On Christopher Caudwell: Materialism, Idealism, & The Problem of Disciplinarity

"A shooting star across England’s empirical night" - EP Thompson

Written version of a talk given at a Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge University conference titled, “Ships in the Proletarian Night: Contemporary Marxist Thought in France and Britain” (2020).

I.

Born Christopher St. John Sprigg in 1907, Christopher Caudwell left school at 15 to become a journalist. He eventually ran an aeronautics publishing company with his brother, edited one of its technical journals, and designed gears for motorcars. According to the historian Helena Sheehan, Caudwell became interested in Marxism in 1934 and wrote his first major book at a blistering rate of 5000 words per day.¹ Prior to Illusion & Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (published posthumously in 1935 which, at least for a time in the middle of the 20th century, was seen as a classic in British Marxist aesthetics) he wrote 7 detective novels and edited a collection of ghost stories. This was all before the age of 27.

He was killed at 30 fighting in Spain, manning a machine gun post covering retreating volunteers in the British Battalion of the International Brigade. His posthumous work includes the collection Studies in a Dying Culture – which includes essays on Freud, HG Wells, TE Lawrence, and George Bernard Shaw, alongside essays with titles like “Love,” “Beauty,” “Liberty,” and “Man in Nature” – a book about the crisis Newtonian physics that followed the introduction of relativity theory, Crisis of Physics, an unpublished book about the history of biology, and a study of English bourgeois literature. When Caudwell is discussed or referenced nowadays (or at least in the last three decades) – which is admittedly rarely (and its notable that the most sophisticated book on Caudwell, at least according to Paul Browne, is in German) – he functions as an almost platonic ideal of the Marxist autodidact, someone simultaneously encyclopedic in the width and breadth of their knowledge, unburdened by the disciplinary distinctions of the academy, but also burdened precisely by the indeterminacy of that same autodidacticism. Terry Eagleton described his intellectual situation as,

“Insulated from much of Europe, intellectually isolated even within his own society, permeated by Stalinism and idealism, bereft of a “theory of superstructures,” Caudwell nonetheless persevered in the historically hopeless task of producing from these unpropitious conditions a fully-fledged Marxist aesthetics. His work bears all the scars of that self-contradictory enterprise: speculative and erratic, studded with random insights, punctuated with hectic forays into and out of alien territories, and strewn with hair-raising vulgarities.”²

For EP Thompson, this characterization was nothing but myth-making, and as Paul Browne argues, the extent of this mythmaking becomes clear when one compares what Eagleton has to say about Caudwell to the description of pre-Althusserian Marxists in Althusser’s own preface to For Marx; where, “the evocation of the isolated intellectual hero engaged in an historically hopeless struggle against enemies internal (Stalinism and Idealism) and external (the lack of recognition by bourgeois academics) merely serves to place Althusser and Eagleton in the role of true pioneers.”³

When not tempered with a kind of astonished ambivalence – EP Thompson for example described him as, “a shooting star across England’s empirical night... a premonitory sign of a more sophisticated Marxism [that would come in the 60s]...[a] fire: a consciousness too bright and self- consuming.”⁴ Across the board, Caudwell is critiqued for the fundamental indeterminacy of his analysis. In the same sentence that he describes him as the best-known critic of his day, Raymond Williams described Caudwell as having, “little to say about literature which is interesting” and perhaps more devastatingly, described him as, “not even specific enough to be wrong.”⁵

While it would be impossible to deny the naïveté of some of Caudwell’s statements – as well as the sweeping form they often take (best compared to the sensation of reading the work of the most gifted stoner undergraduate conceivable) – for Paul Browne, “hectic forays into and out of alien territories only makes sense if one accepts the academic division of labor as insurmountable.” The index to Illusion & Reality contains 500 titles from half a dozen European countries and over a dozen academic disciplines. To judge it at all, one would need to convene an interdisciplinary committee.

II.

When Max Horkheimer took over as director of the Institute for Social Research in 1931- just a few years prior to Caudwell’s writing of Illusion and Reality – his inaugural address described ‘the current intellectual situation’ as one in which ‘traditional disciplinary boundaries have been called into question.’ “The question today,” as Horkheimer puts it, “is to organize investigations stimulated by contemporary philosophical problems in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration.”⁶ This was to become, not simply the Institute for Social Research, but ‘The Frankfurt School,’ with a research agenda that arose out of not only a diagnosis of the insufficiency of any individual discipline in addressing the social and historical ‘whole,’ but, in particular, the insufficiency of philosophy, a position stated classically in Adorno’s own inaugural address “The Actuality of Philosophy.” “Whoever chooses philosophy as a profession must first reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real."⁷ This fact necessitated a turn to an interdisciplinary materialism, which seems to be what the name and goal of Critical Theory now (somewhat flailingly) attempts to subsume.

