The true is the whole.
—Hegel (PhG: §20)Footnote 1
The whole is the false.
—Adorno (Reference Adorno2006: 50)
In her reply to critics of Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, Rebecca Comay laments the fact that the debate concerning the status of Hegel’s idealism, whether it is metaphysical or non-metaphysical, does not map onto the old division between right and left Hegelianism (Comay Reference Comay2013: 54). This is ‘too bad’ since it means that the current debate misses the political stakes of the old one. More than worrying about a revival of right Hegelianism and its affirmation of the theological elements in Hegel’s thought, Comay reflects on the ‘more subtle teleology’ of gradualist accounts of conceptual improvement (Comay Reference Comay2013: 57). Attempts to offer deflationary readings of Hegel have provided new occasions to see Hegel’s thought as reformist, thereby missing the radicality of Hegel’s texts. For Comay, ‘the dialectic not only exposes the fabrication at work in every social product—it reveals every given to be a result—but also explores the logic of disavowal that sustains the consumption of these products long past their expiration date’ (Comay Reference Comay2013: 55). She maintains that Hegel is not merely asking why our normative commitments change, why our obligations and entitlements require adjustment. ‘He also asks a far more painful question’, Comay writes,
why, despite their manifest rottenness, despite their blatant contradictoriness and ineffectiveness, do outdated normative commitments persist, and even keep returning long after their illegitimacy has been universally acknowledged? It’s not just that normative authority is precarious, that it is socially and historically constituted, and thus inevitably loses traction … The more difficult point is that it’s also weirdly resilient. It somehow survives its own demise. Even when divested of legitimacy and credibility, norms continue to bind. They impose a kind of normativity even in the absence of all authority … In this respect they have the excessive, uncanny vitality of the undead. This is why it can sometimes take such extreme measures to evict them (Comay Reference Comay2013: 55–56).
We might articulate Comay’s worry in the following way. Especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s account of the specifically modern conception of freedom, one that centres autonomy, not only examines its progressive articulation throughout time. It tracks the resilience of conceptions of autonomy tied to assumptions about self-sufficiency (Selbstständigkeit) that have turned out to be false. These conceptions suffer inversions into forms of unfreedom, sheer dependence, actual violence. Tracking this strand of Hegel’s text troubles any understanding of Hegelian teleology and of the actualization of freedom that such teleology undergirds. It delivers a reading of Hegel attuned to recovering what is lost in such resilience, indeed to resisting such resilience (see Comay and Zantvoort Reference Comay and Zantvoort2018).
In previous work, I have centred Hegel’s conception of negativity in order to offer somewhat of a hybrid position. Going beyond the metaphysical/non-metaphysical debate, I have argued that Hegel’s metaphysics is a theory of intelligibility, and that intelligibility is a matter of Geist. Hegelian actualization (Verwirklichung) is a process of determinate negation, yet one in which the result must be understood as ‘precarious’ and ‘ambivalent’ (Zambrana Reference Zambrana2015: Introduction; cf. Bowman Reference Bowman2013; Kreines Reference Kreines2015; Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012). Following Robert Pippin and Robert Brandom, I have suggested that any ‘result’ is an ‘institution’, a historical achievement, that can be said to be ‘actual’, wirklich, if it has normative authority (Brandom Reference Brandom2009; Pippin Reference Pippin1989, Reference Pippin2010). A given conception of freedom is binding if it has currency within a particular set of institutions in a given moment in time. Such bindingness, currency, authority expresses the truth of freedom, not merely what is taken to be freedom. Bindingness, then, articulates the specificity of a form of life, of a shape of Geist. Because it is not a given but a result, a historically specific articulation of freedom can lose its authority, its grip. It can be overcome. More than precarious, however, the result of determinate negation is ‘ambivalent’—positive and negative in its meaning and effects. A form of recognition, even when successful, is at the same time a form of misrecognition. A history recollected in light of normative commitments central to a form of life at the same time ‘forgets’, ‘buries’, ‘makes invisible’, ‘pathologizes’ events that do not gain authority in light of those commitments (Zambrana Reference Zambrana2015: 50). Progress is thus at the same time regress. Ambivalence troubles a gradualist understanding of Hegel. It points not only to what is lost, but to what remains within the movement of actualization, for example, the tenacity of an understanding of autonomy tied to a conception of self-sufficiency.
