Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory: A Study of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis, and the Situationists
Vasilis Grollios
Routledge, New York and London, 2024. 206 pp., £130 hb
ISBN 9781032556772
Reviewed by Dimitri Vouros
About the reviewer
Dimitri Vouros is a scholar interested in theories of democracy and sovereignty
The connection between Marxism and critical theory has always been fraught. Hiding this connection may have served a political purpose for the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. There is evidence that Walter Benjamin’s writings were edited by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer to tone down his overtly Marxist language, presumably so the school, while in exile, could maintain its social standing in Western academia. For later generations such self-censorship was no longer necessary. Yet, something of this censorship continues in certain strains of critical theory, especially those that focus on everything except what Marx spent most of his energies pursuing – political economy. Have critical philosophers forgotten that bourgeois economists hold the theory of money and exchange to be a thoroughly natural one, the economy as ‘second nature’ to use a formulation of Georg Lukács?
Vasilis Grollios’ Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory presents an alternative view of society and the economy to that pursued by many recent critical theorists. He describes the view of Open Marxism, of capitalism as a mode of production in which illusion and fetishism dominate human life. Grollios’ book investigates the ideological trappings of capitalist society and its inversion of human values into economic ones. It formulates a theory of why ‘traditional’ viewpoints in political philosophy and economics end up promoting unfreedom and alienation in everyday life. To this end, Grollios emphasises the Marxist underpinnings of critical theory properly understood and presents the contours of a non-dogmatic dialectical philosophy.
Continuing themes from his last work Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition, Grollios pursues detailed reinterpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Cornelius Castoriadis and the Situationists Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. Grollios places these authors in conversation Marx. He presents a view of Marxian epistemology often overlooked by recent scholarship. He underscores Marx’s methodological endeavours that point to the ‘real abstractions’ of the capitalist mode of production and the reduction of labour-power and labour-time to the totalising valuations of the market.
One aim of Grollios’ book is to place the ideology of pecuniary individualism under suspicion. Since capitalism reduces material and social relations to exchange value, bourgeois notions of subjectivity invariably lead to alienation and various limitations on human flourishing. In essence, what we take to be everyday life is informed and driven by the imperatives of the market. This view is first found in Marx, in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts, the Grundrisse manuscripts of 1857-58 and the first section of the first volume of Capital. The Marxist tradition, which wished to join theory to practice, often sidestepped these insights or found them politically inexpedient. It was largely critical theory that retrieved them from possible oblivion. Yet similar insights into monopoly and late capitalism, not only its external mechanisms, but also the way its reifications informed society more generally, were downplayed by later critical theorists. Arguably it was Jürgen Habermas’ influential theory of communicative action that began this forgetting of the social significance of abstractive economic categories. The turn to ‘recognition’ in third-wave Frankfurt School critical theory has only deepened this nescience.
Like Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Moishe Postone before him, Grollios has retrieved the significance of Marx’s thought on fetishism and the real abstractions of the market for philosophy and political theory. He proves that what Max Horkheimer called ‘traditional theory’ reproduces a topsy-turvy understanding of the relation between capital and capitalism’s subjects. Indeed, Grollios pursues a ‘corporeal materialism’, and asks why workers are still being cajoled into navigating the various fetishes of commodity capitalism and subjected to its deleterious effects in their daily life. Grollios also shows how critical theory has not spent its interpretative energies, that much can still be gleaned from twentieth-century thinkers like those dealt with in his book. The relationship between the illusive totality of capitalism and the alienated worker is still relevant, against trends in different theoretical directions, including Foucauldian discourses of power and biopolitics and Lacanian/Post-Marxist theories of symbolic power. In fact, Grollios argues that theory needs to return to the concrete social consequences of capital accumulation, to an understanding of how workers’ free time is expropriated by capitalism’s unceasing search for surplus value. For Grollios, fetishism is ‘a general phenomenon in which, while people attempt to earn a living in a society where “time is money” rules, they end up creating social forms, such as value as money, or the state, or the bourgeois form of democracy that they cannot control and towards which they feel alienated’ (47).
