John Holloway and the concept of a 'noun'

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

I was wondering if anyone could help me make sense of this. Comments stating that what Holloway is talking about is a load of gibberish will be ignored.


This subordination of doing to being is a subordination of subject to object. Duration, then, is a characteristic of a society in which subject is subordinated to object, a society in which active subjectivity is assumed to be incapable of changing objective reality. Objective reality, or society-as-it-is stands over against us: subject is separated from, and subordinated to, object.. And verbs (the active form of speaking) are separated from and subordinated to nouns (which deny movement).


In this wonderland-world, in this communist-moving, nouns are dissolved into verbs, into doings. Nouns fetishise the product of doing, they tear the results of doing away from that doing and enshrine them in a durable existence which denies that they are dependent on being constantly re-created. Marx criticised value to show that its core was human activity, work, but his critical method of recuperating the centrality of human doing can be extended to all nouns (but, in the duration-world in which we live, with its duration-talking, it is difficult to write without using nouns – so that critical thought really requires creating a new talking, what Vaneigem calls the poetry of revolution).

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Can you link to source please?

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

http://www.johnholloway.com.mx/2011/07/30/stop-making-capitalism/ Done.

[Devrim]

I was wondering if anyone could help me make sense of this. Comments stating that what Holloway is talking about is a load of gibberish will be ignored.

I think basically he is talking a load of gibberish though. What I think he is saying is that the way language works is a reflection of the relations within society, and that in the way humans are alienated from their labour, the words denoting human activity (verbs) are separated from the words denoting the results of that activity (nouns).

If this were true we would expect primitive communist societies to have had a completely different sort of linguistic system, but they don't. They all use verbs and nouns. Language, and all human language uses verbs and nouns predates not only capitalism, but also the neolithic revolution.

Devrim

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö.

Holloway is trying to recast the broadly Bergsonian thesis that language, at least modern, scientific language, is incapable of expressing "duration" (movement, conceived of as qualitative and subjective in some sense), in "Marxist" terms, relying on a very careless, "anthropological" reading of Marx. All of this is in order to establish that "active subjectivity is able to change objective reality", where "active subjectivity" denotes an atomised, individual subject. This in turn is the basis of Holloway's peculiar brand of lifestylist reformism.

And with all due respect, it is gibberish. For all his reservations about nouns he seems quite intent on using them.

[Devrim]

For all his reservations about nouns he seems quite intent on using them.

Is quite difficult to write if don't use.

Devrim

[tallguy]

I was wondering if anyone could help me make sense of this. Comments stating that what Holloway is talking about is a load of gibberish will be ignored.
It's gibberish.

Feel free to ignore.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Iirc, he puts forward something like this in "Change The World Without Taking Power" (which, to be honest, I hated - a particularly bad sign in that I expected, as a libertarian communist, to enjoy it) - his point being not so much that "nouns" themselves are the problem as the"noun-ification" of social relations.
One context which he points to is identity, and narratives which "fix" identity rather than conceive of it as a way-of-doing/being. So, for example, one isn't a woman, but, rather, one does femininity.
In a sense, there's something to this critique, but, in my reading, it "slides" too far into a sort of post-modern morass in which the real conditions in which feminity, or indiginiety, or proletarianization, etc. exist are erased.
Part of this is reflects his project of destabilizing the proletarian as revolutionary subject (or as existing subject period). Of course, it doesn't take a hard look at reality to see how misguided this flight of fancy is . . .

[BIXX]

Is this that guy who basically said if we start a community garden or some shit no revolution will be required?

Gonna need to read that shit.

However, if it is like TGDU says I gotta say there might be something to the critique. However, it also seems to miss an important part that some people don't just "do [insert quality here]", as they don't have a choice. Black people don't "do blackness", they are black. In a way I feel that it makes more sense (in specific instances, not universally) to use it in reference to gender. But even then it feels inadequate.

I think his critique is more interesting than it is accurate or useful, I guess.

[synthesis]

his point being not so much that "nouns" themselves are the problem as the"noun-ification" of social relations.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mam2r8F7tC1r62hr5.png

[Luís Henrique]

Is quite difficult to write if don't use.

That is a sentence without a noun, though.

I think all attempts to explain reality through language necessarily fail, and Holloway's is no exception.


This subordination of doing to being is a subordination of subject to object.

