Marxism and formalism: On Ian Angus’s Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism

The equivalences

Angus’s Groundwork is based on a crucial equivalence between Husserl’s critique of modern science, and Marx’s critique of political economy. Galileo reduced nature to measurable quantities and Marx observed the reduction of the use values of commodities to market prices. In both cases the dominant culture identifies rationality with formal abstractions. The lived experience of labor occupies the place in Marx’s theory that the lifeworld holds in phenomenology. Both labor and the lifeworld are the concrete foundation on the basis of which the abstractions arise. Marx and Husserl believed that a return to the concrete was possible, but Angus contends that they had no plausible way to reconnect the concrete with the formal systems instituted by capitalism. The task is complicated by the essential role of science and technology in any modern society, a role that cannot be erased in favor of a simple return to the origin.

Both critiques depend on a concept of formalization, which Angus explains on the basis of Husserl’s writings on logic. Formal abstractions must be distinguished from generic abstractions or generalizations. A generalization merely classifies objects under an abstract category whereas formalization strips its objects of all their qualities except a single one relevant to a science.

The concept of ‘city’ can serve as an example of a generic abstraction. Cities are agglomerations of a certain size and population. They come in all sorts of forms. The content of this concept can be filled in by reference to Paris, New York and so on. The meaning of ‘city’ is enriched by the concrete content of these examples, and vice versa, the examples exemplify general attributes of the concept of the city. Generalizations such as this are a familiar aspect of everyday language.

In modern times experts have learned to use another type of abstraction, the formal abstractions that enter into scientific formulae. Formalization consists in selecting a specific aspect of a concrete object and treating it within a formal system as a variable, an ‘x’ of a certain type. Husserl calls this a ‘substructuration’, by which he means filling out abstract mathematical or geometrical forms with specific real world contents that are narrowed down and emptied of meaning. These empty variables are what Husserl calls ‘adumbrations’, that is, they select a specific perspective on the concrete object suitable for processing in a scientific formula.

For example, the formula ‘distance equals velocity times time’ gains no concrete content from the specific distances calculated with the formula. In this case the ‘x’, the variable, is a number such as ‘one mile’, ‘200 hundred yards’ and so on. Distances in this sense are mere measures that differ only quantitatively. The meaningful content available in the lifeworld as one traverses a distance is wholly lost. Think of the difference between the rich experience of a walk through Paris and the image shown on the GPS of a taxi cab. The modern world is based on such formalizations in both science and economics. They give control with a consequent loss of the meanings and values present in concrete social life.

Modernity depends on formalization, exemplified by both natural science and political economy. Just as perceptible objects are processed in the equations of physics, so goods are reduced to their price as commodities and subjected to the order of the market. Marx and Husserl deplore the consequences of such formalizations without abandoning science. Husserl’s solution is a refoundation of natural science on the basis of its sources in the lifeworld. Marx projects a socialist economy that would restore the potency of the concrete use values obscured by the tyranny of the market. Angus (2001: 263) writes:

It is a convergence on a historical form dominated by formal reason whose critique demands that the presupposed lifeworld, or use, becomes newly central to philosophy. Philosophy can no longer be mesmerized by the attractions of abstraction but must turn to address the role of abstractions in the lived world and their origin from that world.

In one respect, however, there is a major difference between Husserl’s project and Marx’s. Unlike natural science, the capitalist market is not a theoretical formalization but a ‘real abstraction’. The reduction of use values in all their complexity to the simplicity of price takes place in the real world, not just in the head of a philosopher. As such, it cannot be changed by a theoretical innovation but only through practical action. Marx therefore argues that the priority of use value over exchange value must be instituted politically. This has the immediate consequence of inspiring a political movement, but the Soviet planned economy that was supposed to restore the primacy of use value instead created all sorts of unintended consequences (Lebowitz, 2012).

