Fredric Jameson on Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt

Georg Baselitz, Der Jäger (The Hunter) (1966)

Lecture 19

Let’s say that this question of history and historicity leaves us with four different themes. One is the break itself. I told you that I thought the questions about periods are productive for a description, for an early stage in this process. You have to be able to describe a period, but this requires a process of differentiation, in which you identify how this period is different from some other period. The underlying question is: Where is the break? Every one of these works is subtended by some kind of belief in the modern. We have never been modern, says Bruno Latour, but, for Latour, the realization that we have never been modern is itself a historical break, so he has an idea of a break even if he doesn’t want to say so. The existence of capitalism also implies a break, after which, suddenly, it becomes possible to speak of a specifically capitalist mode of production. So, I suggest that this movement from history to historicity is our old friend, the question of modernity, disguised as a conceptual event.

Negt and Kluge share a certain number of these concerns, including the question of the otherness of the past, or more generally, otherness as such. Does the projection of otherness require a call for empathy? Can we understand the other? Is there something beyond the relationship of one other to another, as in Hegel’s master and slave? Is it possible or desirable to move beyond the duality of otherness? Do we consider the other as an object or as a subject for whom we are the object? We are told we must give up the subject-object relationship. The position of the interpreter, of hermeneutics, addresses the other as a situation. There is an other there who is demanding to be the object of my understanding. With Dilthey and the theorists of history in the late 19th century, the hermeneutic process is all about Verstehen, understanding the other, which gives rise to a new concern, namely empathy. The word comes into English in the early 20th century, but it emerges from these theories in late 19th-century Europe. It remains problematical. What is this other? Or, as Negt and Kluge will sometimes say, isn’t the other constructed? And if we have to construct otherness ourselves before we try to understand it, is any encounter with otherness bound to be an encounter with ourselves, with what we already know?

Many of you have said—and they say so themselves, in so many words—that Negt and Kluge’s History and Obstinacy is rhizomatic. I personally don’t happen to have a physical attachment to books the way a bibliophile would, but this one is really remarkable. It is published by Kluge’s own publishing house, 2001. The date of the first publication is 1981, so the name comes from a future 2001, a publishing house of a future which hadn’t yet arrived. It’s full of pictures. You can always attribute the presence of the pictures to Kluge. Maybe you have a philosophical argument from Negt, but the pictures will be Kluge’s wink at you. They are often paradoxical, or rather they don’t necessarily illustrate the argument. They provoke problems, or they suggest solutions that the argument itself doesn’t propose.

One of them that I particularly like is about the emergence of beaten paths. In the rubble of a city, clearly right after the war, we have a milkman. I don’t think we have those anymore. He has a white coat. He’s carrying an old-fashioned holder for milk bottles, seven or eight milk bottles. This figure is striding very calmly through a landscape that is completely destroyed. Are not beaten paths the way that habits are formed? The emergence of beaten paths would be both the cause and the effect of habit. Here is the rubble. How do you make your way through it? If you cross it often enough, like a milkman would—who is he bringing his milk to?—then a path is made in a place in which there are no longer any streets.

In what sense is this book a rhizome? The notion of rhizome is an attack on the conceptual schema of the tree, which you find all the way back in Aristotle’s logic. A concept has its dependencies, its origin, its base, and its direction. It has its branches and its roots. It can be parsed analytically. In that sense, it brings an order to what it names. For Deleuze, it is a royal schema, a schema of power, domination, and order. The rhizome is also something organic, but unlike a tree, it sends off its shoots in all directions, like a potato. Does a rhizome have a center? Eventually not, or, at least, that is what may be desirable in them. I think that this book is more of a rhizome, in a way, than Deleuze’s own books, but it is, nonetheless, unfinished. There is a little epilogue, just a page or so, where they say, in effect, “Look, we’re exhausted. This is enough. We can’t do any more right now, but maybe we’ll come back to some of these things.” The problem with the translation is that the translators, who are certainly to be praised for this effort, shouldn’t have given this back to Negt and Kluge, because, obviously, Negt and Kluge cannot keep their hands off of anything. They have taken their own work apart, removed some things, added others. Of course, they are reworking the book primarily for an American public, while the original itself addresses a German history, a German public, as was the much more conventional-looking book on the proletarian public sphere.

