Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy

Within this suddenly changed environment, it seemed that Marx had something relevant to say. In Germany, sales of Das Kapital rose to levels not seen in decades. Reinhard Marx, Roman Catholic archbishop of Munich, issued his own protest against capitalism in a book called Das Kapital: Eine Streitschrift.² Even if Reinhard Marx—no relation to Karl—is interested mainly in moderating, and not overthrowing, capitalism through a renewal of Catholic humanism, he shares some of Karl Marx’s outrage at the effects of an unbridled market and his yearning for social justice. Although Reinhard Marx considered his book to be an argument against Marxism, it opens with a “letter” to his namesake. That opening, plus the intentional confusion created by the two Marxes and the two Das Kapitals, had the effect of putting Marx on the agenda as indispensable interlocutor. Marx’s return to public visibility reached what may be its climax when Time magazine published a story on Marx in early February 2009. Though it was only the European edition of February 2 that placed Marx’s image on the magazine cover, the article asked what Marx might have to say about the economic crisis. The answers were predictably trite, but the mere fact that Marx was presented not as the godless enemy of liberty but as a potential source of insight was itself striking. In light of this reversal of Marx’s fortunes, one must agree with various commentators who have ventured that Marx may have been wrong about communism, but he may have been right about capitalism.

Yet that proposition itself suggests the real situation of Marxism: the possibility that Marx may speak again to an age that has discovered anew the fragility and inequity of capitalism coupled with the complete collapse of the political alternative that Marx had envisioned. Indeed, it may be that the mainstream media has been willing to invoke Marx precisely because he no longer represents something positive, some other possibility. Shorn of this dimension of radical otherness, Marx becomes a marker within a discourse of contradiction that capitalism has fully absorbed into its own self-referential cosmos. It is not just that the communist experiment in the twentieth century proved to be such a tragic failure that political projects aligned with Marxism have lost credibility, whatever the distance between Marx and the regimes that ruled in his name. The romance with revolution has evaporated, and along with it the fear of revolution—at least in Europe and North America, as both the left and right have come to acknowledge the complex and resilient structures of the existing social order. Insofar as governments in late 2008 began pouring billions of dollars into the economy, they did so partly in order to rescue capitalism from its own excesses and partly to alleviate the misery inflicted on millions of people. But they did not do so to avert revolutionary upheaval. Even the surprising return of popular protest in 2011 does not contradict this assertion. The rebellions that overturned regimes in parts of the Arab world objected to authoritarian governance, but not to the regime of private property and the capitalist structuring of the economy. Likewise, Occupy Wall Street, which spread from New York to other cities in America and Europe in the autumn of 2011, objected to what many Americans deemed an excessive and unbearable level of economic inequality and the corporate manipulation of democratic politics. But the Occupy movement rebelled against a certain kind of capitalism, not against capitalism as such. Undoubtedly, the paranoid use of police force to contain the occupiers and eventually expel them from their encampments would seem to lend new credibility to Marx’s view of the bourgeois state as the guardian of private property, but a Marxist call for revolution could not be counted even as a minor key in the chorus of protests rising from the Occupy movement.

The intellectual underpinnings of Marxism have also crumbled. Gone is belief in a dialectic objectively operating in history and with it the primacy once assigned to class as both the bedrock of social analysis and the agent of historical change. That in turn has dealt a death blow to the old Marxist, and especially Marxist-Leninist, belief in the unity of theory and praxis, a belief that assigned a central role to revolutionary intellectuals. Even as affirmative an assessment as that of Göran Therborn, whose panoramic survey of contemporary leftist politics and intellectual activity certainly supports his claim that “left-wing intellectual creativity has not ceased,” concedes that “its greatest moments may have passed.” Speculating on the future, Therborn writes, “Twenty-first-century anti-capitalist resisters and critics are unlikely to forget the socialist and communist horizons of the past two hundred years. But whether they will see the dawn of a different future in the same colours is uncertain, perhaps even improbable. New cohorts of anticapitalist social scientists will certainly emerge, and many will read Marx, but it may be doubted whether many will find it meaningful to call themselves Marxists.”3

So back to the general situation: the economic catastrophe of 2008 led more people to renewed recognition that capitalism is a problematic system. But if Marx may have been even partly right about capitalism, he was entirely wrong about communism. Which means that we are still left with the gaping hole where the Marxist political project used to stand. This book is concerned with several important attempts to address that gaping hole, that empty place.

