‘At the entrance to science, as at the entrance to hell …’
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
The process of exposition is the arrangement of discourse following the strict movement of a scientific knowledge: not a movement of appearance, describing the emergence of the knowledge (as we know, Marx wanted a distinction made between the process of exposition and the process of investigation), but the different movement of the formulation of knowledge, a movement that must not be readily equated with the mechanical gesture of an ordering or classification,1 but an autonomous2 movement that has to be governed by its relationship to particular laws.
This process can be studied in its own movement: by recasting the process of the exposition, it is possible to see what conditions determine this exposition and what principles it objectively obeys.
Nevertheless, the problem thus posed remains far too wide: it is the classical one of the plan of Capital. Familiarity with this overall disposition is essential, and it seems to constitute a necessary preliminary to the reading of Capital. Yet it is itself not without a preliminary; paradoxically it depends on a reading made according to very different modalities. Before knowing how we move from one volume to the next, one chapter to the next, we have to know how to move from one word to the next, i.e., from one concept to the next (since in scientific discourse, words must be taken as concepts). This detailed reading cannot bear initially on the totality of the text, but only on one of its parts. Nor can this partial reading that we have to begin with be a reading of no matter what, an apprenticeship in reading from a sample taken at random. It will be, as a matter of principle, the reading of the beginning.
Posing the question of the process of exposition, in other words, amounts to making a detailed reading of the first section of Capital Volume One (pp. 125–31).
This transposition of the question must be justified. There are several essential reasons for it. To rapidly follow the path of these reasons, we can say that Marx gave a determining importance to the starting-point, that this distinction implies a certain conception and a certain practice of the nature of scientific exposition, demanding a way of writing, an original scientific style, that this writing demands a reading that conforms to it, and finally that this reading will be learned precisely from the starting-point.
The privilege of the starting-point is a characteristic of Marx’s method. Before explaining this privilege, accounting for it, it is right simply to recognize it. We know that Marx took quite special care over the first chapter of Capital: we find traces of this text already in the first drafts of A Contribution, and it was continually recommenced, corrected and worked on through to the final editions, to the point that we may ask whether it was genuinely finished: as if Marx had never finished with the beginning. But, as we shall see in due course, scientific discourse draws its value more from its actual incompletion than from its finished appearance.
The difficulty of putting an end to the beginning is not in any way due to the fact that everything has to be given in the beginning (so that the exposition then unfolds as if from a seed): an organic conception of discourse of this kind is completely foreign to the idea that Marx has of the establishing of knowledge. The beginning has the value of a setting: an arrangement of concepts and of method (analysis). This beginning has a two-fold inaugural value: it breaks with what precedes it (by bringing new concepts and new methods); but it differs also from what follows: the problem of the starting point is completely original; it illuminates for us the overall structure of the discourse, precisely because of its privileged position, thanks to which certain problems of method will be posed in a particular light.
All this implies a certain conception of scientific exposition, a certain practice of science. The choice to explain the beginning is also commanded by a certain idea of science: this explanation of Chapter 1, section 1 will be an epistemological explanation. What must be disclosed from the starting-point is not, as by a process of deduction, the continuation of Marx’s discourse, but something quite other: what precedes it, its preconditions.3 Thus, the question posed in this reading of a single section seems very simple: in what way is Marx’s discourse a scientific discourse? And can the mark of this be seen in the beginning?
This question is very difficult. It is impossible, in fact, to relate the exposition of Capital to an idea of science given elsewhere, something already independently determined. Rather, the idea of science from which the structure of the exposition follows is announced as a new idea, a beginning. Marx did not unfold a exposition on the basis of an accepted idea; he wanted both to constitute a certain idea of science and to realize a scientific discourse: the one thing did not come without the other, and it is clear that it could not be otherwise. That is why there can be no question of studying the process of exposition for itself, any more than it is possible to present separately and as a whole the conception and overall structure of Capital, and the Marxist theory of science. These theories go together with their practice; it is necessary to set out on the path of this practice to be able to trace that of the theory that alone makes it possible to account for this practice. In this way, we already see in what way Marx breaks with a certain conception, a classical presentation of science: no discourse on science before the discourse of science, but the two things together, which does not mean that they are merged.
