself in a world he did not understand, which eluded his own knowledge, his own distance from himself and his own commitment. So we can see that the appearance of the subjectivity-object to the subject himself leads to its transformation.
Stendhal’s novels offer two celebrated examples of this. In the first, from The Charterhouse of Parma, Count Mosca, who is in love with La Sanseverina, sees her leaving with her handsome young nephew Fabrice to spend two weeks at Lake Como. The pair share affectionate, somewhat ambiguous feelings, and as he watches them leave he thinks: if the word ‘love’ passes between them I am lost. In other words, if this feeling – which is unknown, not yet to be known, unnamed – acquires a name, I am lost because this naming is bound to lead to specific behaviour and commitments that will mean they will feel obliged to love each other. The Red and the Black proposes a contrasting situation. Why does Mme de Rénal give herself to Julien Sorel when she abhors adultery? It is because she does not understand what love is; she cannot put the name ‘love’ to what is happening inside her, because love has been defined for her by Jesuits who have experienced it only in books, in the context of casuistry. Furthermore, other men – friends of her husband, and neither young nor handsome – have tried to draw her into adultery, to her horror.
Thus, her conception of love so named means that the emotions she feels in relation to this very young man, her children’s tutor, cannot be regarded as love. These feelings are something quite different for her; she simply experiences them. The time will come when she does give them this name, because she begins to make love’s gestures. If someone had told her, ‘It’s love’, she would have put an end to the relationship. But this did not happen. Thus, the situation illustrates the fact that subjective knowledge constantly transforms its object. Hence also the significance of this moment for subjectivity: how the movement to objectivity alters it – whereas if we name a star we do not alter it – and, consequently, the importance of non-knowledge, or the immediate within mediation.
A second question will help us understand the functional importance of non-knowledge. If it is true that the psychosomatic unit performs a subjective interiorisation of external being, following which there is a practical negation as a result of which it works on the external being that is placed before it; and if, furthermore, there is a constant transformation of this subjectivity as soon as we have knowledge of it, how can we hope to utter any truth in its regard, or even seek to utter any truth? Every time we try, we will distort it. So how is it, consequently, that we can speak about subjectivity without making it into an object? If subjectivity is apprehended where it happens, in the form of an interiorisation of the exterior, a transformation of a system of exteriorisation into a system of interiorisation, it is distorted; it becomes an object external to me, I hold it at a distance. Where I can recognise it better is in the results of work and praxis, in response to a situation. If subjectivity can be revealed to me, it is due to a difference between what the situation usually demands and the response I make to it. We should not believe that this differentiation is necessarily a lesser response; it may be something richer, which will carry on developing. In any case, if we regard the situation as a test, of whatever kind, it requires something of the subject. The response will never be totally appropriate to the objective demand; it will either go beyond it or will not be located precisely where necessary; it will fall to one side or fall short. So it is in the response itself that we can apprehend what subjectivity is. Subjectivity is outside, in keeping with the nature of a response and, to the extent that it is constituted as an object, with the nature of the object.
To develop this idea at greater length, let us first consider a medical case: the response of someone suffering from hemianopia, half-blindness. This case is interesting to us because, although it undoubtedly relates to a psychosomatic unit, it is as close as possible to a simple organic connection, involving a lesion that affects the optic nerve where it joins the lobes of the brain. In certain cases, this lesion causes a dysfunction such that half the visual field of each eye is blind and the image forms on only half of the retina. But because the eye is an organisation, the retina’s reactions are built up around a central point in the middle of what is called the macula, or yellow spot, a region where retinal images form most clearly. If we were dealing with a strictly inorganic, entirely external system, the consequence of this hemianopic deficit would be a vision of reality reduced by half. Let us imagine for a moment that I could cause the same lesion deliberately, as a laboratory experiment, by ingesting some substance or other. What would I do? Having knowledge of this lesion, I would distance myself from it, knowing that I would not see, for example, the right side of my visual field. When I wanted to see objects located in front of me, I would turn my head and eyes, thereby reconstituting a new complete field by means of a praxis that would in a sense render the deficit inoperational.