People reflexively turn to symbols to organize their historical experience, and it is conventional to date the end of communism in November 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Of course, more sophisticated political histories challenge the simplicity of that symbol of the “end” with analyses of a process that stretches back before 1989 and, in various ways, projects forward beyond 1989. Likewise with the history of Marxism’s collapse as an intellectual system. I was in Berlin when the wall fell, having recently arrived there to begin research on a dissertation concerned with Marx and the Left Hegelians. A week or so after the great event, one of my friends asked me if my topic wasn’t beating a dead horse. The question had occurred to me, but ultimately I never felt undone by history, unlike a hapless West German acquaintance who had submitted a massive Habilitationsschrift on East German property law to the law faculty of the Free University just days before the collapse of the regime. For one thing, I was already convinced that Marx was “for the ages,” an unavoidable and indispensable part of history and, much as he would loathe such a description, a classic within the philosophical tradition. But, more importantly, it did not require the fall of the Berlin Wall to alert me to the weaknesses and deeply problematic status of Marxist thought. At the time, I would have been hard-pressed to reconstruct a satisfying genealogy of my own intellectual distance from Marxism, but I was more or less aware that I was an inheritor of a longer historical process whereby Marxism’s hold on left-wing intellectuals had steadily weakened.

The collapse of Marxism as the dominant paradigm of progressive intellectuals was, perhaps, nowhere felt more profoundly than in France. After all, the collapse dramatically reversed the elevated status that Marxism had enjoyed among French intellectuals after World War II. That prominence was the outcome of a confluence of circumstances: the politicization of intellectuals during the Second World War; the prestige of the Soviet Union, which was seen as the country that had borne the brunt of Nazi furor, turned the war’s tide at Stalingrad and shared the greatest credit for the Allied victory; the success of the postwar communist left in grafting itself to the memory of the Resistance; the widespread conviction that the Bolshevik Revolution was the legitimate heir to Jacobinism; the more or less contingent fact that a number of particularly gifted intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir chose to champion Marxism. The power of Marxism lasted right up to 1968, and then it began to unravel. Corresponding to the intensity of the experience of Marxism’s collapse was the vigor with which certain French intellectuals have sought new paradigms of radical thought beyond Marxism. These efforts extend also to non-French thinkers who have heavily drawn upon the resources of French thought. The mere fact that French intellectuals experienced the fall of Marxism in a particularly intense way would not be enough to justify my decision to concentrate so heavily on this French and French-inflected discourse. After all, the intellectual crisis of Marxism has international dimensions, which could embrace an enormous cast of characters ranging from Jürgen Habermas to Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst, and Judith Butler, to name just a few; moreover, a narrative of the crisis could encompass much of the twentieth century, as Stuart Sim implies when he chooses to title a chapter of his history of post-Marxism “Post-Marxism Before Post-Marxism: Luxemburg to the Frankfurt School.”4

What makes the French case so powerful and influential is the fact that the collapse of Marxism coincided with a larger phenomenon of radical skepticism. This has gone under various rubrics, none of them entirely satisfying: French theory, poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism. The general contours are too familiar to detain us here. The point is that from the heyday of structuralism in the 1960s and on through the works of Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Deleuze, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Kristeva, and numerous others, French thinkers waged a highly influential attack on the rational norms, transcendental grounds, and metanarratives that had provided the foundations for modern philosophical discourse. This unrelieved skepticism contributed significantly to the undermining of the philosophical grounds of Marxism. The epistemological realism that had dominated Marxist thought collapsed as radical constructivism dissolved the “real” referent of “class” and “society” into the fluid of language; belief in the meaningful structure of history, the modern metanarrative of emancipation, gave way to an acute awareness of historical contingency; totalizing styles of thought yielded to the fragmentary; unity yielded to heterogeneity, identity to difference, dialectical development to indeterminate ruptures; Hegel and Marx lost ground to Nietzsche and Heidegger; the very idea of emancipation seemed imperiled by the critique of the subject and the “humanism” that had allegedly dominated the West since the advent of the modern period.5

Did these shifts in the intellectual landscape precipitate the crisis of Marxism, or were they symptoms of that crisis? That question is, in the end, unanswerable in any strict sense, yet, whether as cause, symptom, or both, the larger intellectual context of the collapse of Marxism in France has also complicated the search for alternatives. This quest typically involved a return to political philosophy, rejection of the totalitarian legacy of really existing socialism, a self-critique of intellectuals’ evident attraction to totalizing styles of thought per se, and a turn toward open models of democracy. Yet the same widespread skepticism about the foundational discourses of modern politics that shook Marxism to its core makes it impossible to return to a naive conception of democracy. As Marcel Gauchet described the situation in 1988, “The more we are led to acknowledge a universal validity to the principles of Western modernity, the less we are able to ground them in a history of progress of which they represent the fulfillment.”⁶ In the context of this convergence of Marxism’s eclipse and the decline of foundational principles, what are the prospects for regenerating critical social and political philosophy beyond the Marxist framework? What are the possibilities of creating and sustaining a positive emancipatory project?