The privileged value of the starting-point is then easily justified: it is here above all that it will be possible to distinguish (though not to separate) these two ‘things’ that necessarily go together, the theory and the practice of science.
Explaining the beginning, however, presupposes a method of reading. Which raises a new question: How to read a scientific discourse? How to read science in a discourse?
All scientific language is defined by its relationship to norms of validity; it is these norms that determine the forms of reading of this language. Against all economic techniques and ideologies, Marx himself presents Capital as a theoretical enterprise: the question is to know what are the norms in relation to which this theory is defined as a scientific theory, and to deduce from these norms one or several ways of entering into theory. A theoretical work, in fact, presupposes a mode of apprehension that is itself theoretical: in order for a scientific knowledge to be accepted, it is necessary first of all to identify the problems to which this knowledge is a response, and determine the conditions of this knowledge.
This programme, which has nothing in common with a theory of knowledge (something that pertains to a very particular domain, that of the problem of truth), has at present to be fulfilled by philosophers, as Althusser among others explains. But this task presupposes a very precise definition of the work of philosophers: ‘philosophy as condition of intelligibility of the very object of a science’. Philosophy is nothing other than knowledge of the history of sciences. Philosophers today are those who do the history of theories, and at the same time the theory of this history. The problematic of philosophy is thus two-fold, though not divided: philosophizing means studying in what conditions and on what conditions scientific problems are posed. For a materialist, these conditions are not purely theoretical: they are above all objective and practical.
Such a definition of philosophy is clearly not self-evident. It even seems to run against the traditional philosophical legacy. This is not just a question of appearance, but a situation of fact that expresses a necessity of right. What in fact has philosophy brought us up till now, not to resolve but to raise the problem of scientific problems?
In its classic form, which by and large means until the early nineteenth century, this problem was posed in terms of legality (ideal) and reality (natural): it was all a question of the relation established between these two terms, the manner in which (or rather the degree to which) they were identified with one another. The rigour of the demonstration was defined by the combination of the rational and the real, or by their confusion. Corresponding to this was the ideal of a geometrical mind, constructing an order of propositions in conformity with a natural order: ‘primitive’ propositions for the theorems developed: from the simple to the complex. The concepts of science were determined by their rationality and by their reality, and on this basis a whole philosophy of order was developed, defined by its claim to control by right the process of scientific knowledges, and its impotence in fact to resolve their problems. If a philosophy is historically significant, it is inasmuch as it makes it possible, through its specific difficulties, to determine this contradiction in a kind of material way. The classic use of the category of method gives a characteristic example of this type of philosophical problematic, which comes down to a badly posed problem: for Marx there is not and indeed cannot be any question of method as something separately posed.
Hegel’s logic may be viewed as the finished and final presentation of this philosophical logic: finished because it takes up the preconditions of this in their whole generality, and also because it resolves all problems, transforming these difficulties into answers. But, in this necessarily ultimate form, speculative philosophy acquires a new direction: it becomes a pure scientific ideology. Pascal, Descartes, Condillac and Kant all sought to lay down the conditions in which a certain state of science could be held to be definitive; by displaying in this way conditions that were necessarily insufficient, they tacitly allowed the possibility of different conditions to be transparently seen. The unambiguous resolution of conflicts effected by Hegel, on the other hand, makes a certain state of knowledge4 into an absolute system: contradictions are suppressed on the very basis of these contradictions.5 The dialectic can then be presented as the Advent and Good Friday of contradiction. Philosophy no longer has any function but to construct an image of the finished, the definitive.
Speculative philosophy, brought to an end in this way, in a grandiose putting to death, is in the end nothing more than a paradoxical travesty of science into ideology and technique: or rather, on the basis of a reversal of scientific knowledge into practical knowhow (science viewed as a set of results and acquisitions, placed and arranged along a single line), a travesty of this knowhow into cognition. It is the very ideology of a science (the necessary temptation that this has to see itself as finished) that passes for scientific knowledge, taking the place of a cognition whose absence it precisely marks, and masks.