In this article, I track the ambivalence of Hegelian actualization by examining Hegel’s discussion of actuality (Wirklichkeit) in the Science of Logic. I do so, however, by considering a key difference between Hegel’s and Marx’s accounts of modality that Iain Macdonald has recently pointed out (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018). Critics of Marx of various stripes have often rejected the view of historical necessity that he purportedly inherits from Hegel. Marx famously pledges allegiance to Hegelian necessity by arguing, for example, that social antagonisms ‘spring from natural laws’ that work themselves out with ‘iron necessity’; that the bourgeoisie produces its own ‘gravediggers’; that the proletariat’s victory is ‘inevitable’ (Marx Reference Marx1976; quoted in Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 1–2). Properly understood, revisionists have argued, Marx’s allegiance to Hegelian modality has more to do with understanding possibility as indexed to actuality than with claims about the necessary logic and eventual collapse of capital. Macdonald complicates both classic and revisionary accounts by distilling a rare but powerful notion in Marx’s early and middle period: ‘deactualization’ (Entwirklichung). Marx deploys this term to theorize the ‘thwarting’ indeed ‘undoing’ of real possibility within the ‘living process of actuality’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 7–19). This is a deeply ‘unHegelian moment’ in Marx’s corpus, Macdonald maintains, given that, according to Hegel, a thwarted, undone, possibility is a ‘piece of unthinkable nonsense’. A real possibility, according to Hegel, must occur (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 16). Otherwise, it is but a formal possibility that lacks the condition of its actualization (ibid.).
I argue that Hegel’s treatment of modality not only makes room for ‘alternate possibilities’ but can indeed account for thwarted possibilities within actuality. Actuality, according to Hegel, is indexed to a totality of conditions. Such totality is posited as a totality of conditions through the self-manifestation of the actuality that it produces. Thus, such thwarting must be understood as a necessary possibility given the conditions that produce it in the first place. It can neither be judged nor surmised by a formal conception of the possible. Such thwarting is not grounded in or assessed by what ought to be. Rather, it is grounded in or assessed in light of what is. To be sure, in the Science of Logic, Hegel provides an account of actuality as such and ties that endeavour to an account of the actualization of reason as such. In contrast, throughout his corpus, Marx tracks the actualization of capital and ties that endeavour to an account of the forms of unreason that it produces. My contention is that in order to pursue his historically indexed account of actuality, Marx needs Hegelian modality, although we must transition from a ‘real’ to an ‘absolute’ understanding of modality. Rather than a fundamental difference, I thus argue, the ambivalence that deactualization expresses establishes a deep affinity between Marx and Hegel. This affinity troubles a gradualist reading of Hegel.
The article is composed of three sections. Section one examines Macdonald’s account of deactualization in Marx. This discussion lays the ground for a detailed engagement with Hegel’s chapter on Wirklichkeit in the Science of Logic in section two. Section two examines Hegel’s discussion of actuality drawing from Christopher Yeoman’s reading of Hegel in Freedom and Reflection. With this exposition, I suggest that Hegelian absolute modality is the proper philosophical framework for thinking deactualization. I conclude by providing a sketch of a Hegelian deployment of modality post-Marx, one that can account for the resilience of forms of unfreedom, indeed unreason.
I. Entwirklichung
In his essay, ‘Actualization, Deactualization: Marx, Hegel, and Modality’ (2018), Macdonald draws to our attention Marx’s notion of ‘deactualization’ (Entwirklichung). It is important to first recall the stakes of Marx’s use of modal terms. As Macdonald reminds us, Marx’s conception of modality is nestled within his (and Engels’) understanding of the dialectical relation between nature and society. Although Marx speaks of potentiality and actuality to describe historical processes, ‘as though a natural δύναμις were guided by, and steadily moving towards its ἐντελέχεια’, as Macdonald puts it, Marx is not hereby reducing history to the ‘mechanism of so-called first nature’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 2). Even if framed by the metabolism of human beings and nature, historical necessity is a matter of and specific to ‘socially constituted constraints and is therefore not immediately modelled upon natural necessity, except ideologically’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 3). The crucial point here is political. It concerns the possibility of ‘critical liberation from natural-historical social forms that have been unmasked but which remain in force for the time being’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 3). It concerns the possibility of critical intervention within an economic and social configuration that requires radical abstraction, here the abstraction of purportedly impenetrable social and economic relations that have been unmasked as false.