This book explores these questions through a series of historically and philosophically informed studies of several major thinkers who confront us with contrasting approaches to the challenges of political philosophy in the postfoundational and post-Marxist context. These figures include Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek. Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis played crucial roles in the so-called return of political philosophy in 1980s France. Decades earlier, in 1948, the two founded the group and journal Socialisme ou Barbarie. A Greek leftist forced into exile in Paris after World War II, Castoriadis strove to rethink revolutionary politics as the “project of autonomy”; his exertions led to an increasingly deep critique of the Western philosophical tradition and an exploration of the “social imaginary” as the source of radical creativity in history. Claude Lefort broke with Socialisme ou Barbarie in the late 1950s and went on to write highly influential works on the nature of modern democracy and totalitarianism. Unlike Castoriadis, who avowed the revolutionary project right up to his death in December 1997, Lefort rejected the idea of a revolutionary transformation of society; his embrace of pluralism and, in the 1980s, the politics of human rights could seem to mark him as a liberal centrist. But, in fact, his mature theory involved a robust conception of democracy and, indeed, of the social basis of rights, which cannot be subordinated to liberalism. Accordingly, his theory could and did inspire radical democratic projects. But in an attenuated form, it could also nurture a more conservative project, as we will see in the trajectory of Lefort’s student, Marcel Gauchet. Gauchet teaches philosophy at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and is head of the journal Le Débat. He rose to significance through an impressive oeuvre investigating political power, subjectivity and psychoanalysis, and the relationship of modern democracy to religion. Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek are not French, but their engagement with French thought is so deep that in many ways they represent the continuation of certain French trajectories. Laclau, an Argentine who has taught mainly at Essex, England, and his wife, Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian who has also made a career in England, are best known for their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Since then, Laclau has attempted to place the central concepts of that important book—hegemony, antagonism, and radical democracy—into an explicitly universalist frame. Laclau’s conviction that the future of the left depends on rediscovering a dimension of universality beyond postmodern identity politics is shared by Žižek, though they have developed sharply conflicting visions of what that dimension might be. The prolific theorist from Slovenia has come to occupy a position of almost unrivaled international visibility through a cascade of works, with trademark leaps between philosophy and popular culture and an idiosyncratic synthesis of Hegel and Lacan. If Žižek began as a supporter of Laclau and Mouffe, the final chapter will trace Žižek’s rejection of the post-Marxist project and his return to an equally idiosyncratic and deeply problematic revolutionary language.

The group at the heart of this book does not form a school or a movement. The differences that divide them are at least as important and interesting as the commonalities that unite them. But there are commonalities. Two recent books suggest possible ways of understanding these. Oliver Marchart groups Lefort and Laclau together with Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy under the rubric of Post-Foundational Political Thought.7 Yannis Stavrakakis, building on an analogy to the Hegelian left, groups Castoriadis, Laclau, and Žižek, along with Badiou, in his book The Lacanian Left.⁸ Certainly, all the figures I will concentrate on are postfoundational; they all participated in and have been shaped by the larger intellectual context I have already sketched. Likewise, Jacques Lacan is an important point of reference for all the figures under discussion. Indeed, Lacanian thought undoubtedly provides one of the master keys to late twentieth-century thought in France and beyond, as we shall see in the chapters that follow. Yet the idea of grouping the figures of this book under the name Lacanian left is unsettling. Consider Stavrakakis’s analogy to the Hegelian left of the 1840s. Figures like Ludwig Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauss, and Bruno Bauer were fully converted to Hegel’s teachings in their youth. Each of their trajectories involves a passage through youthful encounter, conversion, growing doubt, and apostasy; at the crucial stages along this path, even after explicitly breaking with Hegel, Hegelianism remained the crucial template for their thought. By contrast, Lacan’s role in the history of post-Marxism is much more varied. Castoriadis and Lefort both read Lacan as mature thinkers. In Castoriadis’s case a brief period of openness to Lacanian ideas was followed by polemical rejection; it is true, as we will explore in detail, that Castoriadis’s ideas formed partly through this critical engagement with Lacan, but a negative abreaction does not qualify Castoriadis for inclusion in any form of Lacanian left, however attenuated that membership may be construed. Lacanian ideas play a more positive role in both Lefort and Gauchet, but by no means is Lacanianism the determinative force. Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy draws on Lacan, but only as one among numerous theoretical resources. Laclau’s subsequent work more explicitly engages Lacan, but even Stavrakakis acknowledges that Laclau’s appropriation of Lacan is quite selective.⁹ That would leave Slavoj Žižek. Žižek is probably the world’s most prominent proponent of Lacanian ideas, and there is scarcely a page in Žižek’s oeuvre that doesn’t mention Lacan. Yet, even here, one of the best books on Žižek claims, perhaps perversely, that, for Žižek, Lacan is a machine for reading Hegel.¹⁰

Behind the shared reference to Lacan is a factor that operates more loosely and broadly, but is at the core of what unites this diverse group. That is, in one way or another, they each turned away from Marx’s ontological assumptions—Marxism’s belief that society is grounded upon the material foundation of economic life. In place of Marxism’s ontological and epistemological realism, each of these thinkers turns toward the sphere of representation; contrary to Marx’s belief that symbolic forms belong to the superstructure, they each adhere to the basic notion that the social world is constituted as a symbolic order. In this sense, they participate in one of the most fundamental tendencies of modern French thought; indeed, as Alain Caillé suggests, “the bulk of the liveliest French thought of the postwar period gravitates around this notion of symbolism.”¹¹ This is a trajectory with a complicated genealogy, reaching from poststructuralist figures like Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Baudrillard back through structuralist thinkers like Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss to interwar figures like Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, the Collège de sociologie, and the surrealists to Marcel Mauss, Émile Durkheim, and Ferdinand Saussure.