Through this reversal, which makes difficulties of knowledge into solutions, transforming questions into responses, and presenting lack in terms of plenitude, all the classic problems of logic are not resolved but suppressed:
1) Nature divided from the concept is unified and reconciled in its very division: the rational is real. The unfolding of a rigorous exposition goes hand-in-hand with the production of its object. As a consequence (and not at the same time), the real is rational: the deduction of the concept is not at the same time deduction of the real. This symmetry is deceptive in its essence: it can only be said that at the same time as concepts are deduced fundamentally from the concept, the real is deduced from the concept (in the development of the concept, therefore, reality always intervenes by way of example and illustration). The rationality of the real is deduced from the rationality of the concept, which is its reality. Because rationality and reality are identified in the concept, the real is rational outside of the concept.
2) The problem of the starting-point is suppressed by the same occasion: real process and process of exposition are merged. It is equally possible to start from what is most internal to the concept and from what is most external to it (i.e., sensory experience): the sufficiency and insufficiency of the starting-point are equivalent preconditions for a resolution; in this way the transition is made from phenomenology to logic.
The classic problem of conformity, accordingly, the problem of the rightness of reasoning, is ‘dialecticized’, as the expression goes; by the effectiveness of the system of resolution, any order no matter what is natural.
With Marx, something essential happens in the history of sciences and in the theory of this history.6 On the occasion of the emergence of a new science, which, without rejecting the mathematical model, assigns it a completely new place (rather in the way that Spinoza takes up the more geometrico only to give it a new and original meaning), the conditions for a new problematic of science, for the first materialist problematic of science worthy of this name, are realized. Capital, in fact, marks the moment of a mutation at the level of the status of science itself.
Marx was aware that he was inaugurating a new form of exposition in economic science,7 one to which he gave the name of ‘method of analysis’ in his letter to La Châtre of 18 March 1872:
The method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous … There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 104).
The unfinished text of the Introduction to A Contribution to Political Economy (1857) gives us, if not the principles of this method, then at least its programme. Scientific rigour consists in the elimination of everything that would make it possible to confuse the real and the thought: the construction of a scientific exposition does not consist in finding a combination between the two, or in deducing one on the basis of the other, in other words of mixing them together. From the materialist standpoint, cognition is a determined effect of the process of the objective reality: it is not its ideal double. The question is then to know how a cognition is produced.
Making a science of economic reality means constructing an exposition by way of concepts; a theory is an arrangement of concepts into propositions, and of propositions into chains of propositions in a form of demonstration. The essential question, therefore, is not that of knowing whether to start from the real or to end up with it.8 What is necessary is to find the concepts and forms of reasoning that make it possible to formulate exact propositions; that is the question posed by all sciences at the moment when they embark on their particular path of rigour. It is no longer necessary, therefore, to ask whether concepts are real or whether the real is rational. The Hegelian maxim is not reversed, but rather eclipsed into this other one:
The real is real: dialectical materialism
The rational is rational: materialist dialectic
These two propositions are not subordinated to one another, they are identical, except inasmuch as they bear on different levels: the second is strictly subordinate to the first.
Science as such is a process of thought. It thus defines a form of exposition that is not to be confused either with the real process or with the process of investigation whose result it is. There is not a simple reversal, since the problem posed in this way is radically new (even if it has been resolved de facto in the practice of certain sciences): the question is to find instruments for thinking the material relations of the rationality of the concept and the reality of the real. Classical logic showed, exhibited, the conditions in which this problem could not be posed: Hegelian philosophy was designed to eliminate it. These relations must be thought in new concepts. The whole question is to know whether these concepts appear in person in Capital, or rather whether they begin to appear there.
If we have to learn to read Capital, it is to answer this question: in actual fact, we are accustomed to a Hegelian reading, which amounts to interpreting the concepts directly in terms of reality. This reading is not absolutely arbitrary, inasmuch as it does respond in a certain way to the problem that Marx posed for himself in order to write Capital: for a very long time, and still in 1858 (see the first drafts of A Contribution), he had to resist the temptation of a Hegelian writing, even while giving in to it. If Marx did indeed find the way to overcome this obstacle, this gives us by the same token the principle for a new reading. The question is to find in the letter of Marx’s text the conditions of a scientific writing: not only by studying the successive corrections (which are quite the opposite of pentimenti, rather the stages in a rigorous research), but in the arrangement of the definitive text.