‘Theory’ is of course something of a loaded classificatory choice: first because it distinguishes itself from ‘philosophy’ and second because of its implicit articulation of the problematic of disciplinarity. As Peter Osborne has argued, it is the transdisciplinary not interdisciplinary functioning of certain concepts – i.e., their functioning across (not between, or even over and against) specific intellectual disciplines – that causes Theory both to resemble philosophy insofar as philosophy is construed as a kind metadiscipline, at the same time that it is self-evidently separate from disciplinary philosophy.

More specifically though, as Osborne points out, much of ‘Theory’ is, if not ‘properly’ philosophical, at least predicated on critiques of existing disciplinary philosophy as a self-sufficient discipline. In the French context, this is the structuralist critique of Sartre’s existential post-Hegelianism and the subsequent post- structuralist critique of structuralism. In the German context, this is the Frankfurt School of critical theory’s taking up the task of Hegelian philosophy – as conceived in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences – as modified by Marx’s critique of Hegel.⁸ That is, as modified by the Marxist critique of philosophy as a self-sufficient discipline, which, famously, pushes Marx away not only from philosophy and its critique, but to the critique of something else—political economy. Indeed, debates about Marx for good reason played a central role in the mid- century transformations in both contexts.

Of course the third in the traditional triumvirate of European philosophical and intellectual cultures missing here is Britain, and perhaps for good reason. The epistemological position stereotypically understood as British is empiricism, a philosophical standpoint that seems to contain within it precisely the refutation of the autonomy of reason that one can find in Kant (German) or Descartes (French), with its fundamental reliance on the idea that perception and sensation are the sole source of human knowledge.

Geoff Pilling has pointed out that it is one of the ironies of British philosophical intellectual history that the same empiricism that lay the foundation for the philosophical materialism of 17th and 18th century did the same for the idealism of Berkley & Hume. The proposition that sensation alone is the source of knowledge is connected, in other words, both to the denial of the objectivity of the external world (subjective idealism), but also the denial of the possibility of an exhaustive knowledge of that external world (skepticism).⁹ What both have in common is the idea that the logical categories of thought (either philosophical or scientific) are only schemes which we use for the organization of sense-data. In other words, they are wholly subjective. It precludes, in other words, the idea that concepts are themselves constituted objectively.

Marx’s critique of Ricardo is relevant here as an example of this emphasis on the origin of knowledge rather than its form. While, in Marx’s view, Ricardo correctly saw in labor the source and measure of value, he failed to consider the form assumed by labor that is specific to the capitalist mode of production (“abstract labor”). This is a form of labor that finds its specificity in the abstraction from the qualitatively diverse concrete laboring activities that is, transhistorically, productive of use-values. Abstract labor, however, is not constituted by a form of abstraction that occurs in the mind. As Michael Heinrich explains,

“abstract labor is not visible, only a particular concrete labor is visible, just as the concept ‘tree’ is not visible...but as with the term ‘tree,’ abstract labor is an abstraction, but a completely different kind of abstraction. Normally abstractions are constituted in human thought...but in the case of abstract labor, we are not dealing with a ‘mental abstraction’ but with a ‘real abstraction,’ by which we mean an abstraction that is carried out in the actual behavior of humans, regardless of whether they are aware of it.”¹⁰

Traditional conceptions of subject and object here, are thrown for something of a loop, insofar as the act of abstraction is not reducible to the domain of the former.

IV.

At a moment of particular tension in EP Thompsons’s “Poverty of Theory” – where Thompson attempts to offer his own philosophical critique of Althusser’s conception of the relationship between the knowledge of the real and the real itself — Thompson criticizes Althusser for eliding the fact that the real can only become an object of epistemological inquiry at the point when it enters within the field of perception or knowledge. Essentially he’s accusing Althusser of confusing the empirical with empiricism. The accuracy or not of Thompson’s critique aside – what is notable is that Thompson turns to none other than Caudwell as an authority on the question. In the essay on Althusser, Thompson selects just two sentences – “object and subject, as exhibited by the mind, come into being simultaneously...knowing is a mutually determining relation between knowing and being” – but in his essay on Caudwell he selects a large bit on Caudwell’s conception of dialectical materialism which is worth reading at length:

“Object and subject, as exhibited by the mind relation, come into being simultaneously. Human body, mind, and human environment cannot exist separately, they are all parts of the one set...we can say that relations seen by us between qualities in our environment (the arrangement of the cosmos, energy, mass, all the entities of physics) existed before the subject-object relationship implied in the mind. We prove this by the transformations which take place independent of our desires. In this sense, nature is prior to mind and this is the vital sense of science. These qualities produced, as case and ground produce effect, the synthesis, or the particular subject-object relationship which we call knowing. Nature was therefore produced by the mind. But the nature which produced mind was not nature ‘as seen by us,’ for this is important into it the late subject-object relationship called ‘mind.’ It is nature known by us, that is, as having indirect and not direct relations with us. It is nature in determining relation with, but not part of, our contemporary universe. Yet, by sublation, the nature that produced mind is contained in the universe of which the mind relation is now a feature; and that is why it is known to us. Such a view reconciles the endless dualism of mentalism or objectivism. It is the universe of dialectical materialism.”

