new left review 94 july aug 2015 105

rob lucas

SOCIALISM AS

A REGULATIVE IDEA?

K jin karatanis Structure of World History is a book so strange and ambitious, and of such striking theoretical imagination, that any approach to it risks misrepresenting its object.1 It is a bid to refound Marxist theory and histori-ography in general, unearthing the fundamental structures of human society and tracing their transformations over time, from the earliest nomadic hunter-gatherer bands to the present, in a sort of universal his-tory. In doing so, Karatani offers to remedy a deficiency that he traces back to Marx: the lack of an adequate concept of the state or the nation and a reductivearguably bourgeoisunderstanding of the economic. It is also a philosophical work, exemplifying Karatanis mode of KantianMarxian transcendental critique in its re-examination of the essential structures of society. Finally, it is an attempt to revise the strategic orien-tation of his Transcritique (2003), anticipating how a simultaneous world revolution might yet be possible.

Transcritique was essentially a meshing of heterogeneous themes that had first been developed in articles for a literary magazine. This new book, written since Karatanis retirement from Japanese academia in 2006, is an attempt at grand synthesis. His signature intellectual pro-cedure over the years has been the striking reinterpretation, in clear, accessible prose, of some small detail from a work of philosophy, political economy or anthropology, which then precipitates a broader, unanticipated shift of perspective. While The Structure of World History attempts something more systematic in the way of theoretical and historical construction, it bears the imprint of its authors distinctive politico-cultural history.

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Born in 1941 in Amagasaki, in 1960 Karatani entered Tokyo University at the height of popular struggles over the Japanus Security Treaty. There he joined the Kysand (Communist League, or Bund), a left split from the Communist Party with roots in the post-war student movement, that had been playing a central role in the anti-Treaty pro-tests. After the defeat of the campaign a majority turned left again, to form a new proletarian vanguard party. Rejecting this course, in 1961 Karatani wrote a manifesto calling for a reorganization of the Shagakud (Socialist Students League) as an association of activists, free of any centralized partyan orientation to spontaneity he would later recognize as anarchist.

Literary criticism

In these years, Karatani studied the work of heterodox Marxist economist Kz Uno, counter-intuitively a core element of the Tokyo University curriculum at the time. Unos theorization had focused particularly on the formal structures of exchange, effectively treating merchant capital as the key form of capital per sean emphasis that would pass into Karatanis thinking, and take on a new importance there. However, after a first degree in economics, he opted for postgraduate studies in liter-ature, and it was in this area that he launched his intellectual career, making his name as a critic with an award-winning essay on the Meiji novelist Natsume Sseki.2 In these years too, he developed a close asso-ciation with the later-famous burakumin [outcaste] novelist and essayist, Kenji Nakagami, that would last until the latters early death in 1992: an instance of the criticnovelist pairing that Akira Asada has characterized as a standard feature of Japanese intellectual life.3 Karatanis cultural turn was not necessarily a step back from politics, though; by Asadas estimate, up to the end of the 1970s literary criticism was the main arena in which Japanese intellectual and political debate occurred, more engaged than other areas with a broader reading public. A continuation

1 Kjin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, trans. Michael Bourdaghs, Durham and London 2014.2 Though Karatani apparently denies any intentional reference, the nom de plume by which he is known is also the exact title of a Sseki novel [kjin], translated as The Wayfarer. See Bungaku to und2000-nen to 1960-nen no made (Literature and Movement: Between 2000 and 1960), interview in Bungaku-kai, January 2001.3 See kojinkaratani.com and Akira Asada, A Left Within the Place of Nothingness, nlr 5, SeptOct 2000.

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of the work on Sseki, Man in Awe, was published in 1972, followed three years later by Meaning as Illness, an investigation of the liter-ary construction of sickness.

At this point Karatani was invited to lecture on Japanese literature at Yale, where he formed connections with Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson. The book that emerged from these lectures, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1980), was lightly poststructuralist in manner, displaying a somewhat Foucauldian or Nietzschean genealogical orientation. It exam-ined the points of genesis, through the years in which Japan underwent its breakneck conversion to industrial capitalism, of a number of new cultural constructslandscape, interiority, confession, the childnot so much under the mere influence of Western culture as spontaneously produced in response to the social logics of a capitalist epoch. Another book of the same year, Architecture as Metaphor, which drew on a series of essays from the 1970s, was an avowedly deconstructionist project, attempting to grapple with a will to architecture that had supposedly been at the core of Western thought since Plato, and probing the ques-tion of structure in town planning, mathematics, language, philosophy, and Marxian political economy.4

