Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 42 页

These are crucial questions, if only because the consequence of not tying the movement of totalisation to temporalisation is the overdetermination of historical time in Marx by the other predominant thread of the post-Enlightenment conception of history: the idea that the human is subject to change over time. Totalisation is a condition of thinking this conception of history, because totalisation is a condition of thinking the objects – the totality of time and the totality of history – in, through and across which this conception of change is understood to occur. After Koselleck, this is history as ‘the collective singular form of Geschichte, which since around 1780 can be conceived as history in and for itself in the absence of an associated subject or object.’⁸ In Marx, this is the idea that social relations and the individuals which constitute these relations are subject to change over time, and moreover that the ways in which social relations change over time differs from how individuals change over time, and in fact determines how individuals change over time. In The German Ideology and elsewhere, Marx frequently invokes this historicist conception of historical time, because he implicitly treats historical time as the medium in which change within and between modes of production occurs. As the previous chapter demonstrates, the social production of the means of life bears a nonlinear temporal structure, but, this chapter maintains, Marx’s failure to examine this production in relation to totalisation unavoidably relegates historical change and historical difference within the materialist concept of history to a historicism which might be summed up as ‘the change and difference between one specific time and place and another’. However, the totalisation of history does not thereby constitute an appeal to the ‘synchronic’ as against the ‘diachronic’. And this is not, as Althusser has it, because the synchronic is an instant within ‘the ideological conception of a continuous-homogenous time’, from which the diachronic becomes ‘successive contingent presents in the time continuum.’⁹ Rather, synchrony and diachrony are in origin ahistorical concepts which emerge from structuralist linguistics – qua the atemporal succession of semiological systems – and are thus ill-suited to thinking the essential relation between totalisation, temporalisation and the materialist concept of history.¹⁰ Many questions arise: in what sense does totalisation register a non-historicist understanding of historical change and historical difference? In other words, in what sense does totalisation register an understanding of historical time as constituted by its own historicality, which is to say by different modes of production themselves? More basically, what is the relationship between totalisation and historicalisation?

³ ‘The proletariat can…only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of individuals means [the] existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.’ Marx and Engels, GI, 56. ⁴ Ibid. 78.

⁵ ‘The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 408.

⁶ ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Marx, ToF, 423.

⁷ Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 16.

⁸ Koselleck, Future’s Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time, 236.

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