In the first chapter, Grollios reads Nietzsche, unusually, as an ally of critical theory. It is true Nietzsche had a substantial influence on the Frankfurt School and its understanding of capitalist society. Yet most recent thinkers in the Continental tradition have focussed on the cultural and aesthetic aspects of Nietzsche’s critique of modernity and nihilism. They have certainly not reckoned with all his insights into politics and society. What Grollios offers is not a Marxist critique of Nietzsche – à la Georg Lukács’ Destruction of Reason – but an assessment of what is still valuable in his criticism of life and work under capitalism. Just like the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche ‘holds a dialectic between appearance/fetishized form and content/essence/alienation in everyday life’ (24). What is especially relevant for Grollios is Nietzsche’s insight into how the creative and liberating aspects of labour and the everyday are rendered superfluous by the market logic of capitalism.
The next chapter refreshingly passes over much of the scholarly literature that has been written about Walter Benjamin the ‘cultural critic’. Such commentaries largely miss the point of Benjamin’s critique of capitalism. Grollios argues that Benjamin ‘belongs to the first generation of Critical Theory and that his ideas take place in the frame of Marx’s Capital’ (61). Using concepts such as ‘determinate negation’, ‘corporeal materialism’, ‘the spellbound, topsy-turvy character of capitalist society’, ‘negative dialectics’ and ‘non-identity-thinking’, Grollios presents Benjamin’s striking characterisations of social production and reproduction and shows what they mean for the inner life of the worker (61). Grollios homes in on commodity fetishism, especially the reification of consciousness and the eternalisation of technical production, a hellish dream Benjamin calls a ‘capitalist phantasmagoria’ (63-64). The ‘corporeal materialism’ of Benjamin comes out in his description of unsavoury aspects of the industrial lifeworld. Benjamin’s perspectives on art and literature are important, but mainly because they alert the reader to fetishized aspects of industrial and post-industrial society. Key for Benjamin is the ‘eternal return’ of commodity capitalism and the way it alienates subjects both from the products they make and from a flourishing human existence. It is for this reason that the motifs of myth, boredom, death and fashion recur in Benjamin’s works, above all his unfinished Arcades Project. The mediation accomplished by capital between things and people can be described in terms of ‘reification’ which, in one essay, Benjamin says not only ‘clouds relations between human beings, but the real subjects of these relations also remain clouded’. This leads ineluctably to the ‘deformation’ of various bureaucratic vocations (93).
Grollios also emphasises the importance of Benjamin’s revolutionary theory of history. For Benjamin, ‘messianic time’ can override idols like the state and the individual. Indeed, as Grollios states, ‘[t]he leap of past events out of history into the present is likened by Benjamin to “the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution”’ (99). Grollios reads Benjamin as an anarchist and as standing against orthodox (and Leninist) historical materialism. He uncovers an Adornian ‘negative dialectics’ in Benjamin’s methodology. (Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ is something of a leitmotif in this book.) One-dimensional, identity thinking, the kind that naturalises the material and social relations under universal exchange society needs to be subjected to dialectical critique. Given that bourgeois epistemologies and logics sacrifice all to the economy and to its limiting temporalities, dialectical thinking must seek to deconstruct, dereify, and demystify them. For Grollios and other exponents of left-communism, historical instances of ‘actually existing socialism’ merely reproduce these logics in a new guise, a ‘state capitalist’ one (192-193).
The brunt of Grollios’ critique is aimed at those views that seek to compromise on the promise, the one implicit in Western philosophy, of a disalienated existence and work life. Read with such an emancipatory end in mind, Marx is shown to argue that communist freedom is possible only if workers are no longer treated as wage slaves, if they are freed from all economic constraints. As Grollios points out, this entails a completely new relationship to things, to commodities, to time and to labour. Finding such renewed social relations is impossible through party politicking, and unlikely to follow a general revolutionary upheaval. Class warfare does not guarantee the emancipation of the proletariat. One needs to interrupt capitalism where it really matters, by finding ‘cracks’ in its imposing edifice and changing workers’ very relationship to labour. This is the true form of protest for our time according to Grollios and other Open Marxists like John Holloway: ‘Cracks open, and revolution takes place when we deny the mask displaying ourselves as “personifications of economic categories” and revolt against the rule of money, against capital’ (55).