But Karatanis postmodern moment, unlike that of so many of his peers internationally, did not amount to a straightforward retreat from the rad-icalism of the 1960s, or a rejection of Marxian theory tout court. Indeed, he was distinctly ambivalent about any wholesale embrace of the post-modern, viewing this in a Japanese context as a kind of facile escapism from the ineluctable nature of modernity.5 Looking back from 1992, he doubted the supposed radicality of Western-style poststructuralism in a culture which was, he thought, already constitutionally predisposed to a certain deconstructionism.6 Here, it was more radical to engage in positive, architectonic construction. The cognitive dissonance of his dual position on these issues appears to have precipitated some sort of crisis and reorientation, eventually to be thematized in the parallax view of Transcritique.7

4 Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, Cambridge, ma 1995.5 Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Durham and London 1993, p. 188.6 Architecture as Metaphor, pp. xlivxlv; also, Transcritique, Cambridge, ma 2003, p. x.7 See Karatani, Transcritique, p. xiv.

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Around that time, Karatani and Asada launched the quarterly journal Critical Space, which aimed to draw together Japanese and Western criti-cal traditions, with articles on culture, politics and philosophy.8 Then in 2000, with others, they initiated the New Associationist Movement (nam), amid deepening economic stagnation, and cynicism about the party-political system after the Socialists had squandered their one chance in government. Drawing its name from the lexicon of the early socialist movement, associationism was a utopian programme that sought to transcend capital, nation and stateseen as three mutually-reinforcing moments of a Borromean knot9through the creation of federated worker and consumer cooperatives, boycotts, and local cur-rency schemes, which were supposed to sow the seeds of a post-capitalist mode of production in the midst of capitalist society. Justification for this orientation had come from Karatanis reading of Marxian political economy, which viewed the moment of consumption as one of greater leverage for workers than that of production, since capital has no direct power to enforce the purchase of its products.

Transcritique can be read as the main theoretical statement of asso-ciationism, constructing a cosmopolitan, ethical Marxism strongly coloured by Proudhonism. Its signal contribution was a novel philo-sophical constructthe parallax. This was a sort of intersection, critical and antinomic, of which the central example was the relation into which Karatani brought Kant and Marx. Kantian transcendental critique was here refigured as transcritiquea mode of open-ended interrogation within and across these conjunctions. In Kants first critique the objects of such interrogationor retrospection as Karatani sometimes calls itwere the transcendental conditions of possibility of experience; in Capital they were the structures of bourgeois political economy. Here the two were brought into alignment, in a series of analogical relations: Ricardo and Bailey are to Marx as Leibniz and Hume are to Kant; money tallies with transcendental apperception, and so on. Though often grounded in striking scholarly insights, there was perhaps something of the postmodernist, collaging approach to theory-production here, as well as a lingering aroma of deconstructionism: was it not arbitrary to

8 See Asada, A Left Within the Place of Nothingness, p. 24 and the Critical Space archive at kojinkaratani.com/criticalspace.9 See Harry Harootunian, Out of Japan: The New Associationist Movement, Radical Philosophy 108, JulyAugust 2001 for a summary of the nam book, PrinciplesGenri, Tokyo 2000.

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align a philosophical interrogation of the transcendental subject with the critique of political economy? If Marx was ethicized, Karatani drove Kant in a more emphatically social direction, to the extent that even core concepts such as synthetic judgement and the thing-in-itself were rein-terpreted in social terms. The general effect was to preserve a deliberate dissonance even while pulling these distinct theoretical structures into alignment, but if there was any overall methodological outcome, it was a rather mysterious notion of transcendental critique as now social.

A systematic undertaking

It is such a critique that Karatani claims to be performing upon human history in The Structure of World History, which first appeared in slightly different form in Japan in 2006. His motive, he disarmingly explains in the preface, is in large part political, spurred by the NorthSouth fis-sures he saw opening up with 9/11 and with Japans part in the us-led occupation of Iraq, which he strongly opposed. Although he had always disliked systematic undertakings and was never particularly good at them, he found himself compelled to construct a theoretical system as the only way to explicate the problem he was wrestling with: how to go beyond themutually reinforcingtriplex of capitalnationstate. This insistent hope, qualified but never extinguished by real-world con-ditions, drives the whole book. As against the sort of world history that is ordinarily taken up by historians, this would be a transcendental cri-tique of the relationships between the various basic modes of exchange, involving a structural explication of three great shifts that have occurred in world history.10