Angus relates the concept of formalization to modern technology, which, like science and the market, is alienated from its origin and consequences in the lifeworld. What might be called ‘practical’ formalization consists in narrowing each technique down to its purely functional aspect with respect to a single end, regardless of its relations to other aspects of the lifeworld context to which it belongs. Just as the objects of theory are ‘emptied out’ of concrete content, stripped down to their function within a formal system, so technologies are designed only under the aspect that enables them to function within the immediate technical system to which they belong. Where the wider context, both social and natural, is ignored, the result, not surprisingly, is a mismatch between technologies and the world they inhabit. Angus (2021: 101) writes, ‘Formalization in theory becomes one-dimensionality in practice.’ Environmental disaster is the most familiar such mismatch today, but already in the 19th century Marx found evidence of similar problems in the occupational hazards and illnesses suffered by industrial workers and the destruction of the soil by capitalist farming.

The introduction of the concept of formalization blocks the romantic turn to an original immediacy. Angus argues for a ‘transversal’ practice of combining formalized sciences and technologies to take into account their context and consequences. Angus could have developed these considerations in terms of Lukács’s concept of reification, but while there are hints, this theme is not pursued. In the remainder of this review, I will show how the concept of reification enlarges the scope of Angus’s phenomenological Marxism.

Bureaucracy and technical disciplines

Reification characterizes commodity fetishism and industrial technology, as Marx argued, and also bureaucracy as Weber conceives it. Lukács also touches on the implications of reification for technical disciplines such as journalism and law that provide the basis for corresponding bureaucracies. This turns out to be significant for Angus’s argument.

The formal disciplines that structure modern society are reified in Lukács’s sense of the term. Their narrow horizon splits them apart from each other and from their underlying concrete basis in the life processes of society. Lukács emphasizes the gap between the bureaucratic order and the life process of the individuals, between a rationality modeled on natural science and the concrete reality of its objects. The seemingly automatic operation of the reified forms reduces human beings to mere cogs in a mechanistic world.

While Lukács is primarily concerned with the Marxist critique of the economy, his enlargement of the Marxist critique to encompass technical disciplines and bureaucracies is of relevance today. In modern capitalism it is necessary to extend the concept of reification to all the bureaucracies, technical disciplines and technologies I have called the ‘technosystem’ in my book of that title (Feenberg, 2017).

Despite his critique of reification, Lukács does not reject specialized knowledge. Specialization is necessary for scientific and technical progress. Thus, the critique of reification is not a romantic call for a return to immediacy. Lukács (28) writes:

But what is decisive is whether this process of isolation [of sciences] is a means towards understanding the whole and whether it is integrated within the context it presupposes and requires, or whether the abstract knowledge of an isolated fragment retains its ‘autonomy’ and becomes an end in itself.

These considerations on specialization resemble Angus’s concept of transversality. Already in Lukács’s day the further advance of capitalism had made a simple return to the concrete implausible. Today, everything, from childcare to communication has its bureaucratic order. Furthermore, bureaucracy and technology are closely aligned in modern capitalism. Bureaucratic systems depend on rules and regulations imposed on a population assembled by technologies conceived in accordance with various technical disciplines. It is the prevalence of these technologies and disciplines that has enabled bureaucracy to spread throughout modern societies.

In terms of their degree of formalization, there are three types of bureaucratic situations: fields like civil engineering and pharmaceutical research apply natural science to projects with clear and simple purposes and boundaries; fields like architecture and food science use scientific knowledge and mathematics in complex social contexts where many considerations interfere and interact; fields like law, social work and university administration are similarly involved with complex contexts, but they operate with rules that may have little if any scientific basis. Yet, even this third category implicates science and technology insofar as the rigidity of the rules, consistently applied to typical cases, imitates natural scientific ideas of laws, facts and applications.

In advanced capitalist society bureaucracies, like technologies, have a narrow focus and so can be analyzed as quasi-formal systems. This narrowing is determined by the socially embedded technical disciplines that inform bureaucratic practice. The definition of their objects is decontextualized and standardized in accordance with a goal. An object such as crime, child welfare, educational achievement, can be defined in many different ways by the technical disciplines that study them, and each definition substructures it with different theoretical and practical consequences.

The bureaucratic object is a human being stripped bare of horizon and background and most of its qualities just like the objects of science and technology. The impoverished content of the bureaucratic object, its remaining quality, allows it to be contextualized within the logic of a more or less formalized system. There it functions to fill out a variable as a ‘case’, a kind of algebraic ‘x’. The bureaucratic reduction of the individual to a case resembles the way markets reduce commodities to price and workers to labor power. By entering bureaucratic systems such as universities, medical institutions, social service institutions, this cuts the individual off from the full complexity of their life in order to fit into a formal system. In some bureaucracies the case is treated under a rule, in others it may be treated mathematically.

