AUT: Mediation

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Angela, Harry, et al.

I have sort of sat this one out, but it seems to me that the notion of
mediation at work here is deficient.  Now I am going to be counterposing
Marx's usage to Negri's, but that is because I think that Negri specifically
has Marx and Hegel in mind.

What is mediation?

The following is a quote from (Richard Gunn, Marxism and Mediation, Common
Sense #1 or 2):

"To mediate" is to bring about a relation by means of a relating (an
"intermediate") term.  "A mediation" is the relating term itself.  To count
as a mediation, a relating term must be more than a mere catalyst or
external condition (however necessary) of the relation: rather, it must
itself be the relation.

If a mediation is, thus, the relation which it establishes, it does not
follow that just any relation counts as a mediating term.  A mediated
relation is distinct from a relation for which, to render it intelligible or
accurately to describe it, no reference to a relating term need be made -
for example, a relation of juxtaposition.  A relation of this kind is an
immediate relation...

Within the conceptual field of mediation, as so far outlined, various
possibilities exist.  Two (or more) terms may be related (mediated) by means
of a third or further term; or a single term may be related (mediated) to
itself by a second term.  Where a single term is mediated to itself, the
relation between it and its mediation may or may not be reciprocal.  Where
it is reciprocal, there exist two terms each of which is the other's
mediation, and each of which is mediated by the other to itself.  This gives
an idea of the internal richness of mediation's conceptual field: either
there may exist two (or more) terms plus their mediation; or there may a
exist a single term plus its mediation; or there may exist two terms each
mediating, and mediated by, each other.  The first of these three
possibilities is, perhaps, the one with which the concept of mediation is
most commonly associated...  However, the third-mentioned possibility is
quite explicitly invoked by Hegel when he envisages a situation in which
each of two terms 'if for the other the middle [the mediating] term, through
which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself' (Hegel 1977,
p. 112).  The example he gives is that of a mutually recognitive relation
between individual self-conscious subjects.

A further, and all-important, step is taken in exploring the concept of
mediation when it is noticed that the process of mediation may be such as to
bring about not merely a relation, but an INTERNAL relation: it is
exclusively such instances of mediation which concern Hegel and Marx.  (In
the case of a single term which is mediated to itself, the corresponding
possibility is that the process of mediation 'totalizes' discrete attributes
into an internally related whole.)Prior to the mediation, that which is
mediated may or may not have been internally related (or self-mediated)
[missing text in my photocopy] the mediation may establish a fresh
internal-relatedness (or a fresh totalisation).  If a (fresh)
internal-relatedness or totalisation is established by the process of
mediation, then the following is the consequence.  since (a) an internal
relation is constitutive of the terms which it relates, and since (b) a
mediation is itself... the relation of the term(s) concerned, we can say: in
such cases, the mediation is the MODE OF EXISTENCE of the related term(s).
This can also be expressed - Marx and Hegel so express it - by saying that
in such cases the mediation is the FORM or APPEARANCE of the term(s) which
it internally relates.

Combining this notion of mediation as the mode of existence (form,
appearance) of what is mediated with the third possible shape of mediation
indicated earlier, a further possibility emerges: two terms may be the mode
of existence of one another.  And such is indeed ther case, for Hegel, with
two mutually recognitive self-consciousnesses: in Hegelian usage, the
expression 'recognition' carries with it a quite specifically CONSTITUTIVE
force.  This being so, it follows that a recognitive relation between
individuals in no way requires mediation through a discrete 'third term' -
for example, social institutions (or as Hegel calls them, 'spiritual
masses') such as the state or civil society (Hegel 1977, pp.300-1) -
separate from, and standing over against, the individuals concerned.  The
Hegel of the Phenomenology is in fact emphatic that the existence of
'spiritual masses' entails alienation, and that mutually recognitive (or
non-alienated) social existence is possible only when no spiritual masses or
social institutions exist: mutually recognitive self-consciousness 'no
longer places its [social] world and its ground outside itself' (Hegel 1977,
p. 265).  Thus it is that being alive to the various possible shapes of
mediation - i.e. the refusal to equate mediation as such with the first of
the three possibilities above mentioned - allows us to discern what is in
effect an anarchist stratum in Hegel's thought.  And the emergence of Left
Hegelianism out of Hegel becomes intelligible at the same stroke...

The expressions "form" and "appearance" introduced earlier, require further
elaboration.  I should like what I have said to be taken as (in the sense
which is relevant here) defining them: the form or appearance of something
is its mode of existence.  This definitional sense is not, of course, the
sense in which "form" and "appearance" receive in ordinary language: there,
form is understood as opposed to content and appearance is understood as
opposed to reality or essence, as though something's form or appearance
might be removed or altered without thereby effecting an essential change in
the nature of the "something" (the content or reality or essence) iteself.
In other words, the ordinary-language use of "form" and "appearance" is
dualistic.