A real hemianopic, in contrast, whose lesion is the result of a physiological process, is unaware of his deficit; and he maintains the unity of his practical field of vision. The two things go hand in hand: he does not say that he has lost half of his visual field, only that he sees a little less well, that it makes him a little more tired. The optical system is complete to the extent that it has reconstructed itself: all the points on the retina have moved, because they were unable to go on organising vision around the central point, with a lateral degradation of visibility. The reorganised centre is now located to one side and new zones of degradation are becoming established, so that every point on the retina has taken on a new function. Around the macula, where vision was formerly at its clearest, it has become most degraded; not only the retina but also focusing, muscular activity and the visual field have been transformed, so that a lateral point, where sight is usually less clear, has now become the central point. If we ask this hemianopic to identify the object in front of him, he will indicate an object located in front of this new central point, since it is around this point that the visual field is now organised.
We note that ignorance is crucial to the hemianopic’s behaviour; he does what he does only because he does not understand the situation. This alteration, which happens suddenly and without his knowledge, offers us a better understanding of what subjectivity is. First, we grasp that we can apprehend subjectivity only using objective elements, which seem to us either to go beyond normal adaptation or to fall short of it. In reality, we understand that something has happened to the hemianopic – whom we then recognise as such – only once he has told us what is in front of him. This is the objective, practical structure of subjective reality. We then understand that the patient is not a person affected only by his lesion, but a being who has reorganised a totality in three parts: the organic behind him, the field of visibility without blemish or loss within him, and the object that he must see before him in order to pick it up, feed himself, live and so on. He must also experience his lacuna in interiority.
But what is the difference between the patient and the man we imagined, who afflicted himself with semi-blindness as a laboratory experiment? This man sets in train a praxis; he distances himself from the lacuna and leaves it to its inertia. He declares: ‘It’s something that is only an external object, which is of course involved in my act of sight, but falls into exteriority because it is merely a strict passivity.’ Indeed what could be more passive than a lacuna, less active in the real sense of the word? At the same time he accommodates, copes, turns his head to right and left and ultimately does what he wants. He has a praxis based on theoretical knowledge. What about the other man, the true hemianopic? He also transforms his visual field, but because he is unaware of his lacuna he integrates it. Having been only external, it becomes totally internal. It has been adopted from inside and can be regarded as directing the entire reorganisation of behaviour, as a practical organiser. This thing, this material lacuna, is suddenly integrated into behaviour as a result of non-knowledge, because it is experienced without distance, and behaviour embodies the adoption without distance of something that belongs to exteriority. There is undoubtedly negation here, but it leads to integration. It is no longer the complete negation of a distancing praxis, but a negation that is integration in ignorance. It is a blind negation of the deficit, which establishes that deficit at the centre of the new organic life. This blind negation is not accompanied by any recognition of lacunary being and, in denying it, integrates it into the whole.
In other words, whatever happens, the whole remains and changes while claiming not to have changed, because it does not know the change. The patient is not hemianopic because he is deprived of half of his visual field – that would amount to regarding this state as a passive disturbance, when it never remains passive. He is hemianopic because he makes himself so, because he maintains a totalisation from within by integrating the deficit. This is the first essential characteristic of subjectivity: if subjectivity is, by definition, non-knowledge, even at the level of consciousness, it is because the individual – the organism – has to be his being – être son être. This is possible in two ways: one consists in being one’s material being, as in the case of a pure material system – here the deficit exists and that is all; the other consists in altering the whole through practice in order to remain what one is, even if it means accepting certain alterations – this is the more complex case of praxis. But between the state of inertia of a system and praxis proper, there is the condition of interiority, which means that the whole does not exist as an initial given, which then has to be maintained, but is something that must be perpetually maintained, which must always-already be maintained. There is no given in an organism; there is a constant drive, in other words a tendency that is one with the construction of the whole. And this whole that is being built is immediately present to each part, not in the form of a simple, passive reality, but in the form of organising schemas that require – the word ‘require’ is purely analogical – a retotalisation of the parts in all circumstances.
We are dealing here with a being for which the definition of interiority is having-to-be its being, in the form of an immediate presence to the self, but at the same time with the slightest possible distance in the form of a regulated and self-regulated totality, which is at once present in every part and the presence of every part in each. In reality the whole is a law of interiorisation and perpetual reorganisation. In other words, the organism is first and foremost a totalisation, rather than a whole; the whole can only be a kind of self-regulation which perpetually brings with it this interiorisation as totalisation. Totalisation occurs through the integration of an outside that disturbs and changes, of which the hemianopic is an example. All in all, the whole is no different from the overall drive. The drive and need are one. We cannot say that there are needs first; there is one need, which is the organism itself as a requirement to survive. It is only afterwards that a complex dialectic with the outside, which we have not considered, leads to the specification of particular needs; at the outset the need is the maintenance of the whole.