Karatanis major departure, from Transcritique to The Structure of World History, is the attempt to think the objects of historical materialism under the heading not of modes of production, but of modes of exchange. In doing so, Karatani sees himself not as abandoning Marxafter all, Capital begins with commodity exchange, and the labour process takes hundreds of pages to enter the analysisbut, rather, extending his procedure to explain the state and the nation, as well as the commodity, as grounded in specific structures of exchange. His starting point is a perceived weakness in the Marxian theory of the state: on his reading of the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx

10 Karatani, Structure of World History, p. 28.

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takes the state to be a mere ideological phenomenon, on a par with art or philosophy. Moreover, he argues, the division of economic base from political superstructure arose from Marxs study of modern capitalist society, and cannot be applied to pre-capitalist formations.11

The Structure of World History thus supplements Marx, as the emblematic thinker of the structures of commodity exchange (here labelled mode of exchange C), with a Hobbesian concept of the state as providing order and security in exchange for obedience, or public works in exchange for tax and tribute (mode B), plus a notion of reciprocal relations (mode A), based on Marcel Mausss idea of the giftfor Karatani, the social solidarities forged and obligations imposed through gift exchange char-acterize communal bonds, from clan societies to the contemporary nation. Perhaps to fend off the obvious criticism that, logically, there can be no exchange without some prior form of production, Karatanis first chapter stretches the meaning of exchange, firstly to include the more general term of intercourse, or Verkehr, as used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology and Moses Hess in Essence of Money (1845), and then to take in metabolismHesss Stoffwechsel, or material exchangethus incorporating an exchange relation with nature.

Actual social formations, Karatani argues, consist of complex combi-nations of these modes of exchange, differing in terms of which mode takes the dominant role. In regular, repeated systems of social interac-tion, people give and take reciprocally (A), form consensual structures of domination and exploitation (B), and exchange goods for money (C). It seems that for Karatani, these mutually irreducible modes are the objec-tive, elementary forms of sociality as such. In themselves too abstract to directly characterize history itself, their variant combinations over time can be used to describe and explain more concrete social structures. In the case of the present, for example, mode C (commodity exchange), has come to dominate B (the state), and, in combination, these two have destroyed the traditional agrarian community (A)leading, Karatani suggests, to its imaginary reconstitution as the nation.

The Structure of World History puts this schema to work, in combination with modified world-systems theory frameworks, throughout the run of

11 In mental dialogue with Proudhon, Marx directly addressed the issue of a historically-specific vs a transhistorical notion of the economy in the Grundrisse, London 1973, pp. 4889.

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human history. Part One examines the tribal mini-systems glued together through gift exchange (A) when humans first took up fixed settlements after the last Ice Age; Part Two looks at the formation of world empires12 with the first emergence of the state (B); Part Three surveys the modern world system, characterized by generalized commodity exchange (C). With regard to the periodization of history, Karatani, like many others, is a trin-itarian. But in speculating on what lies beyond he breaks the Aristotelian rule and adds a fourth part to his narrative, a future in which capital and state are overcome, and mode of exchange Awhich has been repressed in capitalist societiesreturns in a higher dimension, released from the oppressive obligations of traditional community. Karatani identifies this speculative return of reciprocal exchange as mode D, apparently to differentiate it from reactionary hankerings after pre-capitalist forms of community (A), and to emphasize that it would not negate the liberty that commodity exchange has brought. The closest precedent for this utopian combination of liberty and reciprocityKaratanis ur-idealis actually the nomadism of hunter-gatherer bands, before fixed settlement first introduced ordered social systems of exchange; before even a principle of reciprocal giving (mode A) came into place. Though Karatani insists his approach is non-linear and non-teleological, this grand schema clearly represents a return to a once-discredited genre: the philosophy of history. We can anticipate that this will be a focus of controversy. But we would do well to avoid hasty dismissals on such bases: could a speculative orienta-tion to world revolution do without any philosophy of history?

The passing of nomadism

What of the universal history that Karatani constructs on this basis? The first of the major shifts to be explained is that which establishes human society as such. He opposes the notion of an agriculture-driven Neolithic Revolution, which, in his view, involves a confusion of cause and effect. Endorsing Masaki Nishidas sedentary revolution, he speculates that the real shift here was the renunciation of nomadic existence. It cannot simply be assumed that human beings are essentially sedentary dwell-ers; on the contrary, it seems clear that they disliked fixed settlement, not least because it leads to personal conflict and discord within and

12 As in Wallerstein, world in such formulationsworld religion and world economy are two other instancesdenotes a historically formed set of inter-relationships functioning as a provisional totality, whatever its demographic and territorial extent.

