Conrad Hamilton is a postdoctoral research fellow at East China Normal University. His works deals with the relation between social agency and the value form in the mature writings of Karl Marx. He is co-author of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson and author of the forthcoming Marxism contra Subjectivity.
Ege Çoban: Perhaps we could begin by asking you to tell something about your general intellectual background. How did you get into philosophy and what were some of the formative texts that influenced you in your development?
Conrad Bongard Hamilton: I remember very clearly when philosophy first piqued my interest. I had taken a course on medieval philosophy during my first degree at the University of Guelph—I’m not sure why exactly, but I was adamant at the time about missing most of it. Anyway, I joined one of the classes late, and I remember being fascinated by an oracular remark made by the professor. I approximate: “Since the time of Newton physics has been understood as efficient causality, the force and motion of objects. For the Greeks, physis meant something else: an inner drive, a principle of self-unfolding, the fuse that drives the flower. Maybe it’s time we discard our juvenile conception.”
That professor, by the way, was Jeff Mitscherling. At the time, he was attempting to produce a new reading of phenomenology, deeply influenced by Roman Ingarden, according to which intentionality could be said to be possessed not just by human subjects, but by objects in the world. I guess it was like our own, anti-Heideggerian version of object-oriented ontology! I found that intriguing, and began to take my studies—and above all my engagement with his ideas—more seriously. But I’d also always been interested in Marx: indeed, when I was maybe twelve years old the leader of the Communist Party of Ontario, Liz Rowley, had commuted to my hometown—Guelph—to explain to me how the Soviets had never really dropped “toy bombs” in Afghanistan, and so on. So I started thinking about how Mitcherling’s notion of objectival intentionality might be applicable to Marxism, and material determination in particular. “Can productive forces be intentional?” That was the starting point.
After I finished my BA, I actually applied for my Master’s at Guelph. Mitscherling, probably wisely, encouraged me to go elsewhere: specifically to a joint degree at Kingston University in London and Paris 8 University, where both Marxism and Speculative Realism had a strong purchase (remember this was the mid-2010s). Guelph turned me down, possibly because I fell asleep so often in class people thought I had narcolepsy. So I went to Kingston, where I met Catherine Malabou, Mike Ardoline, Borna Radnik, and many others who came to influence my thinking…
Ege Çoban: You are known for being interested and expanding on the concept of “real abstraction”, what was it that got you to the debates surrounding this notion? How would you articulate your proper position with regards to them?
Conrad Bongard Hamilton: I think you can see this question as picking up from my answer to the last one. My BA thesis at the University of Guelph, as well as my Master’s thesis at Kingston/Paris 8, dealt with the idea that there exists an affinity between Marxist, material determination and the attempts to overcome subjectivism (or “correlationism,” if you prefer) that were fashionable in that period. However, one weakness of my approach at the time is that it was based on a pre-value-theoretical reading of Marx: that is to say, I treated Marxism in essentially metaphysical terms, failing to fully take into consideration how, for instance, the personification of the subject characteristic of modernity might relate to the commodification of labour power, or how the Kantian categories might isssue from the value form.
That changed in the summer of 2015. Due to a lock-up in the visa system, I was forced to go to the UK and stay there while waiting for Schengen authorities to issue a French visa for my PhD with Catherine Malabou and Pierre Cassou-Noguès at Paris 8. As Borna Radnik was out of town, I subletted his apartment in Surbiton, living alongside his roommate—Patrick Concannon, another Kingston student. I was totally poor: I usually didn’t have enough money for the train to London, and I remember every day buying a ploughman’s sandwich, a white chocolate bar, and a Diet Coke from the Pound Land as my sole meal. Anyway, at some point Patrick said to me, basically, ‘hey, you ought to read this book by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour.’ I did, and it was like the snare shot that blew open the door to my mind. Someone, I thought, had produced a credible Marxist explanation for the genesis of the modern subject. The riddle of history solved—or at least a subsidiary one.