The sea change that transformed almost every aspect of the social sciences and humanities in France after World War II usually goes under the name the linguistic turn. It is a commonplace that Claude Lévi-Strauss, the key figure steering postwar French thought toward a preoccupation with the symbolic, conceived structural anthropology on the linguistic model pioneered by Saussure, Jakobson, Greimas, and others. Building on Saussure’s exclusion of the historical dimension of language in order to establish a synchronic science of language as a system, Lévi-Strauss defined the symbolic as a closed order of social representations that form a system, the function of which is to render the perception of the world coherent by superimposing on the continuum of reality a grid of taxonomic oppositions and syntagmatic associations.12 Likewise, Lévi-Strauss drew heavily from Saussure’s semiological principle, in which linguistic values emerge through differential relations among signs. Linguistics, as Marcel Hénaffwrites, opened for Lévi-Strauss a new approach to the study of myth, indeed of all cultural systems: “what is important is not the figures or themes as such but the system of their differences, of their reciprocal relations.”¹³ Accordingly, Lévi-Strauss and those directly influenced by him studied symbolism as a code, as an invariant structure, at the expense of acts of speech within living contexts.

Ever since Lévi-Strauss hammered out this new paradigm, critics have objected that the linguistic model employed by Lévi-Strauss and his followers is at best a loose and partly metaphorical borrowing from the tradition of structural linguistics and at worst a gross distortion of scientific linguistics.¹⁴ In light of these objections to the dubious precision of the linguistic model in post-1945 thought, I would propose the term symbolic turn as a better description of the loose set of affiliated ideas and approaches that characterize a broad range of thinkers who have stressed the noncorrespondence of words and things, the nontransparency of language, and the power of signs to constitute the things they purportedly represent. The notion of a symbolic turn gains further credibility if we bear in mind the relationship of French structuralism and its heirs to wider currents of twentieth-century thought, such as both Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, phenomenology, nonstructuralist anthropology, and philosophical anthropology. Whether we are speaking of Freud, Jung, or Cassirer, they may have considered language to be the primary medium of symbolization, but not the only one.¹⁵ Moreover, the broader twentieth-century fascination with the symbolic did not categorically reduce the symbolic to the model of semiological value embraced by Lévi-Strauss. The greatest advantage in emphasizing the symbolic in the sea change of twentieth-century thought is one that is central to this book: namely, that the attempt to reduce the symbolic to the structural linguistic model was doomed to fail not only because it provoked external opposition but also because every theory of the symbolic, including that of structuralism, mobilizes a polyvalent range of meanings that cannot be fully mastered. To speak of the symbolic turn thus brings us back from the deliberate reductionism that was a core strategy of almost all the variants of the twentieth-century linguistic turn.¹⁶

For thinkers oriented toward radical politics yet convinced of the inadequacy of existing models, the symbolic construction of the sociopolitical world offered an irresistible way out of the perceived reductionism of Marxism. However, it also posed a difficult challenge. For the influential model that took shape in the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan privileged a transcendent symbolic order standing over and above contextualized speech, intentions, actions, and events. The symbolic order, always already there before our speech, leaves little room for classically modern (including Marxist) ideas about the autonomous human subject and the potentiality of human creativity. Moreover, structuralism’s heavy emphasis upon the synchronic operations of a closed system makes it exceedingly difficult to conceptualize historical change as a dialectical process. To be sure, the structuralist model of the symbolic, rooted in linguistics, structural anthropology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, provided Louis Althusser with the conceptual tools for his short-lived though influential attempt to rethink Marxism from within; the same is more or less true of Jean Baudrillard in the period when he wrote For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972). Elements of this model even helped to shape the post-Marxist thought of Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek. Nonetheless, the version of the symbolic turn inherited from the structuralist era was as much an obstacle as a vehicle for the various political projects to be discussed in this book. The structuralist understanding of the symbolic is incapable of conceiving forms of critical thought and action that could disrupt hegemonic ideological forms, as structuralism takes these to be constitutive of our subjectivity itself.