But "subject" and "object" are merely syntactical categories; there are no "subjects" and "objects" in the "real world". We may say that "the rain falls" or that "the glass broke", but although "rain" and "glass" are the subjects of those sentences, they "do" nothing when they respectively fall or break.

Indeed, if we reason a little bit more, we will see that Holloway is not merely wrong, but also gets things in the reverse way.

We can say "the rain falls" or we can say "it rains", which are more or less synonimous sentences. The fact that in one of them the idea of rain is expressed by a verb (by a "doing") and in the other it is expressed by a noun (a "being") seems semantically irrelevant, but if we are going to attempt conclusions about the real world from the examination of grammar, it would look that "rain" is a subject exactly where it is a noun; when it is a verb, the subject is an empty pronoun "it" that "does" absolutely nothing...


Duration, then, is a characteristic of a society in which subject is subordinated to object, a society in which active subjectivity is assumed to be incapable of changing objective reality

This is again a confusion between ontologic and grammatical categories. Most grammatical subjects are not semantic agents (and many semantic agents are not agents in any "objective", ontological way: if we say "the truck carried two tons of rock", "the truck" is not only the grammatical subject, but also the semantic agent, but ontologically we know that the truck does nothing, it is a mere instrument in the hands of its driver/owner). Moreso, languages generally express the idea of active subjectivity through nouns: "Charles lead the revolution", where the active, subjective, transforming entity is expressed by a noun, "Charles". And I would deem it very difficult to express such an idea without nouns without removing all subjectivity altogether.


And verbs (the active form of speaking) are separated from and subordinated to nouns (which deny movement).

Hm. However, to tell us what nouns deny, Holloway has no better idea than using a... noun, "movement". So how is this possible, if the idea of movement itself is expressed as a noun?

Much on the contrary, what we see is miriads of movement acts that are correctly expressed through nouns in every existing language: fall, flight, revolution, trip, ride, walk, ascent, run, race, etc. (And yes, in English all or most of those nouns are homonim with verbs, but this is an English quirk; in Portuguese for instance we have "queda, fuga, vôo, revolução, viagem, caminhada, subida, corrida", all of them morphologically distinct from their respective verbs).

So, sorry, I don't want to call it "gibberish", but I really don't think it has any value at all.

Luís Henrique

[Thirsty Crow]

I was wondering if anyone could help me make sense of this. Comments stating that what Holloway is talking about is a load of gibberish will be ignored.
Oh boy a whole lot of translating from gibberish into non-gibberish to do.

Okay:



This subordination of doing to being is a subordination of subject to object. Duration, then, is a characteristic of a society in which subject is subordinated to object, a society in which active subjectivity is assumed to be incapable of changing objective reality.The first sentence is really devoid of any sense as far as I'm concerned.
Though, to modify it so that it might seem somewhat plausible, it seems that what's going on here is this: action, transformation, change is subordinated to fixed states of affairs (immutable); this in turn is connected with a hellish problem on its own - the traditionalist philosophical muddle which takes perfectly usable grammatical categories of the subject and the object and twists them into, well, whatever.

Here, obviously, an object is taken to be something that doesn't act and is immutable. How "duration" figures here as a characteristic of a society itself characterized by this subordination, I've got no damn idea. I thought many an action and processes endured, i.e. had duration (in other words, didn't happen in a so short an instant that our ordinary sense and perception of duration would fail in that we wouldn't even perceive it). I'm afraid that's plain gibberish, fancy gibberish at that.

Though, the question to be asked is just how does our author here demonstrate that this is what actually happens in our society and what are the implications of it. Surely, at least with respect to some activities (what Holloway calls active subjectivities), it is entirely false to say any such thing. Consider new age feel-good propaganda and practices based on it (like, The Secret). Here an active subjectivity completely rules over the object and even constitutes it as it pleases. Total subordination of object to active subjectivity.

And what about other practices in life? Do immutable and fixed objects really impose themselves with such force onto us poor would-be active subjectivities? I don't think this is the case at all as people do in fact change their circumstances, including themselves, in fact, and in different ways.

And the gist of it is that bourgeois ideology banishes some of these ways into the realm of the utopian, unnatural, impossible. This might be the rational kernel to this part of Holloway's story. But then why such obfuscatory rhetoric? What's the purpose here? Just observe this pearl of wisdom:


And verbs (the active form of speaking) are separated from and subordinated to nouns (which deny movement).
What would "active form of speaking" even mean in relation to verbs? They are kinds of words (lexical items to be technically precise) which fulfill a specific function in speech. Does this mean that there are other lexical items that are a passive form of speaking? Or maybe these passive forms are grammatical items (e.g. prepositions)?