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It is even more difficult at this distance to know exactly what the original was doing, but we know it has something to do not just with the transformation of Germany but also with the reinvention of Germany. This is a reinvention of a certain kind of strange Marxism. It is a reinvention of the Left. It is a process of combining the analysis of the past and of tradition with the production of new learning processes. But it is a very different combination of the past and the future than that of the German ‘60s student movements, and, in that sense, it stands all by itself. You can’t say it is a monument. You could say it is a collection of ruins, something like Stonehenge. It has a unity, no doubt, or a completeness, but in fact, up close, it turns out to have been composed of many separate parts. To discern its separate elements is part of the pleasure of reading it.

It is divided into three parts. The first part is about labor power. The second part in German is about Öffentlichkeit, that is, the public sphere, the transfer into the public sphere. And the third is about relationality. The question is: How to look at these separate parts? What we have lost in translation is their analysis of Germany in the second part. That loss is a great pity, but I can restore a little bit of it as we talk about this section. Let’s begin with the notion of labor and labor power. In the 1850s, Marx writes to Engels and says, “Listen, I’ve just discovered something. We’ve gotten all this wrong. We’ve been talking about labor, but it’s not labor that we’re talking about. It’s labor power.” What does he mean by that? Why are they not talking about labor or work when they’re talking about wage labor? To answer these questions, we have to return to the difference between quantity and quality, the difference between the concrete and the abstract. Any form of labor is concrete. It always has individual qualities and calls on individual capacities. It produces a certain effect. All of this, because it is already done. Labor is what has already been done. Marx says that, in a way, the capitalist is really in debt to the workers, who have worked the whole week without pay, only to be paid at the end. The workers are giving him their labor on credit. They have themselves created this thing that he then pretends to pay them for. Looking back at their work, they have done a specific task and produced a use-value. They built a road, let’s say. A road has a use. But then they have to build a bridge. That would be a different kind of thing with different requirements. It involves a whole different set of problems than the laying of a foundation of a road. So labor is not the word we want. What the worker is, under capitalism, is his capacity to work. He hasn’t done anything yet. He is selling his time. Time and labor power are the abstraction, exchange-value. Labor itself is use-value. Accordingly, Negt and Kluge talk about phenomena in terms of labor power, rather than commodification, labor, or any of these other codes. 

But they don’t only follow Marx’s method of abstraction when discussing labor power. André Gide was asked in an interview with a little magazine why he writes. “Well,” he says, “there are three answers. I write because I want to please you, because I want to pursue something, and because I have a good pen.” The why, the various constituents that make up an act, can be separated. Let me give you an example of how Negt and Kluge do that. They’re talking about the multiplicity that goes into a so-called self. 

[I]t would be a gross simplification to assign a single personhood to every single person, as well as to every one of their internal representatives that feed off of strife and life. One characteristic shared by people ensnared in a fight and people who are happy, for example, is the fact that they are capable of expressing themselves rationally. [...] We could break down both arguing and happy people into their actual characteristics, which themselves are individual persons; within a single divided person, these characteristics sit across from one another only extrinsically. Passion’s eyes are different from its hands. The eyes of the objective remote senses are different from those of the immediate senses. The eyes involved in fleeing from another are different from the eyes involved in a person's appetite. In certain respects, the entire history of humanity—the society responsible for bringing these characteristics about—is present in a fight within the family or in the happy caresses between a few select people.

I think this has a lot in common with affect theory. If you think of affects, as they do, as forms of labor power, then you can see how you could take apart a combination of affects and you could endow each one with its specific productive powers. In this regard, their work could rejoin the kinds of theory that they were doing in France at the time, in which everything is conceived as production (a very mannered way of intellectuals trying to be Marxists or trying to be political by using this word, “production”). Nonetheless, Negt and Kluge allow one to reimagine analysis in terms of production, or better still, in terms of the combination of labor powers, which requires us to see how the unskilled laborer is also a combination of skills, and how even the complete lack of skill would itself be a kind of skill, if you like.

There is also the question of the remnant of the production process. In other words, now I’m trying to answer the most problematic question about this whole book: What do Negt and Kluge mean by Eigensinn? Geschichte und Eigensinn, History and Obstinacy. What can obstinacy possibly mean here? Clearly—although maybe it isn’t clear—it has to do with something beyond the various capacities of labor power. Maybe you could call it self-preservation, or the Spinozan conatus. It is what keeps something in being. Obstinacy is this insistence on continuing to be. It is also a resistance to training. Labor power requires training. You have to train these various impulses so as to put them together in some way, to make them function. That is a form of discipline which nobody particularly enjoys, so obstinacy would be the resistance against it. 