Macdonald explores two interpretive possibilities for understanding Marx’s view of historical development. While the first understands historical necessity mechanistically, the second deflates the notion of necessity too much, thereby reducing necessity to mere causality (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 4). A third option, however, is available, though it imports a bourgeois philosophy of history that Marx criticizes. Necessity, in this version, is a matter of ‘natural or quasi-natural, cultural teleology that charts a path from enslavement to liberation’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 5). This conception of history is based on the analogy between historical development and an individual’s maturity. While the analogy seems apt, since it leads to an account of the ‘attainment of a totality of necessary conditions for transformation’, as Macdonald points out, it also ‘authorizes quietist appeals to insufficient maturity to explain the failure of social transformation’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 6). Max Horkheimer, whom Macdonald quotes, puts the point best when he writes:
It might be said of past historical enterprises that the time was not yet ripe for them. To speak of immaturity [mangelnden Reife] at the present time is to sugarcoat consent to the bad state of things. For the revolutionary, the world was always already ripe for change. What in retrospect appears as a preliminary stage or a premature situation was once, for the revolutionary, a last chance for transformation. The revolutionary sides with those desperate individuals who, condemned, are on their way to the scaffold—not with those who have time on their hands (Horkheimer Reference Horkheimer1982: 106; quoted in Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 6).
The political stakes are high. The philosophical problem, how we understand the work of modal terms in discussions of historical development and transformation, however, has direct bearing on how we frame the political problem. Macdonald’s analysis is particularly insightful, since he argues that the decisive problem concerns ‘how maturity can be blocked by immaturity … or, modally speaking, how a real possibility that names a certain historical necessity can seem to be reduced to the level of mere formal possibility’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 7). Rather than simply dismissing a philosophy of history that draws from the insight of determinate negation, Macdonald complicates the conception of progress at the heart of such philosophy of history. The notion of deactualization is key to this endeavour.
Entwirklichung, Macdonald admits, is rare in Marx’s writings, although it appears in both the early and middle periods. ‘Its general meaning’, Macdonald writes, ‘is that of a loss of actuality, a loss of effectivity, which can apply both to the unmasked false necessity of second nature or, more commonly, to the processes by which the real possibility of liberation is suppressed in contemporary reality’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 17–18). There are two ways in which deactualization can be expressed, then, and they are closely related. First, loss of actuality, of effectivity, is expressed in the fetishization or reification, to employ Lukács’s term, distinctive of social, economic and political relations articulated in light of the aims of capital. It is a matter of the necessary abstraction of social, economic and political relations distinctive of capital. Second, loss of actuality is expressed by the ‘suppression of liberation’ that the abstraction that capitalism requires to function as an economic and social system sustains. Macdonald points to two examples in which Marx uses deactualization, and they pertain to Marx’s analysis of labour under capitalist conditions—alienated labour (die entfremdete Arbeit). In the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx writes:
In the sphere of political economy, [the] actualization of labour appears as deactualization for the workers [Entwirklichung des Arbeiters] … So much does labour’s actualization appear as deactualization that the worker is deactualized to the point of starving to death [Die Verwirklichung der Arbeit erscheint so sehr als Entwirklichung, daß der Arbeiter bis zum Hungertod entwirklicht wird] (Marx Reference Marx1964: 108; quoted in Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 19).
Similarly, in the Grundrisse, Marx writes:
as [living labour] actualizes itself in the objective conditions, it simultaneously repulses this actualization from itself as an alien reality [Realität], and hence posits itself as insubstantial, as mere penurious labour capacity in face of this reality alienated from it, belonging not to it but to others; that it posits its own actuality [Wirklichkeit] not as a being for it, but merely as being for others, and hence also as mere other-being, or being of another opposite itself. This process of actualization is thereby equally the process by which labour is deactualized {Entwirklichungsprozeß der Arbeit}. It posits itself objectively, but it posits this, its objectivity, as its own not-being or as the being of its not-being—of capital. It returns back into itself as the mere possibility [bloße Möglichkeit] of value-positing or value-creation; for the whole of actual wealth [wirkliche Reichtum], the world of actual value [wirklichen Werts], and likewise the real [realen] conditions of its own actualization [Verwirklichung] are posited opposite it as independent existences. As a consequence of the production process, the possibilities resting in living labour’s own womb exist outside it as actualities—but as actualities alien to it, which form wealth in opposition to it (Marx Reference Marx1973: 454; quoted in Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 19).
One might point to the distinction between objectification (Vergegenständlichung) and alienation (Entfremdung) and argue that deactualization is the product of Marx’s early humanism/naturalism. Recall that, in the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx distinguishes between objectification and alienation. Objectification elaborates the thought that, as living creatures, human beings necessarily have a metabolic relation with nature. Hence, productive activity is essential to what it is to be human. Alienation, in contrast, tracks the ways in which the aims of capital—profit—distort the human relation to (1) the product of labour, (2) productive activity itself, (3) nature, (4) and other human beings. The product of labour appears as autonomous, in fact as a lord over the producer. Productive activity, which is the source of realization, is turned against the human through wage labour and dehumanizing working conditions. Nature appears as something to exploit. The life of the species is turned into a means for individual life. Capitalism, in short, distorts the fact that human beings produce as a species and for the species. While the distinction between objectification and alienation is crucial, Marx seeks to specify the nature of labour under capitalist conditions. He situates his analysis within what he calls ‘an actual economic fact’, namely, that ‘the worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces’; that ‘the worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates’; and that ‘the devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things’ (Marx Reference Marx1964: 28). Although fragmentary, the text seeks to show that private property is the result of alienated labour, thereby unmasking the dynamic of capital at work in this naturalized institution.Footnote 2 Capital, not labour as such, is the actuality under scrutiny. The actualization of capital, not the process of objectification, is the matter at hand.