The (paradoxical?) correlative of Hegelian ideology is a realist reading of scientific texts: by way of the concept, the content shows through. We read as if words were holes in the page through which reality surfaces; or again, skylights through which the real process can be studied in a kind of speculative voyeurism. This corresponds quite well, moreover, to the spontaneous scientific attitude, for which the only attraction of the concept is as a substitute for the thing itself.
In order to find the right path of the concept, it is necessary on the contrary to emphasize what in language does not risk being confused with a reality that scientific language excludes at the same time, reflecting it: what it must exclude, though clearly not abolish or suppress, in order to account for it.
What we then have to read is what a naïve reading leaves out of count as detritus: that which, not being directly real, nor in the place of the real, is considered simply as the instrument of a rationality, when beyond any confusion it pertains to the rational itself. Thus, instead of reading the words to see where they are deemed to have dropped anchor (ancre), or ink (encre), our interest will focus on the intermediaries, on those connections that are the very site of the demonstration, on the concepts that in this way materially determine the form of reasoning. Can these words, through which the meaning and rigour of the exposition pass, serve us as passwords?
Thus, beyond the traditional concern for an interpretation and an explanation, we have to leave aside what at first appearance seems the essential thing, the content,9 so as to attend, with a myopic attention, to the actual detail of the writing. This method is not very original, but it has probably not previously been applied to the reading of Capital. It consists in reading not with other eyes, but as if it was a completely different text, where what leaps to the eye is the very thing that the traditional regard casts aside as waste, and that thus escapes it (whereas this tradition believes it is assured of technical mastery). A reading of this kind is rigorous, i.e., it is not arbitrary, but no more is it exclusive. It is not the only possible reading of Capital, nor the best: it is, if you like, a provisional artifice that will make it possible to disclose, within the text, certain of the problems that Marx had to resolve in order to write it.
Moreover, to the two types of reading (reading of content and reading of form) there correspond two writings, both distinct and similar. Marx wrote Capital at two levels at the same time: the level of economic exposition (where the concepts are rigorous inasmuch as they conform to a defined scientific practice and make possible the appropriation of the real by thought); and the level of the instruments of exposition, the means of writing, which determine the conduct of the reasoning. This second level also possesses its concepts: the concepts of science, without which nothing can be either read or written, and which correspond to the theory of the preceding scientific practice (that which defines the first level). It is not a matter of saying that one or the other of these kinds of concepts is superior to the other (for example: that the concepts of content are the material of exposition, with those of the second level having only an ‘operational’, i.e., instrumental, value): we have to see that they necessarily go together, that no page of Capital would have existed without their collaboration or conflict.
In fact, if we study attentively the successive corrections, from the first sketch of A Contribution through to the last state of the text of Capital, we perceive that Marx, constantly resuming the exposition to give it a form that would never be definitive (since it always seems capable of being resumed), did the work of a scientific writer, with the page of writing as his perspective. We have to know how to make a page of reading correspond to this page of writing: in reading a piece of text, with eyes wide open, not to read between the lines, but to read what we are not accustomed to reading on these lines themselves, we have to try to see how the different levels, the different types of concepts, are materially arranged. Yet, the point is not to study a text taken at random, simply for its fragmentary value. On our hypothesis, it is the beginning, what is presented in the first pages, which must be the most significant, since it is perhaps here that scientific exposition experiences its roughest adventure: the entry into science.
This first section of Capital (Part One, Chapter 1, section 1), a literal explanation of which, as we have explained, is the point here, can be broken down into three parts of unequal importance. The unity of the text is conferred on it by the constancy of a unique method: we shall have to ask whether this unity is simple or complex, whether the method is as unique as it certainly would like to maintain. Taken as a whole, we shall say that Marx proceeds to an analysis that is successively applied to three objects: the analysis of wealth (the first four lines), the analysis of the commodity (to p. 127), the analysis of value. These three analyses have to be studied separately, which will necessarily lead to inquiring how the transition is made from one to another.