More and more, I began to incorporate Sohn-Rethel’s ideas into my thinking. And what I began to realize is that there was still a lot of unfulfilled potential. His work is based on the thesis that abstraction as we know it derives from, and is a consequence of, the value-form—the way abstract quantity, for example, arises from the process of exchanging commodities. With the rise of capitalism, this is turned by Kant into a sine qua non of thought itself (an appropriate shift, since the labour power of persons is hereafter exchanged). But all this raises the question: if the Kantian subject is but a personification of value, does this mean a communist society devoid of it would be non-dualistic? Alberto Toscano has dealt with this issue—but has an unfortunate tendency, from my perspective anyway, of retrenching ontological (as opposed to materially instantiated) dualism whenever he seems on the cusp of doing away with it (a gesture undertaken for fear that liquidating it would be tantamount to a liquidation of materialism). But what if this isn’t possible? That is, what if—in our efforts to separate out a ‘good,’ scientific dualism from ‘bad,’ abstract dualism—we’re eliding the fact that both are, in the last instance, consequences of the value-relation?
Ege Çoban: You define your forthcoming book Marxism Contra Subjectivity as responding and coming out of a specific conjuncture. That conjuncture was, of course, that of the return to ontology coalescing in the Speculative Realism conferences of the early 2000s. What was your initial reaction to this trend and how did it develop into the stance that you would later take up in your book?
Conrad Bongard Hamilton: My first exposure to Speculative Realism was at the University of Guelph. A TA there, Ryan Krahn, was giving a course that dealt heavily with works that had been popular in the London milieu after 2007—Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, for instance, and Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude. A friend recommended the Meillassoux. I read through it, and didn’t really get it—again, it was Mitscherling that mattered for me at this time. Later, though, when I arrived at Kingston for my Master’s, we studied the book in a module with Peter Hallward, which helped clarify a number of things. I also maintained a close rapport during this period with Mike Ardoline, who was crazy about this stuff. He had long hair and a goatee, and would show up to class in a Batman belt and a black vest over a t-shirt with, say, an astronautic, celestial design (a Deleuzian, of course!). After it, we would grab a drink and talk for hours on end, as he explained to me the finer points of thinkers like Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, and Bruno Latour.
It was through this process that I acquired a heightened appreciation of SR. But as I deepened my study of Marxism, it became increasingly clear to me that its pretension to direct access was—if not completely misguided—then premature, in the sense that it treats “correlationism” as a problem that can be overcome through incisive argumentation rather than as a necessary feature of our economic structure that must be mediated (a critique that, I believe, Alberto Toscano was the first one to advance). A related consequence of this has been a failure of it to fully acknowledge the historical conditions which produced it. SR would not exist were it not for the sense that, by privileging the human subject, philosophy has staved off a serious engagement with the current environmental crisis—I don’t think that’s obscure. But its specific timing is also suggestive. It started in 2007—just as a Great Recession was getting underway that, by putting firms under economic pressure, expedited the pace of automation. And I think its critique of the correlational circle has a resonance with the critique of finance capital, which—it was becoming apparent—was increasingly functioning without any kind of material referent.
Of course, to historicize SR’s goal of getting beyond the fettering of knowledge by the subject-object binary does not mean to dismiss it. I rather see it like Kautsky’s ‘merger fornula’—the idea that socialism was first transmitted to the workers’ movement from without, by bourgeois intellectuals. SR may have been a bourgeois movement. But its importance for the left stems from the way it opened up a political horizon—the overcoming of dualism—that had hitherto been unavailable to it (though its critique of the ‘subject’ certainly has a deeper history). To see this as a political horizon, however, already presupposes its translation into the register of class struggle. Dialectics, with its ability to pull an ought from an is, is the best tool we have for achieving this.
Ege Çoban: One of the main disputes your book goes into, as can be seen by the title, is with regards to the relation between Marxism and the philosophical theory of the subject. Now, the concept of the subject has been the subject of a great renewal of research, especially in light of the work done by Balibar, Cassin and De Libera in the Vocabulary of European Philosophies. Would you agree, with Peter Osborne, that the more formally resolved the concept of the subject becomes, the less it has political purchase?