Crucial here is Marx’s Hegelian use of modal terms. It clarifies the status of Marx’s critique of capital. As Macdonald points out, attention to Marx’s use of Hegelian modality allows us to see that Marx is tracking ‘something like a dual regime of real possibilities’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 19). ‘On the one hand’, Macdonald writes, ‘there is the actualization of the worker in the service of capital, i.e., the real possibility of ongoing alienation; and on the other hand, this very process of actualization is a deactualization or perpetuated suppression of what labour nevertheless contains in the form of ‘lost’ possibilities—lost not as a result of being rendered merely formal, but in the sense of being ‘misplaced’ or ‘diverted’ into capital’ (ibid.). This interpretive suggestion is insightful. It points to the actualization of capital as ‘ambivalent’. Under capitalist conditions, labour is at the same time actualized and deactualized. The actualization of wage labour, and the extraction of surplus value that it allows, is at the same time the deactualization of the worker in her relation to the product of labour, productive activity itself, nature and other human beings. To be sure, labour is at the same time yet not in the same respect actualized and deactualized. It is actualized with respect to the dynamic of capital and deactualized with respect to the process of objectification. Yet here again I want to call attention to the fact that Marx is tracking the actualization of capital, rather than labour as such. The essence of capital is such that it unfolds through a ‘dual regime of possibilities’ in which the actualization of one, alienation, depends on the deactualization of the other, objectification.
The ‘manifestation’ of capital, to use Hegel’s terms, requires that labour is at the same time actualized and deactualized. Instead of a fundamental difference, I argue, this ambivalence expresses a deep affinity with Hegel’s conception of actuality. I have alluded to one important difference, however. It is crucial to here underscore it, since it establishes rather than calls into question the proximity between Marx and Hegel’s treatment of modality. In the Science of Logic, Hegel discusses actuality and hence the nature and status of modality as such. The subject matter of the Logic is the actualization of reason purportedly abstracted from the strictures of time, sociality, history. Marx, in contrast, deploys Hegel’s understanding of modal terms in order to account for the actualization of capital. Marx tracks the production of a historically specific form of life, one that necessarily produces unreason, indeed domination—paradigmatically, although not solely, exploitation. While Hegel tracks actuality as such and ties that endeavour to an account of reason as such, Marx tracks the actualization of capital and ties that endeavour to an account of forms of unreason distinctive of a historically specific form of life. In order to pursue his historically indexed account of actuality, one that can account for deactualization, however, Marx needs Hegel’s understanding of modality. In the Logic, Hegel provides the philosophical justification of the necessary indexicality of actuality. The Logic provides the philosophical justification for indexing actuality and possibility to a totality of historically specific conditions established as such, as conditions, retrospectively, in light of what has been expressed in history’s own manifestation. Yet Marx needs more than Hegel’s account of ‘real’ modality and critique of ‘formal’ modality. He needs Hegel’s understanding of modality as ‘absolute’. Let me turn to Hegel’s chapter on Actuality in the Logic and explain why.
II. Wirklichkeit
Macdonald argues that the loss distinctive of capitalist actualization—a loss of the subject of labour as well as a loss of the object of labour, though he only mentions the latter—is captured by the notion of deactualization. Crucial here, he maintains, is Marx’s implicit ‘innovation of a sub-category of real possibility situated between Hegelian real possibility and formal possibility’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 20). This inclusion demands a ‘reconfiguration of the Hegelian topology of modal concepts’, thereby complicating the Hegelian and Marxist view of historical development and transformation. Let me examine such topology and assess whether such reconfiguration is at all needed.