In chapter three, Grollios finds in Castoriadis’ philosophy a stepping stone to a new kind of political thinking about autonomy. But Castoriadis comes under fire for not having correctly understood Marx’s position on labour and alienation; in fact, he is ‘essentially much closer to traditional theory and bourgeois philosophy than has been believed’ (119). During his lifetime, Castoriadis was struggling against the consequences of Leninism, the failure of the dictatorship of the proletariat to effect real change and indeed other problems with articulating a class struggle under a constantly morphing social structure: ‘In Castoriadis’ theory, classes are not formed from below, from people’s productive activity, they are not a perverted form of our doing […] They are formed from above. However, this is a nonmaterialist, undialectical and therefore uncritical theorizing of class’ (126). While Open Marxism is anticipated by Castoriadis in some places, he nevertheless fails to pose fundamental questions about our daily life that lead to political action in the present. Grollios argues that when we succumb to the view that abstractive bourgeois logics do not exist in any meaningful sense, as Castoriadis does, one is (falsely) liberated to pursue political philosophy for its own sake. Additionally, Castoriadis theorizes the state ‘as a separate and relative autonomous instance’ and further ‘accuses Marx of ignoring this fact’ (139). A similar criticism can be made of Hannah Arendt’s mature political philosophy. Like Castoriadis, she fails to read Marx as formulating a critique, as opposed to offering a predictive description, of political economy, turning instead to superficial readings of Marx’s materialist interpretation of labour. Both Arendt and Castoriadis ultimately return to Aristotle and the ancient polis to settle accounts with capitalism and its illusions. Castoriadis ‘does not identify the concept of the double character of the labour which lies hidden in the commodity, and neither does he recognize the fact that contradiction and struggle are ingrained in the essence of our existence in capitalism’ (129). Nevertheless, Grollios appreciates Castoriadis’ formulation of the social imaginary and the need to reimagine the modern polity, to find a completely new and different footing for current society (146-147).
The last chapter is a distillation of the French Situationists’ critique of capitalism and ‘commodified time’ (154). Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord write eloquently about the subjection of citizens to a barrage of images, about the mediatization of consciousness: ‘Capital in Debord and the Situationists is not the amount of money accumulated waiting to be thrown again into production for profit to be produced but a social relation made up of fetishized social forms-images that originate in alienated-objectified labour’ (155). Capitalism hopes to endear people to the illusion of the totality. The modern ‘spectacle’ and its effects leads to the naturalisation of commodity exchange, to various false notions about what constitutes value in life and to a new form of temporality. Debord holds that ‘spectacular time is the illusorily lived time’ (166), that the ‘spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non-living’ (174). The Situationists, as Grollios presents them, do not pursue a reduction to the economic in the last instance, but rather a way of alerting us to the compromised epistemological foundation of the modern subject, relying as it does on the inversion of the value-form. Since fetishism is ingrained in all life under capitalism, where consumers are unwittingly beholden to the illusions of the market. The key idea here is that ‘fetishization [is] a process whereby people are turned into zombies of capital/spectacle’. The main consequence of this is that ‘class struggle is not only on the streets […] but also runs through ourselves, our bodies and souls’ (179). The only possibility for freedom is finding a way beyond such illusions. For Grollios, this means being attentive to the cracks that open in capitalism, by capitalising on the moments of what Adorno called the ‘utopian images’ in the everyday against capital’s myths, and by finding fresh opportunities to disrupt the status quo.