By contrast, their definitional sense (the sense which is relevant so far as
mediation is concerned) is non-dualistic: what this involves is made clear
by Hegel in his treatment of the relation between appearance and essence.
According to Hegel 'essence must appear' i.e., the appearance is the
essence's mode of existence: 'Essence...is not something beyond or behind
appearance, but just because it is the essence which exists, the existence
is appearance' (Hegel 1892 para. 131)  The relation between appearance and
essence here envisaged is non-dualistic inasmuch as it is in and through its
appearance that the essence IS.  Essence stands ahead of itself as
appearance, and it is as thus standing ahead of itself that it exists:
"appearance", in other words, is to be understood not as a passive noun (an
inert veil or cover) but as an "appearing", i.e. in a sense which alludes to
the activity of the verb... And, in fact, Marx's concepts of fetishism and
of mystification register, so far as social being is concerned, an exactly
parallel point.

I have dwelt on the non-dualistic meaning o the term "appearance" because
its meaning is decisive for how Marx's Grundrisse and Capital are to be
read.  Famously, Marx speaks of penetrating through appearances to reality
and urges that capitalist society appears to those who live in t in
systematically misleading ways (e.g. Marx 1973 pp. 247, 674; 1976 p. 421;
1966 . 817).  Such passages are misunderstood if they are read...as
counterposing appearance to reality in a dualistic fashion, or as affirming
that appearance is less real than the reality it fetishistically
reveals/conceals.  From the Grundrisse, it is clear enough that capitalism's
appearance in terms of freedom, equality, property, etc. is a real moment in
capitalist production relations taken as a whole.  Marx drives the point
home when he contends that social relations which appear as 'material
relations between persons and social relations between things' appear 'as
what they are' (Marx 1976 p. 166): this passage is unintelligible - it must
seem as though Marx is endorsing a fetishized perspective - unless
appearance is understood AS THE MEDIATION (the mode of existence) of the
relation in which the producers of commodities stand.

If despite all of this, a dualistic understanding of the appearance/reality
relation is forced upon Marx then the consequence is either determinism
(reality is seen as causally conditioning an appearance which is distinct
from it) or reductionism (not the appearance, but only the reality, is
supposed finally to exist).  Once appearances are understood as mediations
no such consequences are entailed.  Regarding fetishism and mystification,
Marx's point is not that we can be mystified about reality, or even that we
can be mystified (misled) by reality, but that mystification - or
"enchantment" - is the mode in which capitalist reality exists.  So to say,
capitalism exists as its own self-denial.

It may seem as though such a view inscribes mystification so deeply in
capitalist social reality tha the emergence, from capitalism, of
revolutionary theory and practice becomes all but impossible.  But in fact
precisely the opposite is the consequence if, as we shall see, capitalist
appearances are the modes of existence of realtions which are antagonistic
through and through.  It is the non-dualism of the appearance/reality
relation which allows antagonisms to be matters of experience...in however
self-contradictory and distorted a way.  Once appearance is dualistically
severed from antagonistic reality, however, antagonism is placed outwith the
domain of experience and the basis for a politics of revolutionary
self-emancipation is undermined.

As with "appearance" so with "form".  Marx's characteristic mode of
questioning is always "Why do these things take these forms?" e.g. Marx 1976
pp. 173-4).  The "things" concerned are production relations which are
always, except in communist society, class relations, i.e. relations of
struggle: in existing society it is the capital-labour relation which is
"formed" - as well as reformed and deformed - in varying ways.  Marx's
project is 'to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in
which these have been apotheosized' (Marx 1976 p. 494).  The "forms"
concerned are the commodity-form, the value-form, the money-form, the
wage-form, the state-form, etc.  If "form" is understood dualistically, i.e.
as opposed to content which is distinct from it, then once again (for
reasons parallel to those given as regards "appearance") either determinism
or reductionism results.  In the event, however, forms are to be understood
as mediations (as modes of existence, or appearances) of the class
relation - under capitalism, the capital-labour relation - and hence of the
struggle in which that relation consists.  [last sentence references Reading
Capital Politically for an analysis of how every concept in Capital is
imbued with class struggle.]

It is worth noting that all of the mediations set forth by Marx stand to be
mediated in their turn: for example, exchange-value is the mediatin (the
mode of existnce or appearance) of value, and is for its part mediated by
the money-form.For Marx, as for Hegel, no process of mediation is
definititve: mediated terms may themselves call for remediation, and far
from beng static of merely "structural", the process of mediation and
remediation is one in which the praxis of class struggle - and therefore
capital's response to labour's insurgency - is inscribed.  Better: mediation
and remediation are AT ISSUE IN class struggle, inasmuch as mediations are
FORMS OF class struggle.  As usual, it is categories which thematize
activity - here the activity of struggle - which are given primacy by Marx.
Understood thus, the concept of mediation explodes all deterministic
readings and establishes 'revolutionary subjectivity' at the very center of
Marx's work.