Post-Marxism involves a confrontation between the relatively rigid semiotic concept of the symbolic order and looser, less formulaic and less deterministic ideas of the symbolic. These more open concepts tap the complicated legacy of the symbolic turn, a history with roots deeper than the twentieth century. The polyvalence of the concept of the symbolic opens up the terrain of post-Marxism: on one hand, the view of the symbolic as a “gargantuan” matrix, a ubiquitous ideological grid.17 On the other hand, the symbolic draws on roots in aesthetic and religious thought to indicate a special kind of representation, a representational form that oscillates between creating a certain kind of presence and remaining permanently flawed, shot through with that which it is not and cannot be. Viewed in this way, the symbolic opens the possibility for reorienting critical theory toward radical democracy, conceptualizing the power of symbols to body forth ideas, while at the same time viewing the social space as open and unmasterable. These conceptions of the symbolic overlap and frequently conflict in the course of radical thought in the aftermath of Marxism. The notion of the symbolic is too polyvalent, and the uses to which it has been put too diverse, to permit singular definitions or solutions or a singular line of development. Rather, from the basic problem, we encounter a series of variations on its theme; the original problematic is never wholly overcome, but by following the peregrinations of the concept we may gain a better understanding of that problematic, its history, and its possible implications for contemporary theory and practice.

In brief, I believe that the history of post-Marxism should be narrated as an adventure, as the adventure of the symbolic. In the early 1950s, when Maurice Merleau-Ponty set out to chart the course of Marxism in the twentieth century, he titled his important book Adventures of the Dialectic. In echoing Merleau-Ponty, I want to suggest the analogous need to mark out the course of post-Marxism. But I also want to highlight yet another ambiguity in the history being explored here. What is, in fact, the relationship between the dialectic and the symbolic? To judge from Lévi-Strauss’s searing criticisms of Jean-Paul Sartre’s version of Hegelian Marxism, the symbolic, conceived as an invariant code, is the opposite of the dialectic.18 Then again, the notion of semiotic value is strictly relational, and that might suggest dialectics; but semiotic value seems to lack the dynamic transformative relationships characteristic of dialectical thought. Consider the fact that several writers, including Lacan, lay stress on one of the earliest meanings of the word symbol, sumbolon, which means bringing together. Lacan refers to the Greek word tessera, which denotes tokens such as two halves of a broken piece of pottery that allowed initiates of early mystery religions to recognize each other.¹⁹ The structuralist symbolic is a form of social contract, as Lévi-Strauss made clear in his sense of affinity with Rousseau, Lacan in his claim that “symbol means pact.”²⁰ The ancient meaning of symbol thus has the implication of a union, or more precisely of reunion, insofar as we take the notion of the sumbolon seriously.²¹ This idea of (re)union thus returns us to the function of a code, of an established system of meaning, not to the idea of union as a dynamically transformative process. If we extend the definition of symbolic beyond structuralism, to consider the symbolic as a flawed form that is in permanent tension with that which it purports to represent, then we may also see it as a nondialectical form. Certainly, the young Jean Baudrillard saw in the symbolic a form of heterogeneity that resists dialectical resolution. We encounter Ernesto Laclau contrasting his concept of “antagonism,” which he takes as a form of radical difference, to dialectics: “dialectical transitions are not only compatible with contradiction but have to rely on contradiction as the condition of their unity within a homogeneous space,” he writes.²² A similar resistance to the dialectical movement of contradiction and reconciliation is a powerful motif in Castoriadis, who turned sharply against the determinism that he believed was intrinsic to dialectical form.

So there are grounds for seeing the post-Marxist symbolic turn as a move against dialectical thought. Conversely, the question of the dialectic does not disappear. Žižek, for example, rejects the “postmodern doxa” concerning the “illusion of the Hegelian Aufhebung (‘sublation’: negation-conservation-elevation).”²³ In Žižek’s unconventional reading, Hegel is a philosopher of contingency, and the dialectic rests on a radical negativity that undoes the imaginary drive to wholeness. Moreover, for Žižek, the symbolic itself is the proper place of the dialectic, not only because the symbolic involves an endless series of mediated interactions but also because it is always in relation to that which exceeds it. Lacan’s position on the dialectic is itself divided. On the one side, he frequently attacks the Hegelian dialectic: “this dialectic,” he writes in an exemplary passage, “is convergent and proceeds to the conjuncture defined as absolute knowledge. As it is defined, this conjuncture can only be the conjunction of the symbolic with a real from which nothing more can be expected.”²⁴ On the other side, he continually construes his own work as dialectical, whether we speak of his interwar openness to the Hegelian dialectic of recognition, his 1950s and 1960s structuralist emphasis upon the workings of the symbolic, or his later stress on the agonistic relationship between the symbolic and the real. Even his view of the decentered subject involves a dialectic that disjunctively relates structure and subject.²⁵ Indeed, he pointedly contrasts this view to “the antidialectical mentality of a culture which, dominated as it is by objectifying ends, tends to reduce all subjective activity to the ego’s being.”²⁶ We could pursue the roots of this open, nontotalizing dialectic back and back, at least to the early German Romantics, where we find Friedrich Schlegel defending dialectic as an “eternal determination by a never-ending separation and combination.” This is a dialectic, sustained by irony, that does not settle into sedimented truth: “The actual dialectic has always been in play around necessity and freedom, the highest good, etc. Here irony is one and all.”²⁷