In the Science of Logic, Hegel’s treatment of actuality continues a discussion of the problem of reflection (Reflexion). In Hegel’s words, reflection is the ‘movement of becoming and transition that remains internal to it’ (SL: 345/6:24). As Christopher Yeomans has aptly argued, reflection must be understood in terms of the problem of expression. Expression is a ‘doing’ (Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012: 38). It is, accordingly, a matter of realization. Hegel views what is expressed as realized through a process of change or transformation. The problem at hand, then, is one of the identity of the expressed throughout a process of transformation, indeed differentiation. For Hegel, the determinacy requisite of any identity depends on an ‘other’. At this point in the Logic, Hegel has shown that a conception of otherness merely tied to contrastive relations only leads to a regress. This is perhaps the main failure of the account of determinacy examined in the Doctrine of Being. The Doctrine of Essence pursues an exposition of otherness through a notion of positing (Setzen) whereby reflection-into-self (Reflexion in sich) is made possible. Hegel explores this structure through pairs of categories—for example, ground and grounded, substance and accident, cause and effect—whereby what is posited is shown to be presupposed. Reflection works backwards, as it were. Each category is internally related to an other through which it is what it is. Each category ‘points back’ to what posits it, to what ‘makes its own positing possible’.Footnote 3 As we move further along within the Doctrine of Essence, Hegel clarifies that such backward movement is nothing but the manifestation (Manifestation) of actuality.
The retrospective conception of positing that will turn out to be nothing but the manifestation of actuality is central to Hegel’s critique of what he calls ‘external reflection’ (äussere Reflexion). External ‘[r]eflection’, Hegel writes, ‘in its positing, immediately supersedes its positing and thus has an immediate presupposition. It therefore finds this before it as something from which it starts, and from which it is first the return-into-self, the negating of this its negative. But the fact that what is thus presupposed is a negative or is posited does not concern it’ (SL: 349/6:28; translation modified by Yeomans). The problem with external reflection, as Yeomans explains, is that it ‘forgets its own activity in constituting its own presuppositions, and instead takes them as given’ (Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012: 58–59). Because reflection here erases its own activity of positing, it takes what is found or given as immediate and self-standing. Yeomans describes the problem of reflection as a problem of creation (positing) and interpretation (reflection-into-self) (Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012: 59). Accordingly, because reflection forgets the moment of creation, the moment of interpretation is one of assessment of correctness. Reflection so understood lacks the capacity to grasp the matter at hand in its truth. We will have to wait until the end of the Logic to get a full sense of what an account of truth, rather than correctness, entails. By the end of the Doctrine of Essence, however, we get some important clues. The deflection, the turning or bending-backwards-into-self distinctive of reflection, turns out to be the manifestation of actuality. The manifestation of actuality, in turn, is properly understood in terms of reciprocity (Wechselwirkung). Reflection is thereby properly grasped as the reflexivity of actuality itself. This announces that the truth of essence is the concept, and will lead us to an account of the idea (die Idee), which Hegel glosses as the unity of concept and reality (der Einheit von Begriff und Realität) (SL: 518/6:257; see Zambrana Reference Zambrana2015).
Hegel’s treatment of modality is crucial, since it articulates actuality as both a form of immediacy and the process of the production of that immediacy (Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012: 141). Actuality, Hegel writes, ‘is the absolute’s own manifestation, so that this externalization is its immanent reflection and therefore its being in-and-for-itself’ (SL: 477/6:186). As nothing but manifestation, as nothing but activity, that is, the absolute is ‘absolute form’ (absolute Form). Actuality is this ‘reflected absoluteness’. Hegel notes that it is therefore ‘higher than concrete existence’. Alteration, difference, is not due to externality, but rather to the absolute’s own activity. As absolute form, the dynamic between identity and difference at hand is one that foreshadows the relations that will be developed in the Doctrine of the Concept, where form and content are inseparable, albeit distinguishable. This conception of form, absolute form, is precisely what indexes actuality to reality, actualization to the self-articulation of reality. As I have argued elsewhere, form is nothing but negation or, more precisely, negativity (Negativität). Form, however, requires content in order to be negation. Negation yields an alternative determination—an alternative content (Zambrana Reference Zambrana2015: 116). To speak of form and content rather than form and matter or, more importantly, concept and intuition makes possible understanding reason as a form of rationality that depends on content (see Zambrana Reference Zambrana2015: 75). Moving from form and matter or concept and intuition to form and content makes possible grasping that any given form of rationality is the self-articulation of reality. Actuality is not the full story, since it is an activity that is ‘blind’, Hegel says (SL: 487/6:216). It lacks the self-conscious mediation of the idea. Yet it is a crucial moment of that story, since it establishes manifestation as the activity of determining a totality of conditions as conditions that produce it, actuality, in the first place. Manifestation is backwards pointing, then, because it is a form of productivity—indeed, self-productivity—that establishes its own conditions after the fact, in light of what has been manifested or expressed.
