Economic Determinism Marxian Style

[articul8]

Such a view is, at best, a highly contested interpretation of Marx .

certainly its contested - its contested between people who want to turn Marxism into a justification for bureaucratic governance of the working class, and those who want to see the emergence of a genuinely revolutionary working class. But I still maintain Marx has a lot to offer the latter cause.

The quote I highlighted at the beginning of my last post shows your tendency to argue that Marx went too far in the direction of economic determinism. You dispute this?

 

[gurrier]

The quote I highlighted at the beginning of my last post shows your tendency to argue that Marx went too far in the direction of economic determinism. You dispute this?

No I don't, I dispute the above bit where you said that I accused Marx of reducing everything to economics.

By the way, you also seem to agree that Marx went too far in the direction of economic determinism (your post #30).

 

[articul8]

you also seem to agree that Marx went too far in the direction of economic determinism (your post #30).

no - I think some unfortunate (occasional) phraseology and metaphors have enabled people so inclined to draw the wrong conclusions.

 

[gurrier]

mistake - ignore

 

[Fruitloop]

and the whole boring base-superstructure analogy

I don't think the base/superstructure analysis is boring.

I guess it depends what you're looking at with it. I can see that as social model it's not particularly revelatory, but if you're analysing specific cultural artefacts then it can be a pretty fruitful distinction to make.

 

[articul8]

if you're analysing specific cultural artefacts then it can be a pretty fruitful distinction to make.

OK, but what would a "non-cultural" artefact look like? Isn't the economy always-already a cultural product? That's why I think the B-S model is unhelpful.

 

[revol68]

yeah the base superstructure model is quite crude but I still think that there is stratification within society, certain things will have a more determining factor than others, and i would say that economic relations have a determininh role over the more "cultural".

 

[articul8]

yeah the base superstructure model is quite crude but I still think that there is stratification within society, certain things will have a more determining factor than others, and i would say that economic relations have a determininh role over the more "cultural".

I don't dispute that some things are more determining than others. But I don't see how you can retain the separation between "economic" anc "cultural" factors (when the notion of economy is already culturally produced, and when culture is itself just as material as the so-called "economic).

In which category, for example, would you place advertising?

 

[revol68]

no i'm not suggesting some sort of actual break more a acknowledgement of degree.

For example advertising makes no sense without the commodity yet we can have a commodity form without advertising.

Essentially we need to recognise the distinction (and it's a fluid one) between production and circulation.

The situationists had this problem and mistook the spectacle/ commodity for everything, overlooking the daily process of struggle that maintains production and produces the commodity.

Of course Baudrillard took the situationists to their logical conclusion and hence his half baked critique of the Exchange value/ Use value distinction.

Similar to how some people could prove that black is white because there is not actual breaking point.

 

[Fruitloop]

Without a base/superstructure distinction it's difficult to explain how art-works etc can tell of more than their own means of production, i.e. how they can have a progressive or revolutionary moment. The superstructure as a semi-autonomous area of discourse allows you to move beyond crude economic determinism and to see progressive potential in artefacts with apparently unpromising productive origins.

 

[phildwyer]

Without a base/superstructure distinction it's difficult to explain how art-works etc can tell of more than their own means of production, i.e. how they can have a progressive or revolutionary moment. The superstructure as a semi-autonomous area of discourse allows you to move beyond crude economic determinism and to see progressive potential in artefacts with apparently unpromising productive origins.

The relation of 'culture' to 'economics' is best understood if we conceive of them as elements within a larger totality. When we do that, the distinction between them is revealed as historically determined and shifting--often, in fact, such a distinction will be impossible to draw. I've mentioned before that the idea that "economic" activity can be separated from other "spheres" is itself an ideological attempt to erect a moral *cordon sanitaire* around market behaviour, and that it dates only from the eighteenth century. The issue of which "sphere" determines the other would then have to be considered on a case-by-case basis. Which makes a lot more sense, innit?

 

[Fruitloop]

Certainly. Hence my repeated use of word like 'provisional' and 'temporary' when describing this distinction.

 

[gurrier]

One of the useful things about a method of societal analysis that starts from economic relations and uses the results of this analysis to inform the analysis of other aspects of society (which is what, I think, the base / superstructure distinction is about) is that it is tractable.

I mean, you can say that it is a complex interrelated system where each factor feeds back into all other factors and none can be seperated from the others and you would be correct. However, this provides you with a system that is beyond analysis. It's just not possible to model a complex non-linear system without some baseline to start from.

Using an objective definition of class based upon the relations to the means of production is undoubtedly a simplification of reality, but it does provide a lever with which to start an analysis of a society.

 

[Fruitloop]

Exactly. It certainly is a bane with complex systems that the distinctions that you make keep collapsing before your eyes, but unfortunately I don't know of any other meaningful way of interrogating them.