But it seems this has something to do with the mysterious accusation directed towards nouns, that they deny movement. Which, when taken literally and not as poetry, is ridiculous nonsense. Movement, Holloway says, well okay let's construct a sentence according to this grammatical wisdom.

If nouns deny movement and objects are a no-no as well, we've got this:

1) Moves.

2) Move!

So it would seem that Holloway commits himself to either speaking unintelligibly or to speak only in imperative. Either way, he's fucked. It's unclear how the hell could he even write a paragraph, much less a book with all these movement-denying nouns.

So, not only that nouns don't deny movement, for us as humans they are a necessary part of speech if we want to make sense when communicating. So I propose that 1) be turned into 1)a as all folks with good sense would:

1)a John Holloway is moving.

On the other hand, and to return to attempting to inject sense into this, the idea of society-as-standing-above-us can be remedied here by referring to the good old Marxist notion of alienation and especially commodity fetishism. But here I'm afraid that any serious talk of nouns that fetishize is itself a complete and utter mystification. More than useless, it's damaging and confusing.

So back to square one. This is gibberish.

[Luís Henrique]

Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö.

Ving ding ying ding k'dizink?!?!?

Luís Henrique

[Dodo]

Argh, as a non-native English speaker my brain hurts reading this thread.
But, I am not sure if people here are on point by delving into language so much.
Holloway is an "open Marxist", his tradition is that of critical/hegelian Marxism which draw a lot from Western Marxism, people such as Lukacs.

It is not BS or gibberish imo. At least not the way it is portrayed here.
His dealings with subject and object has to be understood in the context of Young Marx's alienation, reification and fetishisms. In fact my current signature where I quote the "young Marx" is a clear example of the dialectical critical approach to reified abstractions.
Holloway deals with alienation greatly in his work from little I looked into it. His point I think is that, for instance, labor, the subjective act of doing something becomes an object. A reified object, a fetishism something EXTERNAL to the individual within the given social relations.
While I am not well read into these concepts, I would not judge it as "gibberish" without a through reading of these abstractions and the tradition which dealt with it.

In the end, the implications of his work means that LABOR,the subjective act integrated into objective reality has a role to play. In a way, if you ask Holloway, what drives history, he would not say anything absolute, being a dialectics freak, but that change of labor-process can change the world.
It means, we do not need to change capital but we can(alternatively) change labor, what we do, a complete subjective act to change the world. Zapatistas are his favorite group to show his point.
Essentialy it means, we do not need to take over "power", we can isolate power(pretty difficult) and do things on our own as working class. I think this is especially something which has potential in developing world rather than industrialized countries with their different set of relations.
Latin America has a lot of examples where people have created different set of labor relations in protest to "power".
Though I guess that is not the point of this thread.

[Thirsty Crow]

It is not BS or gibberish imo. At least not the way it is portrayed here.
Then you'd be no doubt perfectly capable of demonstrating this to me. Where do I make an error of judgement?


His dealings with subject and object has to be understood in the context of Young Marx's alienation, reification and fetishisms. In fact my current signature where I quote the "young Marx" is a clear example of the dialectical critical approach to reified abstractions.


Holloway deals with alienation greatly in his work from little I looked into it. His point I think is that, for instance, labor, the subjective act of doing something becomes an object.

Which does nothing to justify the fanciful talk of nouns denying movement. Moreover, the part about the "communist-moving" is plain old mystification as it is entirely unclear how could "dissolving nouns into verbs" ever actually work. Do you really want to propose that a noun-less natural language is possible?

But if you think this is just an intriguing way of putting things which actually stand, a curious rhetorical device, you'd still have to account for the purpose and effectiveness of such a strategy. I maintain that it is completely useless for anyone desiring to understand the world. It might be useful for someone who likes to play with words and procedures of reading, much like reading poetry, but that is a whole new ball game.


A reified object, a fetishism something EXTERNAL to the individual within the given social relations. Which makes of everything that actually exist a "reified object". Which should tell you just how useful is that tautology, of the "objectified object".
Of course, the whole point to the notion of the commodity fetishism is not that externality is important here, but that social relations - necessarily involving interaction between humans - seem as if they were mere relations between things. They "appear" as such, one could say, immediately for the participants in the whole process. On closer inspection, what seemed as a result of natural properties is clarified as a historical, social product.


