An Abolitionist Judgment: Thought Thinks Thought (or, Does Thinking Matter?)

There is a kind of detachment that occurs separating mind from action, as if thinking is inert. While there are real fears of idealism's wishing it were so into existence, mind must play some part, and I believe we can see it in the opposition where mind is separated from body in order for the latter to subordinate the former. Body in the form of habit blocks mind when it does not allow for the dialectical move beyond the common sense, from description. However, mind is troubled before the start, before we are even conceived as persons. Our mind becoming so much a shed for customs, rules, preferences. Mind is where we first struggle to move our bodies differently, to interrupt Mind, it turns out, is one of the only things we can possibly get right, but it also does not make sense to talk about without thinking about mind as body itself.

I’m deeply motivated by an ethical core, an ethical repetition, getting mind right as a process of concretization, moving dialectically between whatever is being thought about and the ongoing project to live a good human life, to flourish. This is not a mechanical relationship where the product becomes concrete in an immovable sense, but rather where stuff becomes seeable and existing in form in a process of theorization. The abstract comes together with the concrete in local situations in life. So the result is toward moveability based on this identification: it can now be thought because it has been seen and formed. Crucially, this movement is nothing without a concept and praxis of commitment. Exposure itself is not enough. A process of thought is not enough. It must become bodily and endure in time and space, which is to say become a habit, an ethical repetition. I've never forgotten the Aristotelian maxim, we are what we repeatedly do, even as I became a Marxist and the thought transformed into the context of the classic world-makes-consciousness, shining light on the social production of individuals in opposition to Aristotle's more essence-based view that leaves women, children, slave incapable of learning virtue.

When I read this passage below from Asad Haider’s writing on Louis Althusser, "The Lonely Hour of the Last Instance," I immediately moved to thinking abt the efficacy of truth (the propitious moment over the royal moment?). How does thinking causally put us in a better position to live a good life, to flourish? Does it put us in a better position to end unnecessary suffering in the social and political relations of production of oppression and exploitation? Which is to say, how does it relate to the class struggle? Which is to say, how do I relate to the class struggle? How does thinking causally put me in the best position to relate to the class struggle happening locally all around and everywhere, the global? What does metaphysics, dialectics, thought do? How might an ethic of metacommentary (which seems redundant), what Fredric Jameson termed concern for thinking about thought, function as autoethnographic and as self-implication via the conditions forming the problem trying to be thought? This is the beginning of the work to assess the given problems and transform them. This change dialectically traversing body and mind, is how thought becomes material.

This entails a different conception of both causality and temporality, which is the core concern of Althusser’s famous declaration about the determinacy of the economic “in the last instance”: “From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes” (Althusser 1977, 113). Althusser’s point is not only to assert that the Marxist dialectic of contradiction makes it such that the effectivity of the economy is always overdetermined by elements of the superstructure. He is proposing a statement about causality itself: the cause is never “present” and “exists” only in its effects – there is no moment of its royal appearance in corporeal form. The cause is determinant in its effects, within forms that are spatially characterized as superstructural..  

So, in looking at Haider’s explication of Althusser, I care more about the priority placed on causation, the development of the present out of the past and into the future and how thought’s thinking of these movements in the local situations of our everyday lives presents the opportunities to commit ourselves, to put ourselves in ethical trajectories where we will be called on to be accountable in the shared political project of class struggle. I care here less about the substantive movements of Althusser’s theory of causation and more for the metacommentary on the conditions of its existence as a problem which is to say the value or immanence experienced

 "Causality itself" is the telltale heart here, opening up the metaphysical claim about... causality itself, which is to say how things change, which is to say how things exist together, not how they exist separately in an artificially produced vacuum. Not supraphysics above or outside the physical, but metaphysics, beyond the physical and into the material. Often "meta" is translated as beyond, but also as as "behind" which implies, possibly, causation. There is also the connotation of "on", I believe, which brings "forming a part of something" to meta. So the question of metaphysics here is what is the physicals contemplation of the physical? 

Thinking about causality is an ongoing practice, not a one-time action. We begin each time with our naive appearances which present as causes in themselves when they have concealed relations of production. These naive appearances themselves are the product of a broader structure of thought governing cause and effects Althusser writes of in Reading Capital in terms of visibility and invisibility. For the structure of thought in particular, we'd need to read Deleuze's Difference and Repetition for a more overarching and also more intense look at the structure of thought. Here I'm interested to connect invisibility with Althusser's effects. Both appear to be simply epiphenomenal and dependent but are essential and determinative. The conversation hinges on a reversal whereby the visible is dependent on the invisible, where what is seen is produced in order to be seen and cover over the invisible which in fact is the relation of generation. It is not in the visible where the invisible finds power, but the visible which produces its own power by inventing the invisible to serve as an opposite. 

The power of thinking is not a new idea and emerges loudly in the 6th-Century Roman prisoner Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy in a booklong conversation between Boethius the Prisoner and a conjured figure named Lady Philosophy who confronts Boethius with his poor thinking and how his poor thinking produces his experience of fate. By poor thinking, Lady Philosophy specifically means Boethius' lament of his fate of execution and the loss of his previous good life as a philosophy and statesman. Inside this lament is a thinking that is not concerned with the conditions of its own thought, a thinking that can only experience the pain of losing a life one loved, to which, seriously, we have been detached. 

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence presents the need to think causally to confront the tightly interlocking political conditions of racial capitalism. Thinking continues to take on more practical effect and become concrete and political. In contrast to the lack of possibility, Gilmore demonstrates the power of exhaustion at the limit. There is no room within racial capitalism for this change. It must by necessity position itself with and against, that is, at the limits and edges where contestation occurs. It's here where we can come to see what we can't see. This cannot be on a one-time as needed basis, but rather a practice of critique, of thinking that is grounded in bodily political commitment, in intentional and repeated action that produces the need to think of one's conditions, to do a metacommentary. 

Perhaps another way to think of meta commentary, or this dialectic process of critique which constitutes an efficacious, transformative thought grounded in an intersection of politics, metaphysics and ethics, in Gramsci's

“The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”

"What one really is" -- this is the essence of our process, our habits -- the way in which the world has acted on us to make our consciousness as we become able to act on the world with our consciousness.  And what we find here is another profound dialectical truth: our consciousness is both the site of oppression and emancipation. The world presses on us as we press on others producing an ecosystem of trauma, of hurt people hurting people. The binary opposition, oppressor/oppressed, does not in practice exist. Writers as disparate as Audre Lorde, Primo Levi, Diane Di Prima have discussed this complicated fact wherein for example, white supremacy is not the sole product of folks racialized as white, or the -- we are all called into the oppression and exploitation of others and ourselves. 

So, we are faced with the ongoing Spinozist problem that Deleuze spent so much of his life on: Why do ppl fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

But Spinoza did give us, I think, a powerful if brief response that is still rich with meaning and leads us right back to the power of thinking about causation.

Men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.