Hegel moves through three forms of modality in the chapter on Actuality: ‘formal’, ‘real’, and ‘absolute’. Key in all of these discussions is the relation between possibility (Möglichkeit) and actuality. Hegel thinks of this relation dialectically, whereby the possible necessarily becomes the actual. This movement establishes the actual as the ground of the possible. To begin, formal possibility is a matter of the absence of contradiction: ‘everything is possible that does not contradict itself’ (SL: 479/203). However, because ‘the realm of possibility is … limitless manifold’, and ‘every manifold is determined in itself and as against an other’, possibility already points to a ‘lack’, an ‘other’, to an ‘actuality which completes itself’. Initially, the problem with formal possibility, Hegel argues, is that ‘we do not say anything by it’ (ibid.). Its pointing to ‘an other’, however, already adds content. The problem becomes that this content is ‘only a possible and the ought-to-be of the totality of form’. The problem is thus not that nothing is said, but rather that what is said ‘has no truth without being’, as Hegel puts it. It is a ‘renunciation of existing actuality as a criterion and condition of actualization’, as Macdonald puts it (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 10). Hegel argues that such renunciation is crucial for understanding impossibility. Possibility is the ‘in-itself, determined as only a posited or, equally, as not to be in itself. Internally, therefore, possibility is contradiction, or it is impossibility’. What has been lost here is the very ground that might guarantee or explain the possibility’s being or not being. Thus, according to Hegel, we are now speaking of contingency (Zufälligkeit) (SL: 480/6:205).
Within a formal conception of modality, possibility becomes actuality through the notion of contingency. Initially, Hegel argues, contingency is ‘formless actuality which is only being or concrete existence in general’ (SL: 480/6:205). Contingency is existence that is dispersed. A possibility could or could not be, since it has lost its ground by referring to a manifold of conditions that is not recollected, gathered, by the self-manifestation or activity of actuality. This, however, reveals that what is contingent is more precisely contingent on something else. Again, we are not speaking of the absolute formality of non-contradiction, but a content that is here seen as external to form, to the form-activity (Formtätigkeit) of actuality. Contingency becomes necessity (Notwendigkeit) at this point. ‘The necessary’, Hegel writes, ‘is an actuality; as such it is something immediate and groundless; it equally has its actuality through an other or in its ground, but at the same time is the positedness of this ground and its reflection-into-self; the possibility of the necessary is a superseded possibility’ (SL: 481/6:206). Necessity, then, names the totality that is self-manifestation (Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012: 149). Necessity is the activity of manifestation, since it is the unity or ‘identity’, as Hegel says, of the back and forth of the necessity of existence, as the ground of the contingent, and the necessity of ‘positedness’, of the determination of conditions. Necessity thus names the possible as a moment of the actual (SL: 481/6:206).Footnote 4 With the notion of necessity, we have already abandoned a formal understanding of modality. We must therefore develop a ‘real’ understanding of the relation between possibility and actuality.
Real modality draws from the insight that ‘what is actual can act [Was wirklich ist, kann wirken]; something announces its actuality by what it produces’ (SL: 482/6:208). Real actuality determines itself through contingency—this is its effectivity. As Yeomans suggests, real modality addresses the fact that ‘modal facts can be contextualized at different levels of detail, with their significance varying accordingly’ (Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012: 151). Possibility, accordingly, must be understood as real possibility. ‘The real possibility of a fact’, Hegel writes, ‘is … the immediately existent manifoldness of circumstances that refer to it’ (SL: 482/6:208).Footnote 5 The problem at hand, then, is gathering a manifold of circumstances so that it comprises a totality of conditions that are determined as conditions for possibility. Manifestation is here a matter of positing or determining such a totality as a totality of conditions that produce possibility in the first place. Hence, Hegel writes that real possibility ‘constitutes the totality of conditions, a dispersed actuality which is not reflected into itself but is determined to be the in-itself of an other and intended in this determination to return to itself’ (SL: 483/6:210). The production of possibility is thus a matter of an overcoming a manifoldness of dispersed circumstances. It is important to stress that the work of gathering is, according to Hegel, a ‘recollection’ (Erinnerung). It is only through such gathering that conditions are established as conditions. They are posited as such retrospectively.