One of the nice features of this argument, if we can call it that, is its use of a pair of concepts: ontogenesis and phylogenesis. What things have to come together in an individual? And what has to come together for a community? Going back to the past is not just a question of history. It is a question of finding the underlying impulses that have constituted an individual and a society. That is why the book is marked by the presence of fairy tales, the Grimm brothers being among the first to discover and collect what remained of the storytelling past.

Here is a story from the Grimm brothers about obstinacy. It is quite hideous: 

Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him and let him become sick. No doctor could cure him, and in a short time, he lay on his deathbed. After he was lowered into his grave and was covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth. 

I think this is a particularly hideous story, and I hope you all agree. Is this a horror story, the return from beyond the grave? Certainly, the ghosts are figures for some form of obstinacy, not in death but in life. The mother and God himself clearly stand for order, for the disciplining of the primal impulse to life, and yet the narrative seems somehow to endow them with something more positive. There is something horribly puritanical about this story. They draw on Horkheimer’s essay on authority in the family, which allows them to draw a direct line from the notion of the family, the paternal ogre or disciplinary figure, to the authoritarian personality. And yet somehow the child exceeds the power these figures exert over him, at least until the final punishment allows it “peace,” an odd name for this dystopia in which all living impulses are repressed.

Obstinacy, as this story illustrates so well, is what constantly resists discipline. It is the source of disobedience, and it is life itself. What is the role of obstinacy in capitalism? Nobody wants to work under a wage labor system. The question of productive and unproductive labor is perennially posed, but it can be quite misleading here. Given the nature of our society, of course, everybody thinks that to be productive is good. Marx laid around on his couch, dosed, covered himself with the ashes from his cigarettes and cigars. Okay, well, that is surely unproductive. But Marx says at some point: No, productivity is making surplus value for the boss, the owner. Who wants to do that? There is no virtue in laboring productively. Are we, in the university, laboring productively or unproductively? Supposedly, in the immense collection of notes called Theories of Surplus Value, Marx says that only someone working for a private university is doing productive labor. I haven’t found this myself, but this is a very interesting thought for all of us to consider, whether or not Marx said it. 

Obstinacy under capitalism is the refusal to produce surplus value. But it is not necessarily a good thing. Would we say, for example, that warfare is the ultimate example of obstinacy? I think not, since warfare implies a certain kind of coordinated effort or construction. Kluge wrote a little book on Stalingrad, which is, again, filled with all kinds of interesting things, including notes from a manual handed out to the soldiers. But the subtitle is even more interesting: Stalingrad: The Construction of a Defeat. How was this disaster for the Germans constructed? It’s as though someone set out to imagine the worst possible catastrophe, and then asked: How can I possibly bring it about? What elements do I need? What kind of labor power do I have to acquire and combine in order to produce this absolute disaster, the battle of Stalingrad? 

We’ll end with one more example, although there is much more to see in this text. Long before Stalingrad, there is another disaster, which is at the source of the uniqueness of German history according to Negt and Kluge. Because they use the fate of the peasantry as a leitmotif for their exploration of social history—and indeed they draw on Bahro’s discussion of modes of production—they are aware of the various ways in which societies are built on the labor of the earth. At what point do we find our way out of the relationship to the earth which is unique to the peasantry and into a different, capitalist, extractive relationship to the earth? And what becomes of the peasants? Negt and Kluge discuss English, French, and Italian versions of the peasantry’s path into capitalism. These new societies emerge from the peasantry which they encounter as a first form of obstinacy. How, in these different cultures, is the resistance of the peasantry managed or maintained? In Germany, the peasant wars are the catastrophe that prevents Germany from modernizing—the barbarity of the massacre of the peasants in 1517 with Thomas Müntzer, as opposed to Luther and his soldiers of the princes. This is the primal trauma in German history, which is repeated over and over again, surfacing as a nightmare in the Thirty Years War, which is only ended by a treaty which is largely responsible for the formation of modern nation states. You can’t say that Negt and Kluge are making an argument for the peasant wars as an original national trauma, because they don’t make arguments in that way, but the peasant wars are certainly their primal source of obstinacy in German history, as if finally Luther’s princes and their noble armies have beaten back this hand that keeps coming out of the grave, having put this power of obstinacy to rest in some ultimately unproductive way.