Angus writes, ‘the client of a bureaucracy is in principle a formalism, in practice it is an adumbrated technique’ (personal communication). For example, the ‘rider’ is an abstract object for the experts who organize transportation for a city. The category ‘rider’ is no more rich in content than the category ‘velocity’ in physics or ‘profit’ in political economy, and like them it can be treated mathematically. Riders are characterized by where they get on and off and by their numbers at various times and places. As a rider on the bus system, one appears as an abstract element, tracked by a pass, and measured and plugged into a logistics algorithm. Stripped down to what the pass reveals, riders fill out the ‘x’ of the system variable. With this information to hand experts can make calculations (the formalization) to optimize the system in accordance with the goal of moving people from place to place by the shortest route at the least cost.

The larger issue of the meaning and value of the activities the experts organize may be lost in the labor of one-dimensional optimization. But on occasion decisions need to be made that are not immanent to the system as it stands, for example, decisions on the relative use of the roads for buses, cars and bicycles. These decisions are technically underdetermined and will decide the nature of the city as both an object of the discipline of urban planning and as a concrete experience for its citizens. Here different types of actors engage. The dominant actors, automobile companies and drivers of cars, press for their priorities, while new actors ask for more public transport and bicycle lanes. There is no possible formalization of this dispute. It is carried on discursively with those advocating for the established system basing themselves on the ‘facts’ while the others bring forward what Marcuse would have called ‘potentialities’. The question in dispute is the nature of the city.

The technical disciplines that structure the world have a specific object that orients their expert personnel. In the case in point that object is the ‘city’. But what is a city? Is it a flux of commercial traffic or a sustainable place of human interaction and encounter? That question will be decided in part by the nature of the transportation system and that decision will be essentially political. There are two different definitions of the city and each will determine an expert response. The city as object of a technical discipline is ‘constructed’ in the course of public debate over the idea of the city. In each case the object, ‘the city’, is different, the corresponding engineering and laws are different, and the lived world is also different.

What is true of the city in this example, is also true of the industrial system as a whole in its relation to nature. Hence the significance of the movement to contain climate change, which aims not to eliminate industry but to transform the energy system under public pressure.

Object conflicts ³

The conflict between the lifeworld and the formal systems of the bureaucracies and technical disciplines resembles workers’ struggles in some respects. Just as workers’ struggles emerged around the factory and industrial technology, so the new resistances emerge around technologies and technical disciplines. Contemporary forms of protest and traditional working-class protest are both based on the lifeworld response to the limitations of the prevailing system. In both cases the protest is not simply a return to the immediate, but is mediated by the technical environment that creates the problem and the agent able to formulate the alternative potentialities of the system. There is no concrete object that is not already mediated by a formalization of some sort.

The focus on industrial technology in Marx is now superseded by the universal technification of society. The collective agent assembled by industrial technology is superseded by the many collective agents assembled (virtually) by various technologies and associated bureaucracies, for example, transportation technologies, medical technologies and so on. Class struggle can now be understood as a subset of the object conflicts that emerge around these systems. These many types of social movements can be interpreted through a similar framework.

Today technical disciplines shaped by capitalist imperatives rule over the social world. Markets still play the major role, but they are ever more shadowed by these disciplines. Heidegger and Marcuse were right to emphasize the role of science and technology in modernity but they had no explanation for how the lifeworld interacts with the technical disciplines, indeed they claimed that the lifeworld had been overtaken by formal rationality.

The reality is in fact one of conflict, but a unique form of conflict that requires its own political theory. I have adopted some aspects of actor network theory for this purpose (Feenberg, 1999: 114–19). The issue concerns the role of context and background as Angus argues in his critique of formalism. I formulate this in terms of the relation of systems such as bureaucracies or corporations to the encompassing network within which they are situated. By ‘network’ is meant all the elements symbolically and causally implicated in the activities of these systems, whether intentionally or not. A bureaucratic or corporate system organizes a portion of network under its control, in terms of a project, a ‘program’. The program designates the objects relevant to the system.