While I am not well read into these concepts, I would not judge it as "gibberish" without a through reading of these abstractions and the tradition which dealt with it.
No need to delve into an obscurantist tradition when it is perfectly clear, at least if you are correct in your explanations, that the concepts employed in this way don't amount to anything productive as far as clarity and insight are concerned.


In the end, the implications of his work means that LABOR,the subjective act integrated into objective reality has a role to play.And it is a nearly impossible to understand why would it be necessary to imply such a truism (well, not really a truism but forget about that for a minute) by means of saying that nouns deny movement, which is at best a bewildering and quirky poetic line. At worst? A terrible confusion. And I don't think that confusion begets clarity easily.

Really, if this is not gibberish, provide some grounds for stating that nouns deny movement and what could that possibly mean in the first place. Anyway, it was the implicit point of OP that only these quotes be illuminated. What worth is there if what it takes is a good year or two of getting familiar with arcane traditions?

But there's more to this entanglement:


It means, we do not need to change capital but we can(alternatively) change labor, what we do, a complete subjective act to change the world. Zapatistas are his favorite group to show his point. So not only is Holloway most confused when talking about stuff like this, but his politics is also hopelessly muddled and in effect counter-revolutionary (precisely because it is really hard to sell this nonsense as novel if you outright advocate even a new, more hip kind of social democracy). Isolate power and act for ourselves as the working class. Next thing you know, masters of arcane scrolls will be telling us to retreat into spirituality-based communes. What a load of crap.

[Dodo]

Then you'd be no doubt perfectly capable of demonstrating this to me. Where do I make an error of judgement?

Look, my point is that you should not take his dealing with whatever language form out of the context of his works, reifications and stuff.



Which does nothing to justify the fanciful talk of nouns denying movement. Moreover, the part about the "communist-moving" is plain old mystification as it is entirely unclear how could "dissolving nouns into verbs" ever actually work. Do you really want to propose that a noun-less natural language is possible? Like I said, I am not referring here to his dealing with language. English language is too foreign for me to work on it in such an abstract way.
Its just, I try to point his dealing with "objective" and "subjective" and how we create "valuable realities" and take them for granted, including concpts of historical materialism or communism.


But if you think this is just an intriguing way of putting things which actually stand, a curious rhetorical device, you'd still have to account for the purpose and effectiveness of such a strategy. I maintain that it is completely useless for anyone desiring to understand the world. It might be useful for someone who likes to play with words and procedures of reading, much like reading poetry, but that is a whole new ball game. Well, a lot of Marxists who deal with dialectics more tend to get the stamp "intellectual masturbation"...while they do things too far sometimes imo, I would not go as far as dismissing what they are pointing to. In fact, I'd side with critical tradition rather than the "scientific" tradition if I was to -define- Marxism.


Which makes of everything that actually exist a "reified object". Which should tell you just how useful is that tautology, of the "objectified object".
Of course, the whole point to the notion of the commodity fetishism is not that externality is important here, but that social relations - necessarily involving interaction between humans - seem as if they were mere relations between things. They "appear" as such, one could say, immediately for the participants in the whole process. On closer inspection, what seemed as a result of natural properties is clarified as a historical, social product.Indeed.


No need to delve into an obscurantist tradition when it is perfectly clear, at least if you are correct in your explanations, that the concepts employed in this way don't amount to anything productive as far as clarity and insight are concerned. And it is a nearly impossible to understand why would it be necessary to imply such a truism (well, not really a truism but forget about that for a minute) by means of saying that nouns deny movement, which is at best a bewildering and quirky poetic line. At worst? A terrible confusion. And I don't think that confusion begets clarity easily. I understand. The reason I play the devil's advocote here is because of the outright dismissal. John Holloway's work brings great insight in my opinion, and a very important extension from Marxist tradition which holds things together in the post-modern world.




Really, if this is not gibberish, provide some grounds for stating that nouns deny movement and what could that possibly mean in the first place. Anyway, it was the implicit point of OP that only these quotes be illuminated. What worth is there if what it takes is a good year or two of getting familiar with arcane traditions?

But there's more to this entanglement: Maybe we are taking his words out of context? There is a big attack on Holloway here, but I am not sure we know in what context he even used iniminimanimo of language here.
The way the language is used can easily lead to misunderstandings of abstraction which reifies them. I don't know whether you can solve it or not, nor I am at a point in my life where I'd utilize my energy to deal with details of language.
I am just saying you guys are being harsh.