This backward movement shows that real possibility must give way to real necessity. ‘Whenever all the conditions of a fact are completely present’, Hegel writes, ‘the fact is actually there; the completeness of the conditions is the totality as in the content, and the fact is itself this content determined as being equally actual as possible’ (SL: 483/210).Footnote 6 This realization of actuality represents a ‘self-negation’ of real possibility, Hegel says. And yet, real necessity is in fact grounded in possibility. This is the central feature of real modality—an augmentation of possibility. Indeed, it is important to underscore that the determination of a totality of conditions is ‘additive rather than explanatory’, to quote Yeomans (Reference Yeomans2012: 157). Real necessity is a matter of a fuller account of possibility in the sense of being an addition of circumstances within the possible to be manifest. Real necessity is thus an augmentation of real possibility and opens up ‘alternate possibilities’. As Yeoman explains, ‘the more detail we build into the idea to be expressed, the more options are available for its expression’ (Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012: 155). The issue of alternate possibilities is crucial for specifying the move from real modality to absolute modality. It is also pivotal for assessing Macdonald’s understanding of the difference between Hegel’s and Marx’s treatments of modality. While real necessity magnifies possibility, it does not capture the role of contingency in actuality’s self-manifestation. Contingency is here understood not as what could or could not be, but as that which is contingent on an other for its own realization. Real necessity, then, does not fully integrate the externality of conditions within the self-manifestation of actuality, which would serve as the ground of possibility. It simply adds more conditions without establishing their necessary relation to the production of the matter at hand. It does not, in other words, sustain a concrete conception of possibility grounded in actuality.
Hegel closes his discussion of real modality by arguing that what is really possible cannot be otherwise, since it includes conditions that make it necessary. But he adds that necessity itself could be otherwise, since it presupposes contingency. Contingency here is thus actuality that has made itself into the possible. This establishes the need to speak of modality as ‘absolute’. Now, for Macdonald, Hegel’s discussion of real modality ‘leaves no room for unactualized real possibility or, what amounts to the same, disappointed real necessity’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 16). It is crucial to follow Hegel’s discussion to the end, to the discussion of absolute modality, in order to see that Hegelian modality can indeed account for ‘unactualized real possibility’ or ‘disappointed real necessity’. For Hegel, the augmentation of possibility, of alternate possibilities, that real necessity offers is still abstract. In lacking a robust conception of contingency, real modality cannot yield an account of the totality of conditions that produce actuality and hence possibility in the first place. More importantly, it cannot account for the expression of alternate possibilities as the expression of actuality. In Marx’s case, real necessity could not explain the productivity of capital and its manifestation not only in the actualization of value but in its coextensive deactualization of the worker. Yeomans is here again helpful: he explains that, ‘in real modality, indeterminism is a kind of looseness of fit between conditions and consequent that leaves the latter undecided; in absolute modality, it is precisely the tightness of fit between the two that points to the fact that other tight fits are available’ (Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012: 157). It is important, then, to consider Hegel’s discussion of absolute modality, since it is precisely the unity of possibility and actuality conceived in its most concrete form that allows us to trace the necessary production of unactualized possibility or disappointed necessity distinctive of capital. As I will argue, understanding this necessary production is precisely what provides insight into critical intervention. It is not the search for possibilities built into the necessary dynamic of capital that accounts for the possibility of critical intervention, in other words, but the insight into what blocks intervention that is the ground of the possible.
Absolute modality does not offer a conception of actuality as bearing self-identical nature realized in different ways (see Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012: 158). ‘The alternate possibilities within real or relative modality’, Yeomans writes, ‘were to be understood in terms of different actualities, or one thing happening rather than another. Here, the alternate possibilities are to be understood as between something being possible and its being actual: ‘The tight fit of absolute necessity is such that the actuality produced can still be either actual or merely possible’ (Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012: 159; my emphasis). Absolute modality thus articulates a conception of necessity that retains possibility within actuality’s realization. As I have mentioned, crucial here is the role of contingency. Indeed, Hegel transitions from real necessity to absolute necessity by pointing out that ‘the determinateness of necessity consists in having its negation, contingency, within it’. Initially, as the unity of actuality and possibility, actuality is an ‘empty determination’ or contingency (SL: 486/6:211). Yet as absolute, possibility is no longer the mere addition of conditions, as was the case with real possibility. Contingency is properly understood as ‘necessity’s own becoming—or the presupposition which it had is its own positing’ (SL: 486/6:211). Necessity articulates itself in its own conditions, in other words. It gathers, recollects, those conditions by establishing them as its own. More than simply gathering what is there, necessity articulates one of those conditions as ‘active or grounding’, and thereby also constructs a ‘matrix of alternate possibilities’ (Yeomans Reference Yeomans2012: 161). Because actuality posits its active, organizing condition and a matrix of alternate possibilities, ‘form’, as Hegel puts it, ‘pervaded in its realization all its distinctions’ (SL: 486/6:211).Footnote 7
Here again the significance of the retrospective movement distinctive of expression should not be underestimated. Indeed, even when absolute modality stresses an active or grounding condition that remains, indeed shapes, realization, such a grounding condition is nonetheless clarified in light of what was expressed. Necessity pervades throughout the process of establishing contrastive relations between conditions, yet ones that must be understood as present in necessity itself given the actual expression produced. Manifestation is thus presented as a form of productivity that determines a totality of conditions, as conditions given what was manifested or expressed. It is thus not only indexed to the conditions that play an organizing role within the movement of expression, but also to possibilities that such conditions articulate. The relation between condition and actuality, then, is intimately tied to alternative and indeed unactualized possibilities. What absolute modality shows is that possibilities, too, are internally organized or, better said, included in the internal organization of the totality of conditions that produce actuality in the first place. I suggest that this means as well that unactualized and indeed frustrated possibilities are so determined given such organization. Unactualized, indeed frustrated, possibilities are, too, constitutive of what was expressed, hence intimately related to the articulation of necessity.