This being so, there can be no question of revolutionaries having to
intervene from outside (like Leninist vanguardists) in inert social
structures in order to conjure struggle into existence or to generate praxis
from process, since it is AS MEDIATIONS OF STRUGGLE and as AT ISSUE IN
STRUGGLE that social "structures" and social "processes" exist.  In this
sense, for Marx as for Hegel (and in opposition to every variety of
bourgeois and pseudo-Marxist sociology), a social world 'is not a dead
essence, but is actual and alive' (Hegel 1977, p. 264).  It follows that the
the politics entailed by a reading o Marx in the light of the category of
mediation is, with Luxemburg, a politics of spontaneism: but in the Marxist
tradition Luxemburg's category of spontaneism has been understood no less
confusedly than the category of mediation itself...

An additional virtue of the concept of mediation is that it makes possible a
theorising of the relation of class struggle and struggles of other kinds.
for example, the relation of class oppression to sexual oppression has been
a topic of notorious difficulty in both faminist and Marxist thought: sexual
and class oppression are intertwined, but of course sexual oppression is
older than the capital-labour relation.  The necesary insight here is to the
effect that capitalist valorization is not a CLOSED dynamic, i.e. not merely
one which destroys, externally, all 'patriarchal and idyllic' pre-capitalist
social forms (although just such a view seems to be implied in, for example,
the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto).  Rather, it is to be seen as
an open process of totalisation which is always ready to incorporate -
visciously, and vorasciously - whatever in pre-capitalism can serve its
purposes and lies ready to hand.  It incorporates them as its own
mediations, and in doing so re-"forms" them (understanding "form" here in
the definitional sense specified above).  In this way, capital re-forms the
family and transforms sexual relations within the family into a "form" of
the capital-labour relation itself: the nuclear family comes into being
cotemporally with industrial capitalism (cf. Shorter 1976).  The sexual
relation becomes a mediation of the class relation and vice-versa.  Women's
unpaid labour in he nuclear family serves as a free subsidy to capital so
far as the reproduction of labour-power is concerned.

Thus sexual emancipation presupposes, but is not reducible to, class
emancipation (and vice versa).  This analysis is the opposite of
reductionist because it construes the process whereby capital re-froms
sexual relations as one of struggle and neither implies that all of existing
sexual oppression is a consequence of this re-formation - although it is all
affected by it - nor that sexual oppression will be automatically terminated
once the capital-labor relation has been destroyed.

END QUOTE

That is the not end of the article, which is very much worth reading, but I
think I have enough here to make three substantive points.

1.  What Negri means by mediation has NOTHING to do with Marx.  Negri may
think it does, but I will contend that on the basis of the aforementioned
and aforequoted article, that Negri doesn't get it.  Unless Negri wants to
argue that the money-form, exchange-value-form, state-form, etc no longer
exist, he CANNOT argue that mediation no longer exists, unless he completely
fails to grasp Marx and Hegel's conception of mediation.  Negri has missed
the whole point of mediation by referring to it not as it constitutes an
internal relation (IS the internal relation), but as it plays out in a
purely external relation.  Negri is attacking a dualism which does not exist
and which he himself succumbs to.  So similar to Foucault's attack on the
Subject which he must read as positivistically as bourgeois social science,
but which is not how Marx sees Subject, which he understands negatively, as
negation.

Therefore, if mediation no longer existed, neither would the exchange-form,
the state-form, the money-form, etc.  This attack on mediation is not simply
about the failure of unions, NGO's, the welfare state, etc. really and truly
IS NOT a challenge to the notion of mediation.  It simply raises the ways in
which we see capital's crisis as including various attempts at RE-mediation.

2.  Angela, your notion discussion of the locus of mediation and locus of
autonomy is exactly dualistic.  The locus of mediation is simultaneously the
locus of autonomy because each mediation is a locus of struggle, of
antagonism.  Any defense of Negri involves the same problems as a defense of
Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Althusser and Poulantzas: a misrecognition of
Marx and Hegel's deployment of mediation and the relationship of subject and
structure.  The critique of these (post)-structuralists is implicit in this
article, but explicit in others.

Separating the locii, as it were, creates a dualistic gap between structure
and struggle, autonomy and exploitation.  The mediations are the grounds of
the struggle because there is no dualistic separation of mediation and
autonomy.

3.  I would contend for my part that the aformentioned article opens up a
reasonable space for my recent postin on the relationship of race, class,
and gender.  I have tried to express the content of this piece in my
schematic comments.  I think one critical point would be Gunn's reference to
class as 'production relations'.  I have tried to show that race and gender
are production relations, but also social relations which are not simply
reducible to production relations.  Therefore, as Gunn points out, class
emancipation presupposes, but does not guarantee sexual or racial
emancipation, and vice versa.  They are mediated forms of the separation of
the producers from the means of producing unque to capitalist society.

Anyway, cheers!

Chris



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