1 March 2024
URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21422_illusion-and-fetishism-in-critical-theory-a-study-of-nietzsche-benjamin-castoriadis-and-the-situationists-by-vasilis-grollios-reviewed-by-dimitri-vouros/
ISBN 9781032556772
Reviewed by Dimitri Vouros
About the reviewer
Dimitri Vouros is a scholar interested in theories of democracy and sovereignty
The connection between Marxism and critical theory has always been fraught. Hiding this connection may have served a political purpose for the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. There is evidence that Walter Benjamin’s writings were edited by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer to tone down his overtly Marxist language, presumably so the school, while in exile, could maintain its social standing in Western academia. For later generations such self-censorship was no longer necessary. Yet, something of this censorship continues in certain strains of critical theory, especially those that focus on everything except what Marx spent most of his energies pursuing – political economy. Have critical philosophers forgotten that bourgeois economists hold the theory of money and exchange to be a thoroughly natural one, the economy as ‘second nature’ to use a formulation of Georg Lukács?
Vasilis Grollios’ Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory presents an alternative view of society and the economy to that pursued by many recent critical theorists. He describes the view of Open Marxism, of capitalism as a mode of production in which illusion and fetishism dominate human life. Grollios’ book investigates the ideological trappings of capitalist society and its inversion of human values into economic ones. It formulates a theory of why ‘traditional’ viewpoints in political philosophy and economics end up promoting unfreedom and alienation in everyday life. To this end, Grollios emphasises the Marxist underpinnings of critical theory properly understood and presents the contours of a non-dogmatic dialectical philosophy.
Continuing themes from his last work Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition, Grollios pursues detailed reinterpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Cornelius Castoriadis and the Situationists Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. Grollios places these authors in conversation Marx. He presents a view of Marxian epistemology often overlooked by recent scholarship. He underscores Marx’s methodological endeavours that point to the ‘real abstractions’ of the capitalist mode of production and the reduction of labour-power and labour-time to the totalising valuations of the market.
One aim of Grollios’ book is to place the ideology of pecuniary individualism under suspicion. Since capitalism reduces material and social relations to exchange value, bourgeois notions of subjectivity invariably lead to alienation and various limitations on human flourishing. In essence, what we take to be everyday life is informed and driven by the imperatives of the market. This view is first found in Marx, in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts, the Grundrisse manuscripts of 1857-58 and the first section of the first volume of Capital. The Marxist tradition, which wished to join theory to practice, often sidestepped these insights or found them politically inexpedient. It was largely critical theory that retrieved them from possible oblivion. Yet similar insights into monopoly and late capitalism, not only its external mechanisms, but also the way its reifications informed society more generally, were downplayed by later critical theorists. Arguably it was Jürgen Habermas’ influential theory of communicative action that began this forgetting of the social significance of abstractive economic categories. The turn to ‘recognition’ in third-wave Frankfurt School critical theory has only deepened this nescience.
Like Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Moishe Postone before him, Grollios has retrieved the significance of Marx’s thought on fetishism and the real abstractions of the market for philosophy and political theory. He proves that what Max Horkheimer called ‘traditional theory’ reproduces a topsy-turvy understanding of the relation between capital and capitalism’s subjects. Indeed, Grollios pursues a ‘corporeal materialism’, and asks why workers are still being cajoled into navigating the various fetishes of commodity capitalism and subjected to its deleterious effects in their daily life. Grollios also shows how critical theory has not spent its interpretative energies, that much can still be gleaned from twentieth-century thinkers like those dealt with in his book. The relationship between the illusive totality of capitalism and the alienated worker is still relevant, against trends in different theoretical directions, including Foucauldian discourses of power and biopolitics and Lacanian/Post-Marxist theories of symbolic power. In fact, Grollios argues that theory needs to return to the concrete social consequences of capital accumulation, to an understanding of how workers’ free time is expropriated by capitalism’s unceasing search for surplus value. For Grollios, fetishism is ‘a general phenomenon in which, while people attempt to earn a living in a society where “time is money” rules, they end up creating social forms, such as value as money, or the state, or the bourgeois form of democracy that they cannot control and towards which they feel alienated’ (47).