The complex relationship between the dialectic and the symbolic is heightened when we remember that Merleau-Ponty himself turns to the symbolic as a way of rescuing the dialectic from the vulgar, mechanical Marxism that had come to dominate twentieth-century communism. Repeatedly, Adventures of the Dialectic returns to Marx’s description of the economic apparatus as “a relationship between persons mediated by things.” “This order of ‘things’ which teaches ‘relationships between persons,’ sensitive to the heavy conditions which bind it to the order of nature, open to all that personal life can invent, is, in modern language, the sphere of symbolism, and Marx’s thought was to find its outlet here. The Marxist orthodoxy, however, does not frankly consider the problem.”28 Speaking of this “interworld” of “history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made,” in which all action is symbolic, Merleau-Ponty draws large conclusions for Marxists trying to break out of the rigid base-superstructure model and conceive a more flexible relationship between theory and practice: “If politics is not immediate and total responsibility [contra Sartre], if it consists in tracing a line in the obscurity of historical symbolism, then it too is a craft and has its technique. Politics and culture are reunited, not because they are completely congruent or because they both adhere to the event, but because the symbols of each order have echoes, correspondences, and effects of induction in the other.”²⁹

Adventures of the Dialectic traces this view of the symbolic back through Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch to the interpretive sociology of Max Weber. But, in other work written in the 1950s, Merleau-Ponty located his thinking about the symbolic in a French trajectory stemming from the two roots of Ferdinand Saussure and Marcel Mauss. Already, in a 1951 essay, he embraced Saussure’s thesis that language’s “expressive value is not the sum of the expressive values which allegedly belong individually to each element of the ‘verbal chain.’”³⁰ This enthusiasm for Saussure dovetailed with his friendship with Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a 1960 essay Merleau-Ponty drew a direct link between Lévi-Strauss and Mauss, whose notion of the total social fact is “no longer a massive reality but an efficacious system of symbols or a network of symbolic values.”³¹ Titling this essay “From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss,” Merleau-Ponty explicitly endorsed Lévi-Strauss’s own effort to legitimate his program by leaning on Mauss’s claim that anthropology should learn from linguistics.

Lévi-Strauss’s Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (1950) served as something of a manifesto for the new structuralist agenda, laying out its main premises in rapid succession. First, although people may use symbols consciously, the symbolic functions primarily unconsciously. Consistent with the thrust of structural linguistics, Lévi-Strauss avoided recourse to the conscious speaking subject, emphasizing instead the unconscious operation of structure. Lévi-Strauss’s “unconscious” is not to be confused with Freud’s, for it is without personal affect, content, or historicity. It is an empty site where the symbolic function takes place. This view of the unconscious undergirded Lacan’s famous return to Freud, but Lacan’s distance from conventional Freudianism can be measured by an exchange with the philosopher Jean Hyppolite. When Hyppolite attended Lacan’s seminar in 1952–1953, he remarked, “The symbolic function is for you, if I understand you correctly, a transcendent function.” Lacan’s reply was that the transcendence he had in mind was that of an implacable ideal machine.32 In certain ways, Lévi-Strauss’s move built on Mauss. After all, in a 1924 lecture on psychology and sociology, Mauss had argued that the two disciplines came together in the idea of the symbolic, and he had granted that in symbolic communication “the layer of individual consciousness is very thin.”³³ However, Lévi-Strauss’s much more radical insistence on the emptiness of the unconscious can be seen in his critique of Mauss’s attempt to explain mana, the intense power residing in the symbolic objects circulated within the economy of the gift. Lévi-Strauss condemned Mauss’s idea of an “emotional-mystical” cement holding together the symbolic system as offering nothing more than the self-understanding of the participants, and instead he emphasized the relationships produced by the interactions of the system’s elements.³⁴

This rejection of any sort of depth model and insistence on explanation at the level of the symbolic itself was fully consistent with a second of Lévi-Strauss’s major premises. Radicalizing Durkheim’s insistence that society is sui generis, Lévi-Strauss insisted on a radical discontinuity between the symbolic order and other levels of reality: “Like language, the social is an autonomous reality (the same one, moreover); symbols are more real than what they symbolize, the signifier precedes and determines the signified.” For Lévi-Strauss, “it is not a matter of translating an extrinsic given into symbols, but of reducing to their nature as a symbolic system things which never fall outside that system except to fall straight into incommunicability.”35 This raises a final point. Again in keeping with the paradigm of structural linguistics, the symbolic system is to be understood in strictly relational terms. Meanings are created through differential relations between the terms of the system. These relations are transferable, substitutable, comparable, and reducible. Thus Lévi-Strauss’s repeated insistence that symbolic operations can ultimately be reduced to a small number; hence his frequently expressed interest in “combinatorial analysis” within modern mathematics and his desire to mathematize the field of ethnography.³⁶