Conrad Bongard Hamilton: It depends on what one means by “formally resolved.” I don’t believe that a few scholars in a room have much of an impact in of themselves, any more than I think Derridean deconstruction is responsible for, as was once suggested by the American right, the opposition to constitutional originalism. But ’formal resolution’ has, as is so often the case, pre-existing material indices. Althusser is clearly the name most associated with it. His critique of the subject did not arise in a political vacuum. Indeed, if—as Jameson has suggested—the term ‘Hegel’ in Althusser’s work is a secret cypher for ‘Stalin,’ I would offer another formulation that should be even less obscure: that his critique of the subject is really a cypher for the critique of Khrushchevist de-Stalinization. Not—as is often lazily claimed—because Althusser loved Stalin. Rather, because Khrushchev had not gone far enough: by reproaching Stalin from the standpoint of legalism and humanism, he had jettisoned the tenets of Marxist analysis, in a manner that paradoxically allowed the Stalinist deviation to persist. It is no coincidence that this position broadly recapitulates that of Mao: Althusser was, however subtly, aligning himself with an international tendency that was calling for a heightening of class struggle, and opposing European détente. Mao’s formulation is far less ambiguous: World War I gave us the Russian Revolution, World War II gave us the Chinese Revolution. Why should we be cowed by atomic destruction, or the threat of World War III?
Perhaps I’m digressing a bit. But the point here is that, if one accepts that intellectual discourses are materially determined in the last instance, we have to ask ourselves: what role does the (Marxist) critique of the subject currently play in class struggle? It seems that, in every instance, this critique pertains to the desire to privilege higher order contradictions over the ‘extra-class’ question of the atomized individual. Thus it’s no surprise that, if in the sixties it was linked with atomic war, today we see it at the center of left-environmental debates: while some, such as Jason Moore, have argued that renouncing a subject-oriented perspective is indispensable for an authentic eco-socialist politics, others have opposed this on consequentialist grounds, contending that ontological flattening risks erasing the agency humans possess vis-a-vis the natural world in the age of the Anthropocene (thought this criticism is arguably premised on a misreading, since the elimination of the Nature/Society divide is more of a futural horizon for Moore than something that can be immediately pursued).
The debate over the subject is also, I think, important to the current impasse concerning ‘left populism’: that is, whether—in light of repeated failures—it’s worthwhile for socialists in the West to continue to support parliamentarist projects. In his struggle against reformism, one thing Althusser stressed was that “an empiricism of the subject always corresponds to an idealism of the essence”: that is, that the notion of the subject presupposes an “essence” which is in fact immanent to bourgeois history—Smith’s homo economicus, social atomism, ethico-political idealism, and so forth. If you read Jacobin, it’s very obvious that they think humanism is important, that they think the individual is important, and that they think both entail the embrace of electoralism and the construction of a mass party that eschews violence. These convictions are not seriously interrogated; they’re simply taken for granted. Of course, we see the outcome: Corbyn failed, Sanders failed, Insoumise is simply being blocked from taking power. These are the same things that have been going on for over a century! But the populist left was not in a position to understand this, because their strategy did not derive from a rigorous analysis. This had implications for its class structure: in so far as parliaments do matter, for instance, these movements did not do enough to win over right-wing and (even more importantly) non-voting constituencies.
Ege Çoban: Another line of investigation your research undertakes is in relation to a new hybrid form of conservative and reactionary thought today, embodied respectively by people like Jordan Peterson and Alexander Dugin. Could you expand on your ideas à propos the popularity of these figures?