Nevertheless, having-to-be requires that, internally, being is immediate presence, and permanently so, because it is immediate presence without distance, and subjectivity as a system of interiorisation does not involve any knowledge of itself however we consider it. You will say to me, ‘But consciousness exists!’ So it does; but, as we have seen, once consciousness is involved, subjectivity becomes objectivity.
The case of hemianopia involves an elementary behaviour. Let me now go a little further in showing how things develop at what is more usually thought of as the level of subjectivity, in the case of a very close friend, a past and present contributor to Les Temps modernes who was there at the beginning.4 There we were, about ten of us, trying to come up with a name for the journal. As you know, the aim was to adopt a critical position with regard to the French bourgeoisie and the right; we were of the left on principle, allied to left-wing forces, and we examined the world from that point of view, combining action with critique, in order to help change it. We needed an appropriate name, and this friend simply suggested Le Grabuge. This is a familiar French word that occurs in writings from the eighteenth century and means, we could say, ‘anarchic violence’. For example, if people in a café started to threaten each other, we could imagine bourgeois customers saying, ‘Let’s go, there’s going to be grabuge’. It is a word that evokes violence, blood and scandal—something that suddenly disrupts order. Subjectivity was immediately apparent in my friend’s suggestion and created a mismatch. Of course, we were against the bourgeois order and wanted to assist its liquidation and the establishment of a socialist order as far as we could, but 1945 was no longer the time to do it in the form of grabuge – which might also mean that my friend would walk naked down the Champs Élysées, certain as he was that any scandal would help to undo bourgeois consciousness.
This was the strange mismatch that I will try now to explain, to the extent that it reveals subjectivity. If we suppose that my friend is called Paul, no one who knows him and who heard what he said at the time could have failed to think, ‘That’s just like Paul!’ In other words, we all recognised him in this simple choice of a word. Why? First, because Paul is a former surrealist. He has moved away from surrealism, but he is nostalgic for it and, consequently, he is stuck in repetition. And, as Breton used to say, the simplest surrealist act is grabuge. You take a revolver and shoot someone at random – the act is scandalous, but also strictly individual, as destructive of yourself as it is of the other person. The surrealists got together when they were still young and cultivated this violence, which they continued to express, notably in verbal terms through literary and artistic scandals. However, none of them ever took a revolver and shot the first person he met in the street. Most of them have retained something of this; it is constantly refashioned and repeated in new circumstances. Long after surrealism, Paul would go into bars and insult someone, preferably a man much taller and stronger than him; he would end up on the floor for this act, having received a beating which deep down he did not fear – we could almost say he had gone looking for it. This is a manifestation of repetitive behaviour, not recognised as such, in response to an earlier conditioning that has been re-interiorised. This surrealist will always be a surrealist.
No doubt you could point out that other surrealists have had very different lives. Aragon, for example, has joined the Communist Party and is undoubtedly not the man to call a new journal Le Grabuge, but rather Concorde or something like that. This is a very particular situation, which must be interpreted as such. Of course, it relates to Paul’s social history, which he readily recounts, because he knows himself while also not recognising himself in his suggestion. He knows himself admirably well – indeed, he has written remarkable books about himself – yet when he said that, it did not occur to him that what he had written was coming to the surface. He was just thinking that he had chosen a good title for a journal.
Paul was and remains a petty bourgeois from a rich family, whose childhood – which it would take too long to describe – means that bourgeois life has a hold over him and suits him. He cannot really escape it; his education has given him a personal need for certain bourgeois attitudes, a certain bourgeois comfort, although at the same time he detests these things. He is in the classic position of what are called anarchists – not right-wing anarchists, because he is sincerely anti-bourgeois, but he also knows well that he is held back by a number of things. What is the action that he constantly repeats? The two aspects are inseparable. In 1920 Paul appeared at the top of the staircase in the Closerie des Lilas café in Montparnasse and cried out ‘Long live Germany! Down with France!’ This was definitely not a thing to shout in 1920. The people at the bottom of the stairs told him to come down, which he hastened to do, after which he spent three or four days in hospital. What was he doing? As far as he could, he destroyed bourgeois reality through scandal, and in so doing destroyed the bourgeois within himself, in an act of self-destructive, not to say suicidal violence. There is an element of that in grabuge.