In the definitive study of Mauss’s concept of the symbolic, Camille Tarot does not deny affinities between Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, but he does severely qualify them. Mauss developed his thinking about the sociological role of the symbolic in close collaboration with his uncle, Émile Durkheim, whose Elementary Forms of the Religious Life contains the claim that “social life, under all its aspects and all the moments of its history, is possible only thanks to a vast symbolism.”³⁷ In his 1924 lecture on psychology and sociology, Mauss depicted his ideas modestly as a collaboration with his uncle: “It is a long time now since Durkheim and I began teaching that communion and communication between men are possible only by symbols, by common signs, permanent ones, external to individual mental states which are quite simply sequential, by signs of groups of states subsequently taken for realities.”³⁸ True as that image of cooperation is, Mauss departed from Durkheim in important ways. Durkheim ultimately subordinated symbolic forms to a realist ontology, in which symbols are seen as representations of an anterior social reality. Hence, Tarot maintains that Durkheim treated symbols as allegories to be deciphered in order to expose their reference to reality.³⁹ Far from offering to “decode” symbols, Mauss emphasized their polyvalent meanings and multiple associations. Again, unlike Durkheim, Mauss did not locate the epistemological value of symbols in their capacity to “represent” society, but rather in their capacity to create the order, relation, and bonds of society. Mauss’s final refusal to decipher symbols points to his most basic innovation, namely his shift from individual symbols to symbolic systems. In Mauss’s classic essay The Gift, gestures and objects signify more than they are worth, or rather, are worth only what they signify.⁴⁰ Mauss is not interested in deciphering isolated elements of this exchange of symbolic goods, but in the dynamic exploration of relations that are generated and mediated by the symbolic system. As Camille Tarot writes, “The symbolic is this concatenation of symbols, their structure in a network. The symbolic is the death of the isolated symbol.”⁴¹

Tarot presents Mauss as the pioneer within the French context of an understanding of society as a symbolic construction. But, while he acknowledges Mauss’s influence on structuralism, he also insists on distance. Mauss’s own understanding of language was rooted in Sanskrit studies and the nineteenth-century philological tradition in which he had been educated. Regarding Ferdinand Saussure’s new synchronic approach to language, Tarot finds that Mauss was skeptical and reserved. He had doubts about Saussure’s insistence upon an abstract linguistics removed from sociology.42 And indeed, Saussure distinguished between “symbols” as motivated signs and arbitrary “signs.” Only the arbitrary sign could be the basis for the science of semiology; the motivated sign is too ambiguous, too polyvalent, and too social to play anything but a minor role in semiology. “From the instant at which a symbol becomes a symbol,” wrote Saussure, “which is to say, from the instant at which it becomes immersed in the social mass which at any given moment establishes its value, its identity can never be fixed.”⁴³ The complex social life of the symbolic was precisely what attracted Mauss, and this is, for Tarot, the ultimate distinction between Mauss and structuralism.⁴⁴

Tarot’s insistence that Durkheim’s approach to the symbolic was ultimately allegorical leads him to draw a contrast between Mauss and Durkheim. Mauss maintained that symbols are irreducibly complex. They are polysemic and always open to interpretation, as Saussure acknowledged in the act of pushing symbols to the margins of his linguistic science. Moreover, Mauss recognized that a singular and uniform concept of the symbolic could not be achieved: the concept could not be rendered transparent, but it nonetheless remained essential.⁴⁵ As Daniel Fabre has argued, it was important for the subsequent history of the concept of the symbolic that Mauss did not enclose it in a single definition, but stressed the interplay of arbitrary and motivated symbols, polysemy, the relational values of symbolic systems, and the capacity of symbols not only to possess plural meanings but also to produce chains of associations.⁴⁶ Surveying the innovations of Mauss’s thought, Tarot suggests that Mauss’s symbolic sociology ultimately developed a more “Romantic” version of Durkheimianism. That helps explain why Mauss could have a double posterity, influencing not only the hyperrationalist structuralist current but also the irrationalist currents of surrealism and members of the Collège de sociologie such as Georges Bataille.⁴⁷