Conrad Bongard Hamilton: Peterson and Dugin are ultimately very different products of very different ideological systems. What they share in common is that their thinking is anchored in a deeply reactionary dimension, which is thereafter ‘filtered’ through an exoteric, Enlightenment standpoint. Like Jung, Peterson sees nature as aristocratic and hierarchical. This is why he begins 12 Rules for Life by analogizing wealth inequality to lobster battles, why he’s uncritically upheld the notion that different races have—innately, so it would seem—different levels of intelligence; why he has such a primal appeal for the alt-right. But also like Jung, who insisted that he was an “inveterate democrat,” Peterson believes formal equality (“equality of opportunity”) is a useful fiction worth preserving. The problem arises when one attempts to achieve actual equality (“equality of outcome”): since this is a defilement of nature, it can only lead to Stalinism (or identity politics, which for him amounts to the same thing). It’s this dual aspect of Peterson’s work that has allowed him to cultivate a far-right following while simultaneously maintaining mainstream acceptability. The way he does this has become familiar by now: he’ll say something extreme, like that we need “enforced monogamy,” then walk it back a few days or weeks later, claiming he just meant “socially-promoted, culturally-inculcated monogamy,” a.k.a. what we already have. His critics misinterpreted him!
Peterson’s understanding of how to game outrage culture is, without doubt, an acquired skill he picked up during his two decades at the University of Toronto. Dugin doesn’t do this kind of bait-and-switch—he doesn’t come from a context that compels him to. But the arc of his work can still be understood as an attempt to sanitize reactionary ideas. In the 80s, he was—basically—a garden variety Nazi, who existed on the margins of the Soviet systems. With the crumbling of the USSR, and the popularization of syncretic far right/neo-Soviet ideology by figures like Alexander Prokhanov, this changed. No longer was he, so he claimed, purely fascistic: while fascism contained within it an admirable anti-modern and culturalist impulse, the problem was that it had attached itself to the archetypally modern categories of ‘race’ and ‘nation’—what caused it to fail in its struggle against liberal, Anglo-American ‘Atlanticism.’ One of the ironies of this is that the USSR came in wany ways to better embody the anti-modern spirit of fascism than fascism itself. Sure, it was founded on universalist principles, Dugin admits. But because Russia is innately anti-Atlanticist and ‘continental’ in character, being at bottom a society which privileges both tradition and top-down authority, it nevertheless ended up being pro-multicultural and politically centralized . Later, Dugin revises these ideas somewhat, calling not for a ‘red brown’ synthesis but a “fourth political theory” that—by synthesizing liberalism, communism, and fascism—goes beyond them. But the nucleus of his thought never changes: that all political universalism is a form of Eurocentric racism, and that our ideal should be to distil the anti-modern traits of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union while dispensing with the modern ones.
While there are, as I said, stark differences between Peterson and Dugin, one thing that I think unites them is that—while both fascistic to a point—they share in common that they’re the outcome of neoliberal structures. Because of this, their worldviews are less defined by open chauvinism than the defense of the latent chauvinism lodged within late capitalism itself. It is completely ludicrous to imagine that economic and social policy can be separated: if you’re going to download social reproduction to women by abolishing daycare etc., as happened in post-Soviet Russia, society will not function for very long unless strengthened patriarchal values emerge to subtend these changes (a purpose for which the defense of “tradition” can easily serve). Peterson and Dugin thus exist, I suspect, to highlight the incompatibility of progressive liberal commitments with the shameful economic dispensations which exist in both North America and Russia. This point is, of course, completely missed by actual liberals, who—by likening them to vintage fascists of the 1930s sort, and stopping there—deflect any criticism of the neoliberalism they’ve long since made peace with. Indeed: when I published my essay on Dugin (“The Apostate Fascism of Alexander Dugin”), I was accused in some quarters of being a ‘Duginist.’ We know how this works: if you actually endeavour to explain something, you might make the wrong people look bad. So you’re already guilty.
Ege Çoban: A more controversial aspect of your writings has been about your ideas relating to multipolarity and the heritage of actually-existing-socialism. On both accounts you caution against an overly liberal understanding of these problems. What would be your own interpretation as to these agendums?
Conrad Bongard Hamilton: I suspect the “controversy” you’re referring to—which ultimately boils down to a handful of individuals, since very few people care—owes more to the climate than my actual views. For four years now, left populism has been in a state of acute crisis. This, as well as the rise of China and the porosity of social media discourse, has manifested in a theoretical tendency which sees “Western Marxism” as being indelibly marked by both serial passivity and pro-imperialism. In particular, it takes exception to its reflexive hostility to both the USSR and China: if both countries raised hundreds of millions out of poverty, after all, how bad can they be?