This takes us still further into subjectivity. There was a moment, a few years after the Soviet revolution, when grabuge appeared to all parties on the left to be the best possible inclination for an intellectual. The bourgeoisie was very strong, the USSR was a newborn threatened on all sides, and both the Communists and later Trotsky himself were saying, for exactly the same reasons, ‘Your role as intellectuals is to destroy the bourgeoisie, to destroy it as an ideology. You are ideologues, so steal its words, provoke it with scandals!’ This attitude indisputably had tactical value in its day, around 1925–30, but it no longer has any meaning when the social problem and the international problem are posed in new terms. These days, analysis, study and discussion are more important than pure scandal in combating bourgeois forms of domination. But Paul has maintained a certain past, and it was this that led to his mismatched suggestion.
It was not only his own bourgeois reality, but the preservation of a tactic that had been valid in 1925, is no longer so today, and which he has not left behind; he is still attached to it, and that is where subjectivity lies. Moreover, he did not simply suggest one title among others; he suggested it as something that would commit us. I cannot imagine all the things we might have published if we had accepted it – the wildest articles on sexuality, pornography, articles advocating murder and so on – because the choice of a title like that would have signified that we did indeed want to perpetrate. This indicates that the exteriorisation of subjectivity implies something like giving it institutional form. If we had accepted Paul’s suggestion, his own person would have become, through that title, our shared obligation. It is quite a striking case: either Paul’s suggestion was adopted, and his subjectivity became a set of duties, or it was rejected, and this same subjectivity slipped into oblivion. As things turned out, we did not adopt it, because we knew what we were doing.
Let us imagine, however, that we had been looking uncertainly for something else. We could have sealed the journal’s fate by giving it a totally inappropriate title. It would be impossible for us now to publish, as we do, stories about torture in Algeria, for example, if we bore the name Grabuge. We would seem to be presenting such things to scandalise our readers, when we are presenting them so that all of this can be properly dealt with, so bringing the war in Algeria to an end. Conversely, advocates of grabuge cannot but rejoice at this war. In reality, Paul himself has gone beyond that: he is as hostile to the Algerian war in his actions as it is possible to be. But it remains the case that back then he projected himself and proposed that title because he was being the self he was and did not know. These are distinct moments. If, after the event, we had told him what his suggestion meant, he would no doubt have accepted what we said, but at the time he put forward objective arguments: ‘It will be more attractive to the public, it will express the negative side, and so forth.’ He certainly did not say, ‘I like it, and it’s what I want’. He did not say it because he did not know it.
This example offers us an opportunity to observe two traits describing subjectivity proper. For human beings there are several dimensions to subjectivity – subjectivity itself being ultimately their totalisation. First there is what is current, actuel. I would say, for example, that Paul’s class being has remained current, insofar as his class being, which is a particular way of rejecting the bourgeoisie while being unable to separate himself from it, is a constitutive element of his being that is not of the order of the past, but timeless; it truly is his class being, in other words, the form of his insertion into the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, his relationship to Surrealism is a relationship to the past because, after all, if he had not been involved in the Surrealist movement, if he had not at one time participated in a project that allowed him to satisfy his appetite for grabuge, he would not have felt it. So there are two dimensions of subjectivity that must be perpetually re-totalised, without their being known: the past and, at the same time, class being. We have to be our class being, we are not it. We have to be it, in the sense that we are it only in the form of perpetually deciding, subjectively, to be it.
At the same time, we have to be our past. To regard the past as a set of memories that it is always possible to evoke is to reduce it to something passive, a set of objects that are available to us and which we can line up before us. To this extent, the past is already no longer me; it is a quasi-me. But, for this past to exist all the time as the possibility of distancing oneself from it, it must be perpetually re-totalised. This implies that repetition is a constant in subjectivity. Because we endlessly re-totalise ourselves, we endlessly repeat ourselves. Paul never stopped repeating himself in this way, from the moment he cried ‘Long live Germany!’ at the Closerie des Lilas to the moment he suggested Grabuge, and indeed long after, in different circumstances. His past is there in its entirety, but in the mode of non-knowledge, non-consciousness, in the form of a necessary re-integration, and this past in turn is linked in a contradictory way to his class being. While his class being may lead him to be something else in different circumstances, the past, on the contrary, implies repetition.