In the first chapter, Grollios reads Nietzsche, unusually, as an ally of critical theory. It is true Nietzsche had a substantial influence on the Frankfurt School and its understanding of capitalist society. Yet most recent thinkers in the Continental tradition have focussed on the cultural and aesthetic aspects of Nietzsche’s critique of modernity and nihilism. They have certainly not reckoned with all his insights into politics and society. What Grollios offers is not a Marxist critique of Nietzsche – à la Georg Lukács’ Destruction of Reason – but an assessment of what is still valuable in his criticism of life and work under capitalism. Just like the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche ‘holds a dialectic between appearance/fetishized form and content/essence/alienation in everyday life’ (24). What is especially relevant for Grollios is Nietzsche’s insight into how the creative and liberating aspects of labour and the everyday are rendered superfluous by the market logic of capitalism.
The next chapter refreshingly passes over much of the scholarly literature that has been written about Walter Benjamin the ‘cultural critic’. Such commentaries largely miss the point of Benjamin’s critique of capitalism. Grollios argues that Benjamin ‘belongs to the first generation of Critical Theory and that his ideas take place in the frame of Marx’s Capital’ (61). Using concepts such as ‘determinate negation’, ‘corporeal materialism’, ‘the spellbound, topsy-turvy character of capitalist society’, ‘negative dialectics’ and ‘non-identity-thinking’, Grollios presents Benjamin’s striking characterisations of social production and reproduction and shows what they mean for the inner life of the worker (61). Grollios homes in on commodity fetishism, especially the reification of consciousness and the eternalisation of technical production, a hellish dream Benjamin calls a ‘capitalist phantasmagoria’ (63-64). The ‘corporeal materialism’ of Benjamin comes out in his description of unsavoury aspects of the industrial lifeworld. Benjamin’s perspectives on art and literature are important, but mainly because they alert the reader to fetishized aspects of industrial and post-industrial society. Key for Benjamin is the ‘eternal return’ of commodity capitalism and the way it alienates subjects both from the products they make and from a flourishing human existence. It is for this reason that the motifs of myth, boredom, death and fashion recur in Benjamin’s works, above all his unfinished Arcades Project. The mediation accomplished by capital between things and people can be described in terms of ‘reification’ which, in one essay, Benjamin says not only ‘clouds relations between human beings, but the real subjects of these relations also remain clouded’. This leads ineluctably to the ‘deformation’ of various bureaucratic vocations (93).
Grollios also emphasises the importance of Benjamin’s revolutionary theory of history. For Benjamin, ‘messianic time’ can override idols like the state and the individual. Indeed, as Grollios states, ‘[t]he leap of past events out of history into the present is likened by Benjamin to “the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution”’ (99). Grollios reads Benjamin as an anarchist and as standing against orthodox (and Leninist) historical materialism. He uncovers an Adornian ‘negative dialectics’ in Benjamin’s methodology. (Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ is something of a leitmotif in this book.) One-dimensional, identity thinking, the kind that naturalises the material and social relations under universal exchange society needs to be subjected to dialectical critique. Given that bourgeois epistemologies and logics sacrifice all to the economy and to its limiting temporalities, dialectical thinking must seek to deconstruct, dereify, and demystify them. For Grollios and other exponents of left-communism, historical instances of ‘actually existing socialism’ merely reproduce these logics in a new guise, a ‘state capitalist’ one (192-193).
The brunt of Grollios’ critique is aimed at those views that seek to compromise on the promise, the one implicit in Western philosophy, of a disalienated existence and work life. Read with such an emancipatory end in mind, Marx is shown to argue that communist freedom is possible only if workers are no longer treated as wage slaves, if they are freed from all economic constraints. As Grollios points out, this entails a completely new relationship to things, to commodities, to time and to labour. Finding such renewed social relations is impossible through party politicking, and unlikely to follow a general revolutionary upheaval. Class warfare does not guarantee the emancipation of the proletariat. One needs to interrupt capitalism where it really matters, by finding ‘cracks’ in its imposing edifice and changing workers’ very relationship to labour. This is the true form of protest for our time according to Grollios and other Open Marxists like John Holloway: ‘Cracks open, and revolution takes place when we deny the mask displaying ourselves as “personifications of economic categories” and revolt against the rule of money, against capital’ (55).
