The Order and Connection of Ideology Is the Same as the Order and Connection of Exploitation

Abstract

Of all of the various attempts to define and clarify the recent turn to Spinoza, perhaps the most provocative is offered by Antonio Negri: the postindustrial age the Spinozian critique of representation of capitalist power corresponds more to the truth than does the analysis of political (1997, 246). Negri's formulation is provocative not just in that it suggests a critique of capitalist power which is not grounded by the (Marxist) critique of political economy, but in that it suggests a need to counter capital not just at the level of the economy, but at the level of its representation of power. Capital needs to be countered at the level of ideas as much as social relations. Negri's provocation has perhaps been answered by two contemporary neo-Spinozist writers, Frederic Lordon and Yves Citton, the former of which has developed a Spinozist critique of political economy while the latter has pioneered an analysis of the representations of power.Read together, Lordon and Citton's work can be understood as a response to two fundamentally different questions. The first is a question integral to both Marx and Spinoza: how to understand the relation between order and connection of things and ideas, base and superstructure, in terms of their identity, causal relations, and difference? Spinoza and Marx offer two very different formulations and answers to this question. It is precisely their difference that brings them together. Spinoza offers a non-reductive immanence to Marx's hierarchy, while Marx's thought offers to historically situate and place the eternal order of being and thinking. Thus if the first question is ontological, encompassing different perspectives throughout time, a fundamental and unchanging question about the relation of minds and bodies, things and ideas, the second question is more contemporary, more conjunctural, brought about by changes in economic and political structure. How can the current economic and political transformations, neoliberalism, the crisis, austerity, be understood and transformed by looking at the intersections of material conditions, ideas, and imagination? Several writers have underscored the manner in which neoliberalism is perhaps best understood as a change of political imagination as much as social relations, a question that has become all the more pressing after the current crash, as the neoliberal imagination continues to structure responses and policy (Mirowski 2013, 1). Answering these two questions together, or examining the ontological by means of the conjunctural and vice versa, in turn answers a third question, why turn to Spinoza today as a way of understanding social and political life.Lordon and Citton's projects intersect in the most recent wave of neo-Spinozist scholarship. Their project is unified in the sense that it is turned specifically to considering the question of the relationship of Spinoza's thought to a theory of social relations, or even the social sciences, as can be seen in their jointly edited Spinoza et science sociales. At the core of this project is the turn not so much to Spinoza's critique of the imaginary, as it was with Louis Althusser's account of ideology, or to his ontology, as in Antonio Negri's account of constituent power, but to Spinoza's anthropology (if it can be called that) as it encompasses desire, affects, and the imagination. For both Lordon and Citton it is the conatus, the striving underlying every existence that makes possible a new thought of social relations (Citton and Lordon 2008, 27). This striving, the desire, as much as it defines man's very essence, is irreducibly singular, we each strive in different ways, but the direction and orientation of this striving is shaped by affects and the history of encounters. Spinoza's conatus overcomes the dualism between holistic and individualistic accounts of social relations, starting with neither the society nor the individual but the relations that are their mutual constitution. …