As a music analyst you face this problem all the time; that you can look at a piece (particularly of music before 1700 and after 1900) and apply the standard analytic methods - analysis of major structural points, the essential motivic elements of the developing variation, the pacing and rhetoric of the hypermetre etc - until you think you've got it all pinned down and the piece stands in your head in its architectonic totality. Six months down the track if you come back to the analysis it's often difficult even to work out where the major points of structural articulation were supposed to be, let alone why you labelled them as such. However, I don't think that the aspect of irreducible complexity necessarily invalidates the analytical process altogether - not least because there simply is no hermeneutic alternative.

 

[articul8]

Looks like we're all pretty much agreed here. I think we are concerned with dialectics is technical sense. By definition any particular starting point in an attempt to grasp the whole is partial, and one-sided, which is why 'economics' can't be hypostasised into some universal "key" to explain all facets of all conceivable societies.

But of course you can only work through the inadequate terminology we've got, not just pluck a whole new one out of the air.

(BTW: Fruitloop - have you read Adorno's musicological analyses - some fascinating parallels here?).

 

[Fruitloop]

(BTW: Fruitloop - have you read Adorno's musicological analyses - some fascinating parallels here?).

Yep, quite a bit of it. Although I don't agree with a few of his conclusions, my analytic method (such as it is) is pretty heavily influenced by Adorno (as is the case for most musicologists, either pro or contra)

'After Adorno' by Tia de Nora is a pretty good summary of the current 'state of the art' in music sociology if you're interested.

 

[articul8]

'After Adorno' by Tia de Nora is a pretty good summary of the current 'state of the art' in music sociology if you're interested.

will have to check that out - I've read some of his stuff on music - esp. the 2nd viennese school - i think he got it wrong on Jazz (or at least what he called 'jazz' cannot be taken as a critique of jazz per se).

sounds like you're more qualified than me to comment on that though .

 

[Fruitloop]

Yeah, after a while you get to the point where you skip ahead a couple of pages if you see the words ''jazz' or 'Stravinsky' - not that this particularly detracts from the rest though.

 

[phildwyer]

(BTW: Fruitloop - have you read Adorno's musicological analyses - some fascinating parallels here?).

Yes, a fine example of what can be achieved by a totalizing analysis. Adorno points out the parallel between Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, whereby the composer's subjectivity is eliminated from the composition, and the death of the human subject under the commodity form. He also connects both to *Satan:* Schoenberg's composition is dominated by the tritone, historically known as the "devil's interval," because it disrupts harmony, which was traditionally understood as divinely-instituted. This theological dimension is brought out in Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus," which was essentially co-written by Adorno. Ever checked it out?

 

[articul8]

I have indeed. Do you reckon the Devil in Mann's novel is meant to be Adorno? I read a paper somewhere that thought it was Mahler instead.

The devil as ultimate modernist creator comparison only makes sense in the context of Adorno's depiction (indebted to Benjamin) of the 19th phantasmagoria of commodity-images as baroque vision of hell.

 

[Fruitloop]

Yes, a fine example of what can be achieved by a totalizing analysis. Adorno points out the parallel between Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, whereby the composer's subjectivity is eliminated from the composition, and the death of the human subject under the commodity form. He also connects both to *Satan:* Schoenberg's composition is dominated by the tritone, historically known as the "devil's interval," because it disrupts harmony, which was traditionally understood as divinely-instituted. This theological dimension is brought out in Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus," which was essentially co-written by Adorno. Ever checked it out?

The tritone was seen as 'diabolus in musica' in the middle ages, long before the advent of tonal harmony, because of the difficulty in singing tritone intervals, which made it a step that it was considered essential to avoid in linear counterpoint.

The view that the composers subject is eliminated under dodecaphonic tonal organisation is erroneous, in fact it's less prescriptive than tonal harmony, and certainly less so than species counterpoint.

It's been alleged that the Devil in Doctor Faustus is Schoenberg, but I'm not so sure. Although Schoenberg's music was at odds with the early Adorno's personal musical taste, his championing of Schoenberg's compositional method against Stravinsky's (and the fact that he studies with Schoenberg's most famous pupil Alban Berg) suggests that it wasn't as simple as all that. Given the book's anti-liberal slant, Mahler (the backward-looking, johnny-come-lately conductor/composer) is a more likely target for parody - although I confess I've never looked into it in detail. There is however a music critic character (another incarnation of the devil I think) that's probably a fairly affectionate thumbnail parody of Adorno.

 

[Fruitloop]

Interestingly, it's actually the tritone that makes the western diatonic scale what it is; Out of all possible note-sets in an even-tempered welve-tone scale, the unique thing about the Ionian mode (i.e. the regular major scale) has only one tritonic interval in it, which happens to be the essential cadential chord, the dominant seventh. What this means is that as soon as you hear a single tritone interval (and they are of course permitted in chordal harmony, just not between the outer parts) you know exactly which key you're in. Modulatory harmony would be enormously more difficult to actually hear without this feature, and would have been more of an abstract construct than a feature of the sounding object. So the 'structural hearing' which Adorno considers the preferable mode of musical listening is actually dependent on the tritone for its intelligibility.

I digress....

