Spirits Are the Powers That Compel People
* Article: Science of Spirit. By Kojin Karatani. Crisis & Critique, Vol. 8, Issue 2, pp. 183+
URL = https://www.crisiscritique.org/volume_8-issue_2/CC_8.2_Kojin%20Karatani.pdf
Abstract
1.
"This paper is an examination of “spirits”. There are four kinds of spirits, and they originate in the four modes of exchange A, B, C, and D, respectively. Spirits, in other words, are the powers that compel people. Understanding these spirits is essential for the realization of D (communism)."
2. Kojin Karatani:
"Several years ago, I contributed a thesis titled “Capital as Spirit” to Crisis & Critique. In this thesis, I developed some of the thoughts I had after writing The Structure of World History . It was an attempt to reconsider ““modes of exchange”“ that I proposed in that book.
Since then, I have been rethinking the mode of exchange in the same line, which will become a book titled “Power and Modes of Exchange”. At the heart of that book is what might be called the “science of spirits”. My consideration of “spirit” has some of its origins in Hegel’s spirits (especially in his Philosophy of Right, which deals with the problem of the capital-nation-state) and Marx’s fetish (Capital). In this essay, I will give a very brief introduction to this “science of spirits”."
(https://www.crisiscritique.org/volume_8-issue_2/CC_8.2_Kojin%20Karatani.pdf)
Excerpts
Kojin Karatani:
"I would like to quickly review how I came to conceive “modes of exchange”. According to the standard thinking, historical materialism is based on the mode of production (productive forces and relations of production), but this became subjected to the criticism that it did not sufficiently capture the “political and ideological superstructure”. For example, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud criticized historical materialism in this way. In their view, there is something in the “political-ideological” dimension, i.e., the state and religion, that cannot be simply determined by the “economic base” (mode of production). But then how is it determined?
In response to that, I thought like this: the political-ideological dimension is also determined by the “economic base”, however, the economic base in this case is not the mode of production but the mode of exchange. In fact, when Marx and Engels proposed the “materialist view of history (historical materialism)” in 1846, they wrote; This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e., civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history.3 I thought that what they called “Verkehr (intercourse)”, or “exchange”, was the key to solving the mystery. In fact, Marx himself later tried to elucidate the “fetish” as the superstructure brought about by exchange in Capital. The exchange that Marx discovered in Capital is exchange of commodities that begins between communities. However, intercourse exchange is not confined to this. For example, gift-giving/ gift repayment and domination/subjugation are also forms of exchanges.
Therefore, we could say that both the community and the state began with intercourse-exchange. Of course, exchange here is different from commodity exchange. In The Structure of World History, I proposed a view of the history of social formations from the perspective of the mode of exchange in addition to the mode of production. The modes of exchange can be divided into A (gift and return), B (obedience and protection), C (commodity exchange), and D, which goes beyond these.
I realized that the “power” that defines the political and ideological superstructure does not come from somewhere different from the economic base, but from the “intercourse (exchange)” that forms the foundation of the economic base. That is to say, the ideational powers that are seen as religion or unconsciousness come from there, creating differences depending on the mode of exchange on which they are based. There are four modes of exchange A, B, C, and D that underlie the social formations; the social structure changes depending on which mode is dominant and how different modes are combined. From the above perspective, I worked to reconsider the history of social formations in The Structure of World History.
After writing this book, I have come to think about in particular about the “power” which these exchanges bring about. It was Marx, who first clarified about this power; in Capital, he elucidated the power that arises from mode of exchange C. He saw the emergence of a fetishspirit in the emergence of money out of the exchange of things between communities. It is the power that enables, or rather compels, the exchange of things. Likewise, Marx discovered “capital as spirit”."
(https://www.crisiscritique.org/volume_8-issue_2/CC_8.2_Kojin%20Karatani.pdf)
Hegel’s Spirit is a Ghost That Operates in the Way of the Unconscious
"Hegel’s “spirit” (Geist) is a “ghost” that operates in the way of the “unconscious”.
Kojin Karatani:
"In Capital, Marx wrote about “fetish”. However, this was only taken as a joke. Lukács, for example, called it “reification”, where a relationship between human and human is transformed into a relationship between thing and thing. This is a failure to recognize an important realization that Capital arose.
In the postscript to the second edition of Capital, Marx praised Hegel. This was already a time when Hegel was treated as a “dead dog”. Almost thirty years earlier, when the mystical aspect of the Hegelian dialectic was still in vogue, Marx relentlessly criticized Hegel. However, in the postscript to the second edition of Capital, he wrote the following: I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevent him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
This famous statement is misleading in several ways. In a sense, Marx had been “inverting” Hegel since he was young. What is important is that the overturning of Hegel in Capital is different from the previous overturnings, and this is what makes it unique to Marx.
In the first place, the “Hegel” that Marx found when he professed to be a “pupil” of Hegel is different from the Hegel that is usually referred to. In Hegel, world history is a process of the self-realization of “spirit”. However, what Hegel means by that is that the social history of humans is not created by their intention or design, but is something beyond human intentions, forced by the “unconscious”. Hegel’s “spirit” (Geist) is a “ghost” that operates in the way of the “unconscious”.
Hegel emphasized this in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy.
He first rejected the “psychological” view, that is, the view to see action as stemming from “consciousness”. Caesar and Napoleon, for example, were driven by their own intentions, desires, and ambitions in their individual consciousness. However, each of them achieves something beyond such “psychology” or “consciousness”. Hegel understood this that they are driven by the “unconscious”. In this sense, Hegel can be said as the first philosopher who doubted the view from “consciousness” and looked into the workings of the “unconscious” or spirit."
(https://www.crisiscritique.org/volume_8-issue_2/CC_8.2_Kojin%20Karatani.pdf)