Judith Butler once insisted that the structuralist idea of the symbolic is the exact opposite of the German Romantic meaning of the symbolic, which she defined as “the fusion of sense and sound, characteristic of poetic language.”48 Recent German commentators have made similar distinctions. So, for example, Rudolf Schlögl speaks of the “old European semantic of the symbol, which even into the modern era emphasized not the referential character of the symbolic, but its power to make present [Vergegenwärtigung].”⁴⁹ Karl-Siegbert Rehberg distinguishes between the theory of the symbol as “presence-creating” (Präsenzsymbolik) and the theory of arbitrary signs. “Today the arbitrariness of signs and complexes of symbolization is nearer to us, more distant is their double existence as the presence of something else, along with their authoritative structure.”⁵⁰ That is to say, there is something archaic about the latter. Such distinctions immediately get complicated, for we see Rehberg assert in the same text that the theory of “presence-creating” symbolism is indispensable to the analysis of modern institutions because of the ongoing need for power and order to make themselves visible through symbolic embodiment and presence.⁵¹ Indeed, Rehberg suggests that one might speak of a progressive dissolution of the old modes of symbolism if it were not for the persistence of countercurrents and knots tying us to underlying continuities.⁵² Schlögl, too, acknowledges that at present a unified theory of the symbolic is not available.⁵³ This probably means it never will be. Far from being crippling, this “fecund uncertainty,” as Daniel Fabre calls it, may be intrinsic to the concept of the symbol.⁵⁴ So, for example, Vincent Descombes insists on the “irreducible duplicity” of the symbol, between the strictly conventional sign and the motivated symbol that evokes the unsayable, as Romantic philosophy insisted, but, even further, Descombes argues that the symbolic sits between two stools, between the algebraic and the sacred.⁵⁵ Likewise, Jean-Joseph Goux maintains the equivocal oscillation between “abstract operational symbolization” and “cryptophoric symbolization.” “There is no true symbolism,” he writes, “that is not cryptophoric: the symbol is a visible substitute that replaces something hidden, something that is not presentable.”⁵⁶ We need to hold onto this sense of polyvalent, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting concepts of the symbolic if we are to follow the twists and turns of post-Marxism’s adventure of the symbolic.

Jean-Joseph Goux argues that the ambiguities in the word symbol do not need to be reconciled, but “correspond to different logico-historical moments in the evolution of the symbol.”57 In Goux’s presentation, the cryptophoric symbol yields to a rationalized, instrumentalized, and abstract symbolization appropriate to the capitalist world. In one way or another, the engagement with the history of the symbolic typically involves some form of exit narrative. As Sven Lütticken has written, “In the end, all genealogies of the symbol seem to end in practices of radical de-symbolization.”⁵⁸ Indeed, one could see this as the basic premise of the Enlightenment: myth yields to science, a world of opaque meanings evolves into a world of rationally transparent relations, belief in the real power of symbols gives way to a recognition of their status as fictions, the power of symbols to present fades before the function of signs to represent, the forest of symbols is cleared to make way for a field of truth. This position governs Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, insofar as symbols have a “liberating power,” to borrow a term from Jürgen Habermas, not only because symbolic activity per se is the properly human mode of life that lifts humans out of the immediacy of nature but also because symbolic form itself tends increasingly toward more abstract conceptual expression.⁵⁹ Lévi-Strauss strongly subscribes to a process of desymbolization, despite his commitment to the symbolic as the basis of anthropology. This is the burden of his use of the term “floating signifier”, to designate an undetermined signifier, such as mana, which operates as a supplement that seeks to remedy “the intellectual condition of man, in which the universe is never charged with sufficient meaning and in which the mind always has more meanings available than there are objects to which to relate them.”⁶⁰ This condition may in essence be permanent, but it is not static. In his essay on Mauss, Lévi-Strauss suggested that the domain covered by the floating signifier is shrinking as the intellectual practices of humans develop: we “acknowledge that the work of equalising of the signifier to fit the signified has been pursued more methodically and rigorously from the time when modern science was born.”⁶¹ As Marcel Hénaff writes, “this presentation demonstrates an optimistic vision of science and assigns it a precise task regarding symbolic thought. One should be able to say that science takes over for such thought and, especially, relieves it of its duties. This would mean, at the limit (or, in any case, in principle), that symbolic thought could completely disappear in a universe where objective knowledge has responded to the totality of available signifiers.”⁶² Even deconstruction, that wayward offspring of structuralism, has been seen in this light, though here it is the hypergrowth of symbolic plurality that ironically seems to undo the power of the symbolic. It amplifies the consciousness of the unconnectedness of symbolism and hence its liberation from the various attempts to anchor it in an authoritative structure. Thus Umberto Eco calls deconstruction the “ultimate epiphany of the symbolic mode”: radically secularized, semiotically adrift, and with no “outside.”⁶³

Grosso modo, another term for desymbolization is secularization.

It is no accident that Karl Marx insisted on the necessity of turning to religion when he strove to understand the function of symbols in society. He well recognized the power of symbols: what is money, after all, other than a symbol? Even gold, often thought of as more real than paper species, is already symbolic; and the commodity is a symbol of the value generated by labor. Value is a social relation that gets condensed into the commodity, making every product a “social hieroglypic.”⁶⁴ To find an analogy to this process, Marx wrote, “we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world.” It is worth recalling this famous passage from Das Kapital: “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 men’s 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.”⁶⁵