> Fred also sez somewhere that we have to historicise everything except the
> rule that we have to historicise everything. To historicise Jameson is not
> to say he doesn't know stuff Brecht and Lenin didn't know, of course -
> whatever Jameson's constraints, he does have a spot of hindsight available
> to him. And there was, by the time Jameson makes this call in 1991, a
> tenable case to be made for the proposition that the relative autonomy of
> the literary form (for instance) did not afford it the transformative
> ideological power Brecht might have hoped for.
>
> Things didn't look too good for a goodly portion of Lenin's more
> instrumentalist ideas (or, perhaps, what anyone could have made out of his
> time and place) in 1991, either.
>
> I dunno, still sounds pretty true a decade later, really. Anyway, if
> history progresses by the failures of people in thrall of their time and
> place, that does at least remind us that agency - the self-conscious
> capacity and effort to make a difference - is what keeps us going. We're
> the conscious part of the big contradictions-unto-contradictions that are
> history, and we'd do best to be conscious of our conscious part. There
> ain't anybody else to look after us ...
>
> We'll have to wait and see how Jameson looks half a century from now, I
> s'pose ...
Lenin and Brecht appear in the passage only as "illustrious" examples of the general point that "achieved positivity" is impossible so that, for instance, it is impossible to imagine Utopia because "it is always impossible to imagine." (Postmodernism, p. 209)
I don't myself share the view that "achieved positivity" is impossible. I can therefore point out Jameson's "failures" without falling into self-contradiction. Here is a biggie.
Jameson can see nothing wrong with (and no essential incompatibility with Marx in) the "core" of Gary Becker's "admirably totalizing approach" i.e. with Becker's claim that "the economic approach provides a valuable framework for understanding all human behavior."
In defense of this, he quotes a footnote to Becker's claim that this framework enables us to understand "marriage".
"the clarifying footnote is crucial and marks a beginning toward grasping what is really at stake in Becker's interesting proposal: 'Let me emphasize again that commodity output is not the same as national product as usually measured, but includes children, companionship, health, and a variety of other commodities.' What immediately leaps to the eye, therefore, is the paradox - of the greatest symptomatic significance for the Marxian theoretical tourist - that this most scandalous of all market models is in reality a production model! In it consumption is explicitly described as the production of a commodity or a specific utility; in other words, a use value which can be anything from sexual gratification to a convenient place to take it out on your children if the outside world proves inclement. Here is Becker's core description:
'The household production function framework emphasizes the parallel services performed by firms and households as organization units. Similar to the typical firm analyzed in standard production theory, the household invests in capital assets (savings), capital equipment (durable goods), and capital embodied in its 'labor force' (human capital as family members). As an organizational entity, the household, like the firm, engages in production using this labor and capital. Each is viewed as maximizing its objective function subject to resource and technical constraints. The production model not only emphasizes that the household is the appropriate basic unit of analysis in consumption theory, it also brings out the interdependence of several household decisions: decisions about family labor supply and time and goods expenditure in a single time-period analysis, and decisions about marriage, family size, labor force attachment, and expenditure on goods and human capital investments in a life cycle analysis.
'The recognition of the importance of time as a scarce resource in the household has played an integral role in the development of empirical applications of the household production function approach.'
"I have to admit that I think one can accept this, and that it provides a perfectly realistic and sensible view not only of this human world but of _all_ of them, going back to the earliest hominids. Let me underscore a few crucial features of the Becker model: the first is the stress on time itself as a resource (another fundamental essay is entitled 'A Theory of the Allocation of Time'). This is, of course, very much Marx's own view of temporality, as that supremely disengages itself from the _Grundrisse_, where finally all value is a matter of time. I also want to suggest the consistency and kinship between this peculiar proposal and much of contemporary theory or philosophy, which has involved a prodigious expansion in what we consider to be rational or meaningful behavior. My sense is that, particularly after the diffusion of psychoanalysis but also with the gradual evaporation of 'otherness' on a shrinking globe and in a media-suffused society, very little remains that can be considered 'irrational' in the older sense of 'incomprehensible': the vilest forms of human decision-making and behavior - torture by sadists and overt or covert foreign intervention by government leaders - are now for all of us comprehensible (in terms of a Diltheyan _Verstehen_, say), whatever we think of them." (Postmodernism, pp. 267-8)
He then goes on to identify "Becker's maximization model" with "Sartrean choice" and "postmodernism" (though Becker is not fully compatible with the latter "because his is finally a production and not a consumption model at all" and therefore ignores the "_jouissance_" possible through "the wilder forms of consumption available in the postmodern").
Fred seems to have gone a bit off the rails here. "Becker's maximization model" is "a perfectly realistic and sensible view" of no "human world" including this one. It's radically inconsistent with Marx.
For Marx all "being" is "activity"; his is a process ontology based on the idea of "internal relations". This is the ultimate sense in which his "model" is a "production model". Becker's is an "atomistic" model implicitly rooted in an "external relations" ontology.
Human being is therefore activity. It is distinguished from all other forms of activity by the fact that "what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax". In particular, human activity is potentially the activity of a "universally developed individual".
The "end" of life for a universally developed individual is a particular kind of activity - "art" understood as "production through freedom, i.e. through a will that places reason at the basis of its actions." Art in this sense has as another of its defining features that it is communication and, as such, an essential feature of ideal human relations. These are relations of "mutual recognition". Another of its defining characteristics is that it is activity which is an end-in-itself rather than instrumental.
This is production in the "realm of freedom".
"The real wealth of society and the possibility of a constant expansion of its reproduction process does not depend on the length of surplus labour but rather on its productivity and on the more or less plentiful conditions of production in which it is performed. The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper ... The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it [the "realm of necessity"], though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite." Capital vol. 3 pp. 958-9
Instrumental production defines the "realm of necessity", a realm that is inescapable because humans "must wrestle with nature to satisfy their needs" "in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production." In an ideal world of "freely associated producers" individuals would still have to devote a minimal amount of time to this realm in order to provide themselves with the means for life in the realm of freedom (means which are of a very sophisticated kind because they must meet the "needs" of universally developed individuals). This realm would, however, be vastly more productive than anything now possible because it would be a realm in which relations and forces of production were those of universally developed individuals.
"Time of labour, even if exchange value is eliminated, always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production. But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, partly for free activity which - unlike labour - is not determined by a compelling extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfillment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one's inclination.
"It is self-evident that if time of labour is reduced to a normal length and, furthermore, labour is no longer performed for someone else, but for myself, and, at the same time, the social contradictions between master and men, etc., being abolished, it acquires a quite different, a free character, it becomes real social labour, and finally the basis of disposable time - the time of labour of a man who has also disposable time, must be of a much higher quality than that of the beast of burden." Theories of Surplus Value pp. 301-2 Collected Works, vol. 32
"The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition - question of life or death - for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations - two different sides of the development of the social individual - appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. 'Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time' (real wealth), 'but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.' (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)" Grundrisse pp. 705-6
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" ("Critique of the Gotha Programme")
The character of "marriage" is taken by Marx as indicating the degree to which the ideal has been realized.
"The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man's relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature ‹ his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man." (EPM "Private Property and Communism")
In Becker's use of the "economic approach" to understand marriage is found, in contrast,
"the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived."
Ted -- Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW at YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario CANADA M3J 1P3