Aphorisms II
Rescue Mission: What is the relation between thought and its objects? Posing the question this way already betrays a misunderstanding because we are not dealing with two different “things” (thought on one side and reality on the other), but two distinct yet inseparable moments in a temporal process called History. The truth of objectivity is not lying somewhere hidden out in the world, waiting for thought to stumble upon it. Rather, our thinking is a moment in the unfolding of objective Truth itself. Marx’s materialism has been abused to the extent that it has been understood as an account of the unreality, the illusory nature of thought. This thinking asserts that we’ll never know the truth of reality, our thoughts are merely delusions produced by an objective society of domination and oppression. Yet in reality, it is quite the opposite. Objectivity itself has fallen into obscurity, not just thinking. Reality becomes more and more opaque everyday. The role of thought for the critical theorist in this situation is not to accurately describe an object assumed as given, but to rescue the object itself from the discard of the forgotten past that threatens to be liquidated with every passing minute in which we do not recognize that our thinking expresses a reality that has yet to be realized. In a world that appears to us as completely objective in its trend of domination and barbarism, the task left to thought is to speak for an objectivity that has not yet come into being, thereby rendering the appearance of the world as an unchangeable fact the real illusion.
Michael Snow, Authorization, 1969. Art Canada Institute
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Proust writes “Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.” This sentence should serve as a maxim for revolutionary thought. The world of capitalist social relations confronts us as eternal and immutable. The task of critical theory is to dissipate this semblance by exposing the radical character of reality itself, as Lenin puts it. To be a revolutionary means to recognize that one is living in a revolutionary society. The semblance of the immobility of our social relations is affirmed by both those who espouse them, and by those who rail against them, by both the ostensible “pro-capitalists” and “anti-capitalists.” The point is that capitalism is more revolutionary than we are. It is an object in perpetual motion, re-establishing itself by negating itself, a dynamic we have failed to realize to its full potential. Our thinking lags behind its revolutionary transformation of all of social life. We petrify its movement into immobile concepts so that we may deal with a phenomenon that renders our thinking helpless and impotent in the face of it. Yet the solution lies not in the rejection of thinking for the sake of immediate action, but to recognize that our reified thinking about society is what renders revolutionary action impossible. Capitalism reconstitutes itself at the level of how people think about it. The class struggle today must be waged at the level of ideas.
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To Save my Soul: Marx ends his Critique of the Gotha Program with the words “I have spoken and saved my soul.” The question is then posed: what is the relationship between speaking and salvation? The question revolves around how one thinks of language. If Benjamin is correct in his assessment that language is an expression of our mimetic faculty, then we must examine the relationship between mimesis and the reality it imitates. The world of children is filled with mimesis. A child plays doctor, fireman, super hero. And in these everyday acts of mimesis, neither the child nor the object of his imitation remain the same. The child not only becomes a scientist, but makes real to himself what a scientist is. He brings the foreign object of his playful imitation closer to himself and thereby transforms it. Language functions in the same way. It is not merely a passive description of a foreign reality, but actually changes it. The talk of “signifier” and “signified” in post-structuralism misses the point. With language, we are not merely dealing with an unchanging system of signs to describe a static world, but rather that the object of language, reality, is changing all the time as a function of what is said about it. Language is a tool of transformation, not merely description. This is what the correlation between speaking and redemption expresses. As Marx writes, “It is a matter of confession, no more. To have its sins forgiven mankind has only to declare them to be what they really are.”
Eugène Atget, Jardin du Luxembourg, 1930. Duncan Miller Gallery
Charles Ray, Plank Piece I, 1973. Artsy