In chapter three, Grollios finds in Castoriadis’ philosophy a stepping stone to a new kind of political thinking about autonomy. But Castoriadis comes under fire for not having correctly understood Marx’s position on labour and alienation; in fact, he is ‘essentially much closer to traditional theory and bourgeois philosophy than has been believed’ (119). During his lifetime, Castoriadis was struggling against the consequences of Leninism, the failure of the dictatorship of the proletariat to effect real change and indeed other problems with articulating a class struggle under a constantly morphing social structure: ‘In Castoriadis’ theory, classes are not formed from below, from people’s productive activity, they are not a perverted form of our doing […] They are formed from above. However, this is a nonmaterialist, undialectical and therefore uncritical theorizing of class’ (126). While Open Marxism is anticipated by Castoriadis in some places, he nevertheless fails to pose fundamental questions about our daily life that lead to political action in the present. Grollios argues that when we succumb to the view that abstractive bourgeois logics do not exist in any meaningful sense, as Castoriadis does, one is (falsely) liberated to pursue political philosophy for its own sake. Additionally, Castoriadis theorizes the state ‘as a separate and relative autonomous instance’ and further ‘accuses Marx of ignoring this fact’ (139). A similar criticism can be made of Hannah Arendt’s mature political philosophy. Like Castoriadis, she fails to read Marx as formulating a critique, as opposed to offering a predictive description, of political economy, turning instead to superficial readings of Marx’s materialist interpretation of labour. Both Arendt and Castoriadis ultimately return to Aristotle and the ancient polis to settle accounts with capitalism and its illusions. Castoriadis ‘does not identify the concept of the double character of the labour which lies hidden in the commodity, and neither does he recognize the fact that contradiction and struggle are ingrained in the essence of our existence in capitalism’ (129). Nevertheless, Grollios appreciates Castoriadis’ formulation of the social imaginary and the need to reimagine the modern polity, to find a completely new and different footing for current society (146-147).
The last chapter is a distillation of the French Situationists’ critique of capitalism and ‘commodified time’ (154). Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord write eloquently about the subjection of citizens to a barrage of images, about the mediatization of consciousness: ‘Capital in Debord and the Situationists is not the amount of money accumulated waiting to be thrown again into production for profit to be produced but a social relation made up of fetishized social forms-images that originate in alienated-objectified labour’ (155). Capitalism hopes to endear people to the illusion of the totality. The modern ‘spectacle’ and its effects leads to the naturalisation of commodity exchange, to various false notions about what constitutes value in life and to a new form of temporality. Debord holds that ‘spectacular time is the illusorily lived time’ (166), that the ‘spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non-living’ (174). The Situationists, as Grollios presents them, do not pursue a reduction to the economic in the last instance, but rather a way of alerting us to the compromised epistemological foundation of the modern subject, relying as it does on the inversion of the value-form. Since fetishism is ingrained in all life under capitalism, where consumers are unwittingly beholden to the illusions of the market. The key idea here is that ‘fetishization [is] a process whereby people are turned into zombies of capital/spectacle’. The main consequence of this is that ‘class struggle is not only on the streets […] but also runs through ourselves, our bodies and souls’ (179). The only possibility for freedom is finding a way beyond such illusions. For Grollios, this means being attentive to the cracks that open in capitalism, by capitalising on the moments of what Adorno called the ‘utopian images’ in the everyday against capital’s myths, and by finding fresh opportunities to disrupt the status quo.
1 March 2024
URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21422_illusion-and-fetishism-in-critical-theory-a-study-of-nietzsche-benjamin-castoriadis-and-the-situationists-by-vasilis-grollios-reviewed-by-dimitri-vouros/
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