Subjectivity appears as both repetitive being and inventive being. These two characteristics are inseparable, because Paul repeats himself in circumstances that are always new, and always projects the same being through inventiveness, in circumstances that are quite diferent. Because it is inventive to get yourself beaten up in the 1920s by shouting ‘Long live Germany!’ and it is also inventive to suggest calling the journal Grabuge. It is an adapted response – although the adaptation is not always successful – to new circumstances with a new inventiveness. The raw material, as it were, of the inventiveness is subjectivity itself. We will never recognise and understand what human inventiveness is if we assume it to be pure praxis, grounded in clear consciousness. Elements of ignorance are necessary to permit inventiveness. So we can say that subjectivity has two characteristics that are essential and contradictory. Through them human beings repeat themselves indefinitely, although they never stop innovating and, by this very fact, inventing themselves, since what they have invented reacts on themselves. Grabuge is at once repetition and inventiveness.
There is a third essential characteristic, however. This repetition-innovation within a particular, immediate relation, always transcendent to external being, is called projection. This means that what is essential in subjectivity is knowing oneself only outside, in one’s own inventiveness, and never inside. If subjectivity knows itself inside, it is dead; knowing itself outside it does indeed become an object, but an object in its results, and this leads us back to a subjectivity that is not really objectifiable.
Projective tests have meaning only if we assume that we constantly project ourselves into the object. A projective test is an answer to a question posed by an experimenter and the subject depicts himself totally in the answer or set of answers. But how could there be particular questions that lead the subject to depict himself entirely, if he did not depict himself entirely constantly and everywhere? We cannot think that the projective test is an exceptional situation. The clearest case is the Rorschach test, which consists of images showing shapes and colours with no definite structure, because it is for those who take the tests to provide a structure. In my own case, I saw absolutely obvious things in a Rorschach test but, as soon as they were compared to other interpretations, the objective perception of something obvious suddenly became weak and schematic – which is a curious experience that anyone can have in other circumstances but which is a constant in this case. The perception was the projection of my own personality, without my knowing what it meant, moreover; but where I saw genial human figures, another person saw cabbage leaves. Well, I realised that in fact you could see cabbage leaves. At once my brilliant characters, whom I still saw, became simply the impoverished outline of something in me. Which shows that subjectivity must be understood as perpetual projection, and to the extent that it is a mediation it can only be the projection of being within – en deça – onto being beyond.
This allows us to understand how subjectivity is indispensable to dialectical knowledge of the social. It is because there are only people – there are no great collective forms, as Durkheim and others imagined; and these people are obliged to be the mediation between themselves of forms of exteriority such as, for example, class being. As we said earlier, at every moment these people create a singularisation of class being, which is thus a singular universal, or a universal singularisation. In these conditions, it is at once something transformed by history and a structure that is indispensable to history because, at this level, we are no longer dealing with a being ‘below’, en deçà, as we were before. We are already at the more complex level of what, in Critique of Dialectical Reason, I called the practico-inert, in other words a quasi-totality in which matter always prevails over the person, insofar as it is itself mediation.
The being of a worker in a factory where there are automated machines, for example, is defined in advance. It exists, it is a particular place, not in the form of pure inertia, not in the form of the requirement of a being, but in the form of an inert requirement of the machine. Let us take a factory which, in the context of capitalism, is obliged to produce a particular amount to generate a particular profit. According to a particular norm, it uses a particular machine, which implies a particular human function and a particular wage. Supposing that the capitalist’s profit will be as high as possible, and that the machine is newly bought, a being is thus defined who is undoubtedly not yet current and, with her, the wage, the type of work – including the type of work-related illness – and, through her, an entire family. As I wrote in the Critique, a worker is defined not only by the type of inner reverie that the machine obliges her to have, but also by her pay, her illnesses, the number of children she has and so on.5 Certainly, along with exhausting work and pay, it allows her the possibility of having just so many children and not one more, unless she is to give them up to the social services. While all this is imposed in the manner of inert requirements, a world nevertheless begins to take shape in which people can struggle, come into conflict, deceive and dominate one another as soon as subjectivity has to take that turn – a être cela. The concrete social reality is not the machine but the person working at the machine, who is paid, gets married, has children and so on. In other words, worker or bourgeois, one has to be one’s social being and one has to be it in a way that is first and foremost subjective. This means that class consciousness is not a primitive given – far from it – and that, at the same time, one has to be it in the very conditions of work.