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without the band. In nomadic life, if things get bad, people simply move onbut once a band takes up sedentary settlement, it has to come up with ways of dealing with the conflicts and discord that increase in fre-quency as the population grows.13

Why then did hunter-gatherers adopt fixed settlement? This, Karatani argues, was precipitated by post-Ice Age climatic shifts. Rising tem-peratures favoured the spread of forests, which squeezed large-game populations; increasing seasonal variation disrupted foraging practices; gradually, the indicated alternative became fishing, which, however, was at odds with nomadic lifestyles, because of its reliance on equipment and focus on particular sites such as river mouths. Such pressures, rather than the agricultural possibilities of alluvial soil, explain the first riverside encampments. Agriculture was then a consequence, rather than a cause, of these settlements, as ecologies were transformed by the very presence of human dwellings. With fixed settlement came the first possibilities for accumulation, such as the smoking and storing of fish. At this stage, the basic pooling of resources by nomadic bandsnot itself a full-fledged mode of exchangestarted to give way to the reciprocities of clan society, producing stratified structures, from family nuclei to inter-tribal rela-tions. This is the beginning of Karatanis mode A, the original fall from small-scale pooling. Indeed, the reciprocity of mode A can be rigorous. Gift-giving itself, Karatani maintains, following Mauss, is the imposition of an obligation: The gift exchanges of potlatch sometimes continue until both communities completely exhaust their resources, and it is the same with vendetta. Vendetta is abolished only when a higher-order structure capable of sitting in judgement of crime arises.14 For Karatani, it was through gift-giving that relations between clan societies were regu-lated, enabling trade, and ultimately the establishment of higher-order communitiesalthough the endless warfare that is the concomitant of this sort of reciprocity held off the emergence of the state.

The coming of the state

The second great historical shift in Karatanis scheme is the emer-gence of the state. Pitting himself against what he calls the dogma of V. Gordon Childes Neolithic Revolution, he argues that the proto-city and state actually preceded the wholesale turn to agriculture, emerging with the extension of trade relationsthemselves held to be entirely

13 Structure of World History, pp. 423. 14 Structure of World History, p. 41.

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transhistoricalbetween riverside fishing settlements in tandem with gift-giving. With systematic commodity trade, he concludes, there came directly the tendency for one commodity to start playing the role of uni-versal equivalent, or world money; and thus we have arrived already at the abstract structures of commodity exchange that Marx analysed in volume 1 of Capitaland even at credit, since monetary exchange always harbours a speculative aspect in the salto mortale that the commodity must make to realize itself in sale. Moreover, it was in its antediluvian forms that the characteristics of mode C were most explicitly revealed, so that it is in these that the essence of capital can best be grasped.15

Karatani agrees with Marx that trade was initially between communitieswith internal commodity exchange a matter of taboorather than an outcome of some essential Smithian propensity to truck and barter. With the resultant meeting of peoples for trade, new gods and religious forms arose as distinct peoples made Weberian federations by oath, and proto-cities thus became a new kind of sacred centre. With the new religious legitimation came king-priests capable of organizing people into command-and-control structures for both military and labour tasks, as well as enforcing contracts; and from this, Karatani believes, there emerged the Hobbesian sovereign, born of a covenant extorted by fear. But it would be a mistake to read this as an endogenous process. Rather, the sovereign arrives as a conqueror, or at least as a response to the threat of conquest, and the state emerges when reciprocity between com-munities is prohibited and a principle of no punishment without law is established. For Karatanipicking up threads from Karl Wittfogels refiguration of the Asiatic mode of productionit is in the large-scale irrigation projects resulting from these transformations that we find the first signs of the state proper, and thus finally a systematic turn to agricul-ture. Counter-intuitively, it was not the development of the community that led to the rise of the state; to the contrary, it was only after the estab-lishment of a centralized state that a new community would emerge.16

The first world empires were then constructed as other city-states or communities were subordinated through conquest. In the process, state religions became world religions; state languages became world languages; moneyworld money; lawa supra-communal rule. This led to new geopolitical patternings, for which Karatani adapts a schema from Wittfogel: core, submargin, margin, and the out of

15 Structure of World History, p. 84. 16 Structure of World History, p. 73.

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sphere. Since world empires were dominated by the state (mode B), other configurations of exchange relations tended to be generated only in their submarginszones too distant from the core to be domi-nated or absorbed, yet not so far away as to be untouched by its regnant civilizationwhere the social logics of world empire were more negotia-ble. Thus it was in Ancient Egypts submargins that Mediterranean trade first began to flourish.