I see both strengths and weaknesses in this approach. It is true, surely, that the erasure or decisive weakening of communist parties in the West beginning in 1991 or earlier has created a climate in which—so far as communism is understood at all—it is understood through a Trotskyist or social-democratic prism. In this sense, we’ve inherited a lopsided view of history, one that sees in state socialism only undifferentiated repression without taking into consideration the positive effects of what Samir Amin terms ‘delinking’ as a development strategy (something true even if it emerged out of the wreckage of abortive world revolution). At the same time, I am personally not persuaded that “Western Marxism” is as devoid of value as some partisans of these ideas seem to think. Why? First, because arguably its signature feature—a utopian inspiration rooted in the idea of a world revolution emanating from the West—remains a relevant one. This merely follows from the assertion of the importance of the anti-imperialist contradiction: to say that Stalin or Mao were in some measure ‘justified’ because their actions represented a defense against imperialism even if they fell short of ‘full’ communism is to acknowledge that it was, ipso facto, the absence of revolution in the imperialist states that prevented a better outcome. Marxists in the West cannot simply adopt “Eastern Marxism”: if the Russian Revolution was, as Gramsci said, the revolution against Capital, we’re still stuck with the task of making the revolution of it. Second, because whatever its political failures, Western Marxism generated a remarkable body of theoretical work: I don’t think you can dismiss the likes of Lukács or Gramsci or Althusser or Jameson. Of course, one be reductionist here, and reproach it on the grounds that it failed to engender revolution, or was part of a larger sequence of political passivization. But I would see it a bit more charitably: that one of the consequences of the international division of labour was for ‘theory’ to flourish in the comparatively liberal enclaves of the imperial core, while ‘practice’ acquired greater purchase in the semi-periphery and periphery. I don’t think the solution is to seek the expulsion of one dimension or the other. Rather, it’s to pose the question of how the economic contradictions that caused their partition can be overcome—something perhaps more possible than ever, given the tremendous general proletarianization we’ve witnessed over the past several decades.
Ege Çoban: Finally, can you tell us about what you are working at the moment? What are the lines of research that interest you currently?
Conrad Bongard Hamilton: There are a few different ones. One is a book on video games I’m hoping to put out soon, the title of which comes from a remark by Roger Caillois, The Contagion of Reality. In essence, I argue in it that—while games started as a social activity, in the arcades and the ARPANET—the commercialization of microchips and home computing in the late 1970s caused them to become predominantly a solitary one. The result of this was that they took on a more strongly narrative form—a shift that led to them being perceived by scholars like Janet Murray as akin to books or films, albeit ‘multisequential’ (in the sense that they delegate a defined set of choices to the player). However, just as the consensus was emerging in the late nineties, something else happened: online gaming. More and more—and we see with this StarCraft for instance—companies were eschewing customizable ‘arcs’ in favour of a toolkit with which players would generate renewable online content. This caused the idea that games were above all a form of storytelling to wither. In its stead emerged ‘ludology’—the notion that we need to analyze games as games.
While ludology helped advance game studies, it nevertheless had certain serious flaws. From the get-go, it decried the ‘politicization’ of gaming indulged by narratology, which it saw as detracting from a more rigorous approach. This turned out to be a serious liability. First, because—due to concerns I would interpret as stemming partly from declined innovation and consumer-friendliness caused by a lowered rate of profit—it prevented the nascent field of game scholarship from formulating an adequate response to the alt-right insurgency known as #GamerGate. Second, because it ignored the fact that—as games became yet another species of monopoly capital—they were beginning to function less as discrete aesthetic objects and more as platforms targeted at absorbing as much input (labour?) from players as possible. Take Minecraft: it’s like StarCraft on steroids—it’s not a game, it’s a social world. This is why games have, contra the ludologists, become so politicized: because they’re the aesthetic expression of the contradictions characteristic of the most advanced sectors of capital.