For example, a corporation harvesting wood from its forests treats the environment of the forest exclusively in terms of economic value. But the commercially valuable objects of its program are abstracted from the larger environment of the forest, that is, the total network with which it is engaged. The corporation’s activities may have unintended effects on the network relevant to the lifeworld of other actors who are incorporated into the network by those effects. Resistances of those other actors can be conceived as an anti-program, brought to bear on the system by those disadvantaged by the existing program, for example, hunters or hikers for whom the forest is an environment rather than a commercial resource. Their resistance might take the form of a lawsuit seeking to restrict the operations of the corporation.

Angus reformulates a similar argument in phenomenological language:

The return of the repressed lifeworld in social movements is a movement of the horizon of that world through the adumbration in a client such that the horizon overflows the technique toward a potential. Here is where the explication of the meaning of ‘potential’ in Marcuse becomes important, an intimation of the future…. There is, therefore, a rigorous parallel between the return of the repressed concrete lifeworld in the worker’s struggle and social movements…. It is through background and horizon that such movements attain both full social concretion and project a new horizon (Marcuse’s potentiality). (personal communication)

If the crisis of meaning and value can be resolved it will be through the politics of such resistances, not through changes in science under socialism as Marcuse argued, or the grounding of physics in the lifeworld as Husserl imagined. This means that the critique of rationality must be enlarged to include the technical disciplines and the resistances they evoke. The disciplines construct objects that are challenged politically even as various types of formalization are deployed to rationalize the outcome. Husserl and Marcuse were too focused on physics and its universal ontological claims to address the regional ontologies defined by the technical disciplines that actually structure the lifeworld.

Angus argues that this is the implication of the rise of ecology as a paradigmatic science in place of physics. Ecology draws on many conceptual frameworks to treat objects in their interconnections, rather than narrowing its objects down to a single attribute in a formal system while ignoring their wider connections. As such ecology offers an alternative to Husserl’s notion of a return to the concrete lifeworld: what is required is not immediate concreteness but a transversal practice embracing multiple contexts. The obstacle to such a revised practice is the formal system of the capitalist economy, which constrains social agents to narrow their purposes. The formalization of the economy thus privileges a narrow instrumentalism with dire consequences in many domains.

Conclusion

In conclusion, let me summarize the main points of this comparison between my approach, based on Lukács’s critique of reification, and Angus’s phenomenological approach.

We agree that there is a parallel between the way in which science reduces its real world contents to a few measurable parameters, and the way in which technologies, bureaucracies and technical disciplines similarly restrict their understanding of their objects. These disciplines determine social life through bureaucratic organizations and technologies. They formalize purposes in their selection of relevant properties and the corresponding objects, and organize the socio-natural world through applied formal systems.

The disciplines internalize presuppositions of the capitalist market, its fragmentation and single-minded pursuit of profit, and so impose a capitalist technical practice that corresponds to formalized science. This results in a specific type of instrumentalism that repeats the blindness of theoretical formalization to context and consequences at the practical level.

This blindness affects nature, which is instrumentalized in terms of formalized designs with disastrous environmental consequences. It extends to human beings, treated as users or clients of modern technical systems. As cases they are subject to ‘design’ in the sense of selection of relevant properties (age, condition, income, skill, movement, etc.). Mismatch between these designs and lifeworld experience leads to object conflicts.

The objects of the socially embedded technical disciplines are designed relative to a purpose and can be redesigned for a changed purpose: there are no fixed types (‘essences’) but only variant designs. When the innovations proposed by social movements become incorporated into a reformed technical system, then the ‘technical codes’ of those systems are revised. A democratized form of modernity would be based on a recursive system of reform between system and lifeworld. Such reform would be within the framework of modernity but nevertheless give it a non-capitalist direction.

The problem is thus not theoretical formalization as such, but the ‘one-dimensional’ consequences of its practical implementations under capitalism. If formalizations could be seen not as ontological substructurations but as practical tools in a context aiming at wider goals consonant with the complexity of the lifeworld, they could be integrated into a ‘two-dimensional’ world.