So not only is Holloway most confused when talking about stuff like this, but his politics is also hopelessly muddled and in effect counter-revolutionary (precisely because it is really hard to sell this nonsense as novel if you outright advocate even a new, more hip kind of social democracy). Isolate power and act for ourselves as the working class. Next thing you know, masters of arcane scrolls will be telling us to retreat into spirituality-based communes. What a load of crap.Again, if you take it out of context it is easy to blame. You have to understand his premises in relation to his bashing of scientific Marxist-Leninist tradition and failure of "real" socialism.

Essentially, he is not suggesting his "method" as an -absolute- right Marxist way. In fact his whole point is that there should not be an established eternal doctrine of communism, and that it is a reification and dogma on its own. And he draws directly from Marx in this.
He does not necessarily say Leninism is wrong either, he just says that Marxism is stuck in this dogmatic tradition which kills the point of Marxism and that as Young Marx would say :
"On the other hand, it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one"

At least that is how I take it.
People started to obsess themselves with "class", "mode of production" historical materialism and its stages, state as a tool of class oppression and next thing you know....we have a bunch of religious zealots limited by a reified objectification of the world.
This forum is full of this....

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

x


Now philosophy has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is that philosophical consciousness itself has been drawn into the torment of the struggle, not only externally but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

Therefore I am not in favour of raising any dogmatic banner. On the contrary, we must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their propositions for themselves. Thus, communism, in particular, is a dogmatic abstraction; in which connection, however, I am not thinking of some imaginary and possible communism, but actually existing communism as taught by Cabet, Dézamy, Weitling, etc. This communism is itself only a special expression of the humanistic principle, an expression which is still infected by its antithesis – the private system. Hence the abolition of private property and communism are by no means identical, and it is not accidental but inevitable that communism has seen other socialist doctrines – such as those of Fourier, Proudhon, etc. – arising to confront it because it is itself only a special, one-sided realisation of the socialist principle.

You mean this bit, Dogukan?

[Dodo]

Yep, the letter ruthless criticism of all that exists is the heart of Marxism to me. Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge in 1843.

[blake 3:17]

I think it's a wonderful piece. Some of the language is a little messy -- he's borrowing from German philosophy which has tidier neologisms.




Marx criticised value to show that its core was human activity, work, but his critical method of recuperating the centrality of human doing can be extended to all nouns

I understand his politics as being a very radical rethinking of the relationship of humans to nature. Where is air in our doing? Where is water?

I wouldn't dismiss a thinker or a thought because it broke Aristotle's rules.

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

I think it's a wonderful piece. Some of the language is a little messy -- he's borrowing from German philosophy which has tidier neologisms.





I understand his politics as being a very radical rethinking of the relationship of humans to nature. Where is air in our doing? Where is water?

I wouldn't dismiss a thinker or a thought because it broke Aristotle's rules.

Would you mind elaborating your thoughts further?

[Comrade #138672]

Maybe it is me, but I do not get it. Why would the existence of movement deny the existence of objects or nouns? In fact, objects are necessary for movement to occur: only objects can "undergo" movement. Of course, this does not mean that objects are fixed and static entities. Not at all. Nouns and verbs complement each other and are both equally necessary.

[blake 3:17]

Would you mind elaborating your thoughts further?

I'd suggest reading the whole essay & rereading and thinking it through. I'm overly familiar with Holloway, but this piece and some others I've found either very insightful or stimulating.

This is certainly thought provoking:
Capitalism exists today not because we created it two hundred years ago or a hundred years ago, but because we created it today. If we do not create it tomorrow, it will not exist.

Is there no truth to that?

In regards to the quote in the OP I'll just address the end & not very throughly (sorry, got laundry and dishes to do before going to bed!):
critical thought really requires creating a new talking, what Vaneigem calls the poetry of revolution

From an interview with Vaneigem:
Who are your favorite poets?
Villon, Blake, Hölderlin, Nerval, Fourier.

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-conversation-with-raoul-vaneigem/

Wonderful! This is some seriously tripped out stuff! Some of you might have guessed I'm a bit fond of Blake. This piece of Blake's is a total mind bender and is completely in step with a search for a new language: http://www.william-blake.org/The-Laocoon-as-Jehovah-with-Satan-and-Adam,-c.1820.jpg

[blake 3:17]

^^^ Should read "I'm not overly familiar with Holloway" -- oops.