The dialectic _seems_, at first, to be the tripartite movement from thesis, to antithesis, and then to synthesis. #### The world of seems and forms I say _seems_ but unpacking those instances of "seems" and surface-level forms is precisely one of the [[Marx's style and dialectic emphasize the world of forms and appearances|moves that Marx's dialectic makes]]. You take a surface appearance (thesis), discover the hidden essence (antithesis), and _then you account for why that hidden essence actually took the form of that surface appearance in the first place_ (synthesis). #### Negation of the negation [[Slavoj Žižek|Žižek]] thinks about this as a kind of [[negation of the negation]]. You take an initial thing (thesis), then you negate it (antithesis), and then you negate the negation and return *back* to the start, albeit with a slight, minimal difference (synthesis). This is very similar to going back and accounting for why that hidden essence, at first, took the form of that initial surface appearance. The example Žižek likes to use is alive (thesis) ⤍ dead (negation) ⤍ ***un***-dead (negation *of* the negation). Unlike taking the number "`1`" and then multiplying it by `-1` and then by `-1` again, a double negative in this case doesn't quite bring you back to the same, positive starting point. Un-dead isn't the same as alive. You return to the start—but with a difference.[^repetition] [^repetition]: This is also why Žižek is big on repetition. Žižek also thinks of this in terms of the "Virtual" and the [[Real (Lacanian)|Real]]. What is it that allows for that hidden essence to take the form of that initial surface appearance? For him, this is like an invisible ("virtual") force that holds the two elements together. The Lacanian "Real" of ideology is in that invisible, virtual force that structures the world of essences and appearances.[^virtual] [^virtual]: Or maybe it's all appearances and all virtual. We're just probability waves, floating on the void! There's not even nothing: there's _less than_ nothing! (And that's why there's... something? Wha...?) Anwyay, long story short: once Žižek starts using Lacan and Hegel to get into the metaphysics stuff... I'm lost. #### The part and the whole Another way of thinking about the dialectic is as a process-philosophy kinda thing. It attempts to _un_-abstract those concepts that we stupid humans abstracted in the first place. This is why [[Marx's style and dialectic emphasizes flux, change and process|Marx's dialectic emphasizes flux and change]]. If you take an individual "thing" (or *part*) and abstract it away from its history and its relations with the rest of the world (or *whole*) you will misunderstand that thing. For example, you can't understand the commodity without understanding its history and its relations within a larger system of capitalist production. Sure, we bought and sold things before capitalism, but because now the relations are all different, it just "wasn't the same *thing*" (as it were). [[Bertell Ollman]] summarizes this idea: > “In abstracting capital, for example, as a process, Marx is simply including primitive accumulation, accumulation, and the concentration of capital—in sum, its real history—as part of what capital is. Abstracting it as a relation brings its actual ties with labor, commodity, value, capitalists, and workers—or whatever contributes to its appearance and functioning—under the same rubric as its constituting aspects. All the units in which Marx thinks about and studies capitalism are abstracted as both processes and relations” ([[Dance of the Dialectic (2003)|Dance]], p. 14)[^see_also] [^see_also]: See also Ollman's discussion of Joseph Dietzen. Ollman writes, “According to Dietzgen, therefore, the whole is revealed in certain standard parts (in which some thinkers have sought to reestablish the relations of the whole), because these are the parts in which human beings through individuation or abstraction have actually fragmented the whole” (p. 45) The allusion to including the whole "real history" of capital "as part of what capital is" offers a hint as to why Marxism presents itself as "historical materialism." You can't or shouldn't abstract "things" from history, that is, from their relations within the larger historical process.[^Jameson] [^Jameson]: This, in turn, is related to [[Fredric Jameson]]'s famous injunction to "Always historicize!" at the beginning of [[The Political Unconscious (1981)]]. Jameson calls this injunction "the one absolute and we may even say 'transhistorical' imperative of all dialectical thought" (ix). I will add, also, that Jameson's discussion of "absent causes" in his _Political Unconscious_ is very congruent with Žižek's understanding of the "virtual" in dialectics. This is also central to the [[rhetorical structure|structure]] of [[Capital (1867; 1887)]] itself. Marx starts with this particular, static "thing" (the commodity), and then moves outwards from there in order to describe the larger whole (capitalism). In thinking about the relationship between the "part" and the "whole," the dialectic is related to the [[particular and universal|particular and the universal]], or the [[centre and circumference]], or even... [[metonymy]] and [[synecdoche]].