Whether the quotation provided does in fact reconcile the dualism of mentalism or objectivism; rationalism or empiricism; idealism or materialism can be left aside, but what is remarkable – and this is something Thompson himself comments upon – is the intensity with which Caudwell explored, on the one hand, the materiality of thought and, on the other, the ideality of nature—or, to put it another way, the materiality of subjectivity and the ideality of objectivity.

While prominent British Marxist authorities like Maurice Cornforth, Francis Mulhern, and EP Thompson in particular have all agreed that Caudwell’s thought suffers from a, “certain deforming weaknesses, and in particular the analytic preference for binary oppositions;”¹¹ these binary oppositions are simplistic only when looked at in isolation from each other. Caudwell understood well the necessity of grasping certain concepts in terms of ‘reflection determinations,’¹² the type articulated in Book II of Hegel’s Logic. The more Hegelian inclined will call this grasping something ‘dialectically’ but if you’re allergic to this Hegelian vocabulary (as the Althusserians in the audience very well might be) or suspicious of its occasional sophistry (a perhaps legitimate suspicion) you can simply replace ‘dialectically’ with ‘the need to think together with;’ i.e., the idea that some concepts are simply incoherent without being thought in relation to their opposite—they are co-constitutive.

All of this from a thinker whose entire knowledge of German Philosophy was derived from Engels, Lenin, Bukharin, and Deborin. Illusion & Reality contain no references to Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, or Feuerbach. The Grundrisse was not published until he died, and he had no knowledge of either the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts or The German Ideology. Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci, Lefebvre—all of these names would have been completely foreign to him. This makes it rather astounding that Caudwell would zero in on the “Theses on Feuerbach” – with its interpenetration of subject & object – as the core of Marx’s thought.

V.

Caudwell’s exploration of, on the one hand, the materiality of thought and, on the other, ideality of nature bears a rather striking resemblance to Marx’s theory of fetishism—which describes simultaneously the materialization of social relations (where social relations appear as the relations between things) but also describes material objects (i.e., commodities) which seem to act very much with the agency of subjects. For Ricardo the demands made of human beings by commodity production are not the result of some a historically specific mediation and distribution of social labor, but are determined by the ‘natural laws’ (i.e., ahistorical laws) of the market—laws which political economy seeks to describe; however, Marx’s critique of these supposedly natural laws of economic motion, is not merely via some formal comparison to some different object that lies outside the purview of its categories of analysis. Marx held that the categories discovered by classical political economy do actually describe objective phenomena – they are not mere mystifications – what Marx criticizes political economy for is the ahistorical and unreflective relation they had to their own disciipline, for they could not grasp that their own science had emerged and developed – indeed, could only be possible – under certain historical conditions; namely, the fact that commodity production was becoming the dominant mode of production.

That the form disciplines take are constituted by specific historical and social relations is something even disciplinary purists are willing to point out, as long as this acknowledgement is book-ended with a nod to the sort of inter-, multi-, post-, meta- or any number of the prefixed qualifications we so often say we need more of. A more difficult idea to accept is that these same social relations are also constitutive of a given discipline’s intellectual content. That is to say, it is not merely the form of study – understood as the determinative conceptual borders of a specific discipline - that is the result of social relations of institutionality, but this is the case as well for the very object at which any disciplinary form takes aim.

To return to Caudwell – with his mix of grandiosity, immaturity, and transdisciplinary conceptual arsenal – would mean to at least remind ourselves of a standpoint that does not view the intellectual division of labor as insurmountable, but to truly take the social whole as one’s object of analysis.

1. Extract from Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History by Helena Sheehan (Humanities Press International 1985 and 1993) online at: https://web.archive.org/web/20080706020738/http://www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/caudwell.htm

2. Terry Eagleton, “Criticism and Politics: The Work of Raymond Williams, New Left Review 95 (Jan/Feb): 1976.

3. Paul Browne, “An Unclaimed Legacy: Caudwell’s Dialectics,” Science & Society 48, 2 (1984): ft. 195.

4. EP Thompson, “Christopher Caudwell,” Critical Inquiry (Winter, 1995): 331

5. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, (Penguin, 1966): 268

6. Marx Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” Philosophy and Social Science. Selected Early Writings, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993): 10.

7. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos March 20, 1977.

8. Peter Osborne, “Problematizing Disciplinarity, Transdisciplinary Problematics,” Theory, Culture, & Society 32 (5- 6): 18

9. Geoff Pilling, Marx’s Capital: Philosophy and Political Economy, (London: Routledge, 1980): 72

10. Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to Marx’s Three Volumes of Capital, 49

11. EP Thompson, Caudwell, (1977) online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1977/caudwell.htm

12. GWF Hegel, The Science of Logic, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 355-356