In another passage of the Critique, I cited an example to which, in concluding, I return, in order to show what I mean by this. Around 1880, one type of worker was defined in the clearest possible way by the universal lathe. This was a qualified worker who had done two years’ apprenticeship, took pride in his work and was surrounded by unskilled labourers. The machine defined him because once there is a universal machine,6 one that is not closely connected to particular functions and performs perfectly only if it is supervised, you need a man who can do that work, a trained technician. That is the first thing. You also define a certain number of beings around this qualified worker – men, or rather ‘sub-men’, unskilled workers who are denied any kind of qualification and are simply there to give him a tool, take the waste to the other end of the factory and so on.
From here, a certain type of social being had been created which had to be realised. It would be realised by the skilled worker, and that meant that subjectively he would accord particular value to his work. In place of a class struggle founded on the need that inspires ‘a humanism of need, as the direct hold of every man on all men’,7 as happens today, there was a time when value was conferred by work – real, intelligent, skilful work. In fact, in France at that time there were anarcho-syndicalist writings that seemed to say that it was less unjust to pay unskilled workers poverty wages than to pay skilled workers badly—in which they failed to grasp the problem of surplus-value. Above all—and rightly, moreover—they regarded themselves as the very foundation of society, seeing that they worked and made objects that others used, and were badly paid even though they did the most valuable work. They shared an aristocratic idea of work. Unskilled workers were poverty-stricken and should be helped, of course, but the injustice they suffered seemed less flagrant in that they had no skills. Thus, a certain way of experiencing the situation subjectively becomes established, which could not fail to go hand in hand with a position of prestige. Such positions had immediate importance in struggle, because more often than not these skilled workers were devoted to self-education; they read a lot in that epoch, despite the long working hours; they regarded themselves as the ones who would make the revolution, giving a lead to the unskilled and educating them.
We are dealing here with a kind of worker aristocracy; around them would gravitate the people who were to be helped and raised up but who, for the moment, really were inferiors within the context of the working class itself. This translated into the choice of a particular form of unionisation. When the time came to raise the issue of forming industrial unions, the skilled workers opted for craft-based organisation, because that would exclude the unskilled. Objectively, this gave rise to a particular kind of union struggle that was real enough at the time, because in practice it was enough for the skilled workforce in a factory – the minority – to go on strike for operations to cease, even if the unskilled majority wanted to go on working. The union practice of the time, the kind of self-valuing, the type of struggle and form of organisation, corresponded strictly to what those workers were, to what the machine was. We are not saying here that they were wrong or right: they were all that the universal lathe allowed them to be. It was in them, as their superiority; they interiorised it, and this interiorisation, or subjectivation, produced the whole phenomenon of anarcho-syndicalism.
This was not, as Lukács claims, because they did not grasp the totality of what the working class was and what its struggle was. On the contrary, because they were at the centre of production, they did grasp it as it was at that time. It is true that at that time they were far better qualified than the rest, but it is also true that this led to the development of yellow unions, an aristocracy of labour and a host of fairly aberrant secondary elements reflecting that conception, that interiorisation in the form of social superiority, which disappeared wherever work that required training was replaced by semi-automated, then automated machines. But in that epoch they could not have been expected to foresee the existence of such machines, practically and in their struggle. Of course, Marx described them in Capital, but he was a theorist, a leader of the International, not a worker who struggles at every instance of his life, someone who is formed by the machine and at the same time internally transforms it. Which means that class consciousness itself has its limits, which are the limits of the situation as long as that situation has not been completely revealed.
Should this lead us to describe this type of ‘class consciousness’ as empty? Should we decide that the anarcho-syndicalists were not the men required? On the contrary, it is because they were aware of their strength, their courage and their worth, because they established unions and specific forms of struggle, that other forms of struggle could emerge in the era when specialised workers appeared. In the course of struggle, the subjective moment, as a way of being inside the objective moment, is absolutely indispensable to the dialectical development of social life and the historical process.8
Translated by Trista Selous
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1The Holy Family, trans. R. Dixon, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956, p. 53.
2Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, p. 167.
3Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 106.
4The evidence suggests that this was Michel Leiris.
5Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, London: NLB, 1976, pp. 232ff.
6‘This means a machine – like the lathe in the second half of the nineteenth century – whose function remains indeterminate (in contrast to the specialized machines of automation and semi-automation), and which can do very different jobs provided it is guided, prepared and supervised by a skilful, expert worker’, Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 239.
7Ibid., p. 243.
8Trista Selous translated this lecture from Italian into French for publication by Editions les Prairies Ordinaires; this English rendering is based on that French translation.