III. Concluding remarks
Recall that Macdonald argues that, with the notion of deactualization, Marx is tracking ‘something like a dual regime of real possibilities’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 19). The actualization of the worker in the service of capital, the ‘real possibility of ongoing alienation’, is at the same time the deactualization of labour’s possibilities, which have been ‘diverted into capital’. Rather than dual, I would call such a dynamic ‘ambivalent’. The process of actualization is coextensively a process of deactualization. Given the reconstruction of Hegel’s topology of modality that I have offered, I argue that Marx’s analysis requires Hegel’s understanding of absolute necessity. According to Hegel, real possibility simply adds more conditions without tying them together in the way suggested by the case of alienated labour. The dynamic at hand, that the actualization of labour in the service of capital is at the same time the deactualization of the worker, requires the ‘tightness of fit’ that Hegelian absolute modality provides. It requires modal terms that allow for both possibilities to be not only tightly bound but internal to the manifestation of capital. At a diagnostic level, then, Marx needs the notion of absolute necessity in order to account for the actualization/deactualization of labour as the expression of the nature of capital.
This suggestion, to be sure, might reignite the worry concerning economic and historical determinism. This worry is in great part rooted in the thought that Marx’s account of capital explains away the possibility of critical intervention, indeed interruption of exploitation and other modes of domination distinctive of this form of life. Macdonald suggests, contra Hegel, that ‘in the interplay between actualization and deactualization we can glimpse a more dynamic notion of necessity at work—one in which the ‘real’ is constantly and unpredictably redefining itself, while nevertheless maintaining the intelligibility of the demands and constraints upon us in the form of historical tasks’ (Macdonald Reference Macdonald2018: 23). In my reading, Hegel would agree that a dynamic conception of necessity is the more truthful, though he would perhaps qualify this statement by saying that any such unpredictability is precisely grounded in any redefinition, that is, any rearticulation of actuality. Unlike Macdonald, then, I argue that an understanding of the necessary production of actualization/deactualization is precisely what provides insight into the possibility of meaningful critical intervention. It is not a possibility immanent to actuality that ought to be sought. Rather, it is insight into the actuality of the suppression of liberation that recovers the critical potential of Hegelian determinate negation.
Any Hegelian account of what such an intervention would require would need to keep moving further into the Science of Logic to Hegel’s discussion of the actualization of the idea. In the Doctrine of Essence, Hegel describes the internal organization of absolute necessity ‘blind’ and ‘light shy’ (SL: 488/6:216). It lacks the self-conscious mediation of the idea. Although absolute necessity organizes a totality of conditions coherently, it lacks the properly ‘purposive activity’ (zweckmäßige Tätigkeit) of reason.Footnote 8 It lacks, in other words, the thematisation of the goal or aim that articulates the relation between actuality and possibility. Here again I want to suggest that Hegel’s account helps rather than harms Marx’s case, though we must move outside of the Logic to Marx’s historically indexed conception of actuality to see why. The very aim of capital—profit—articulated in and through a totality of concrete conditions necessarily produces an ambivalent dynamic whereby the actualization of labour in the service of capital is intrinsically tied to the deactualization of the worker. The form of rationality distinctive of capital is necessarily a form of irrationality, then. It is a form of necessary unfreedom, in other words. Bound by the aims of capital, freedom as being with oneself in the other (bei sich Selbstsein im Anderen) is unintelligible. This is not to say that it is ‘blind’. On the contrary, it is to say that it is ‘held captive’ by an image that has been shown to be false (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein2009: §115). It is held captive by a conception of freedom tied to a notion of self-sufficiency and its naturalized institutions. It is held captive by varieties of abstraction. The possibilities of critical intervention, I would thus argue, reside in the insight into the necessity of the production and resilience of such unintelligibility, of such unreason, hence of such unfreedom. Hegel’s treatments of modality and the idea, accordingly, provide critical perspectives and dynamic categories that disclose the nature of capital, which is to say, the irrationality of capital in its specificity.Footnote 9