 

[phildwyer]

The tritone was seen as 'diabolus in musica' in the middle ages, long before the advent of tonal harmony, because of the difficulty in singing tritone intervals, which made it a step that it was considered essential to avoid in linear counterpoint.

The view that the composers subject is eliminated under dodecaphonic tonal organisation is erroneous, in fact it's less prescriptive than tonal harmony, and certainly less so than species counterpoint.

It's been alleged that the Devil in Doctor Faustus is Schoenberg, but I'm not so sure. Although Schoenberg's music was at odds with the early Adorno's personal musical taste, his championing of Schoenberg's compositional method against Stravinsky's (and the fact that he studies with Schoenberg's most famous pupil Alban Berg) suggests that it wasn't as simple as all that. Given the book's anti-liberal slant, Mahler (the backward-looking, johnny-come-lately conductor/composer) is a more likely target for parody - although I confess I've never looked into it in detail. There is however a music critic character (another incarnation of the devil I think) that's probably a fairly affectionate thumbnail parody of Adorno.

All the characters in "Doctor Faustus" are pastiche, which is what led Frederic Jameson to describe it as "the first postmodern novel." The devil is basically Adorno (he's a dillentante, amateur composer etc) expounding Schoenberg in the same terms as his "The Philosophy of Modern Music." But the temptation scene is closely modelled on "The Brothers Karamazov." Schoenberg himself was convinced he was Leverkuhn, and in fact forced Mann to append a disclaimer to subsequent editions. But Mahler's in there too, and the scene in which Leverkuhn catches syphilis is drawn word-for-word from Nietzsche's letter recounting his own contraction of that disease, while his theological speeches are verbatim Luther, even down to the archaic (and untranslatable) German. There are also, of course, countless allusions to Spies's Faustbuch, Marlowe, Goethe etc.

 

[Fruitloop]

Interesting.

Adorno's relationship to Schoenberg and the serial technique is a weird one. Whilst he thought that the twelve-tone system destroyed the spontaneity that gave emancipated music its essence, he also recognised its constraints as being a necessary pre-condition for musical meaning, and an antidote to the formlessness of pure atonality. Similarly, whilst he welcomed the passing of the decadent tonality of bourgeois musical forms, he never shared the optimism of other members of the Viennese school that one day children would 'whistle Webern in the streets'. It's partly the contraryness of the positions that Negative Dialectics allowed him to hold that makes Adorno such an enigmatic thinker, IMO.

 

[phildwyer]

Interesting.

Adorno's relationship to Schoenberg and the serial technique is a weird one. Whilst he thought that the twelve-tone system destroyed the spontaneity that gave emancipated music its essence, he also recognised its constraints as being a necessary pre-condition for musical meaning, and an antidote to the formlessness of pure atonality. Similarly, whilst he welcomed the passing of the decadent tonality of bourgeois musical forms, he never shared the optimism of other members of the Viennese school that one day children would 'whistle Webern in the streets'. It's partly the contraryness of the positions that Negative Dialectics allowed him to hold that makes Adorno such an enigmatic thinker, IMO.

I don´t know what´s so contrary about them, they seem rigorously consistent to me. Basically, he´s always showing how the commodity form operates at psychological and aesthetic levels as well as economic. Even in Minima Moralia he´s demonstrating its effect on everyday life. I don´t know as much as you about music, but I think "The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression in Listening" is fantastic, the best explanation I´ve found for the precipitous decline in popular literacy, both musical and literary. Of course he was wrong about Jazz--or mostly so. He was correct about commercialization, and he uses "Jazz" as a synecdoche of that. If he´d been writing about Rock I´d have agreed with him wholeheartedly. I suppose you know Griel Marcus´s "Lipstick Traces," which points out that Adorno on Jazz prefigures the Punk critique of classic Rock?

 

[118118]

The situationists had this problem and mistook the spectacle/ commodity for everything, overlooking the daily process of struggle that maintains production and produces the commodity.

Are you saying here that the situationists mistook circulation (or advertising) for production (or the commodity).

 

[118118]

 

[revol68]

Are you saying here that the situationists mistook circulation (or advertising) for production (or the commodity).

no i'm saying that they mistook circulation and the commodity form for the whole and so tended to overlook the contested and dynamic nature of capitalism as a social relation. They overlooked how capital sets the working class to work and how it is a process that involves constant struggle and compromise, meaning that the spectacle is not an overarching field of bourgeois dominance but rather it will contain many fractures and fissures in which the needs and desires of the proletariat will be glanced.

 

[118118]

...

 

[118118]

mistook circulation and the commodity form for the whole and so tended to overlook the... social relation.

Becasue they failed to see that

production and circulation (are seperate as shown by)... For example advertising makes no sense without the commodity yet we can have a commodity form without advertising .

I see now.

Does 'the social relation' in Marx refer to the form of production e.g. the "social relation" of me to a factory worker is him being wage slave and me being unemployed. I ask becasue I have read that the "economic relation" is something different, but can not think of what it could be.