A chapter on belief systems describes the divine order of world religions as paralleling that of the imperial state in relation to other powersthe solar cult of the pharaoh Akhenaten, for example, was produced through his struggle with local priesthoods. In contrast, universal reli-gions emerged in antagonism with the existing order, in places where mode of exchange C had become the general rule. The key figure here is the prophet or philosopher who criticizes the existing world religion and attacks the priestly caste. For Karatani, such a figure is in structural opposition to state and capital (modes B and C), due to the threat they pose to communal reciprocities (mode A), and thus posits their specula-tive overcoming (mode D):

Mode of exchange D is born in reaction to the ambiguous effects of mode of exchange C. The money economy severs people from the bonds of com-munity and at the same time situates them in new class relations . . . In other words, the money economy simultaneously brings about freedom and inequality.17

Karatani identifies a historical alignment between early communist and anarchist movements and the more radical poles of universal religions. But as with Buddhism in the Tokugawa shogunate or Christianity in the Roman Empire, radical-upstart universal religions, once co-opted by the state, revert to the condition of humdrum world religions, with their own priestly castes and legitimations of state violence.

Capital and state

The third major historical shift is the emergence of the modern world system. For Karatani, it was the very lack of any centralized state in feudal Europe, situated in the submargin of the Islamic world, that enabled commodity exchange (mode C) to flourish in free cities. With its spread, Englands feudal aristocracy became landlords; monarchs

17 Structure of World History, p. 148.

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intensified their efforts to promote trade with a view to swelling tax revenues; state-funded bureaucracies and standing armies developed. In Transcritique it was claimed that the essential form of the capitalist state was revealed in mercantilism, and the same conviction is in evi-dence here: the modern state was wedded to commerce from its very beginnings, Karatani maintains, sometimes speaking of capitalstate to emphasize this conjunction. Nonetheless, he goes on, modern sover-eigntywhich he seems to view as fundamentally Westphalianis to be grasped according to a political logic essentially external in character: Sovereign states were formed through a process of mutual recognition. No higher entity, such as an empire, was recognized. In turn, this con-cept could legitimate conquest since it implied that countries lacking a recognized sovereign state could therefore be ruled over by others. Western powers would thus come to denounce imperial forms of rule, offering sovereignty to subject peoples of existing world empiresOttoman, Qing, Mughal.18 For Karatani, drawing on Carl Schmitt, it is the exceptionparticularly warthat discloses the essence of the state, as an entity distinct from government and people and defined primarily in relation to other states. Gramscian and Foucauldian approaches are on this view overly focused on internal systems of coercion and consent. The relational foundation of the state has important implications for the notion of popular sovereignty, and for any prospect of a revolution aim-ing to consign mode B to the past:

When the absolute monarchy is toppled, it appears as if the national people become sovereign. But the idea of sovereignty is not something that can be understood solely from within the interior of a nation. Sovereignty exists first of all in relation to the outside. As a result, even if an absolute mon-archy is overthrown, there is no change in the nature of sovereignty as it exists in relation to other states.19

Karatani views nationality as a product of capitalstate. While agreeing with Ernest Gellners grounding of nationalism in industrial society and the formation of a standardized workforce, he insists that the nation, understood as Benedict Andersons imagined community, is also a form of resistance. He suggests that the break-up of the agrarian community, under pressure from capitalstate, led to its reconstitution in imaginary form as the nation. Rather than a sublation of traditional religious senti-ment, this process actually freed religion to take on a more universal

18 Structure of World History, p. 168. 19 Structure of World History, p. 170.

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form. The nation, then, is not a stand-in for religion, but for the agrarian community in which the latter was previously grounded. And just as the political logic of sovereignty tended to proliferate after first emerg-ing in Europe, so too with the nation-state: here the mechanism was imperialism. Whereas the old world empires ruled over distinct subject communities without much need to intervene in their internal life, the imperialism of the modern capitalnationstate, committed as it was to the expansion of the world market, could not help but do so. The result-ing disruption of the colonized agrarian community produced impulses towards national consciousness as a force of resistance.

Although his metahistorical schema effectively locates merchant capital at the origins of agrarian society, to account for specifically industrial capitalism it is necessary for Karatani to deal with the question of transi-tion. He views the debate over this as conventionally polarized between production-centred and exchange-centred claims: either producers converted themselves into merchants, or merchants took hold of pro-duction. The Structure of World History aims to remain faithful to Marx in presenting a way of thinking both aspects together. In this view, the specificity of industrial capitalism lies not in the production process per se, nor at the level of exchange, but rather in the double freedom of labour-power: workers are free of means of production and free to sell their labour. On this basis, industrial capital enabled a virtuous circle by which workers in aggregate came to buy back the products of their own labour; and given that the prices of necessary articles of consumption ultimately determine wage levels, the operation of this circle meant that greater aggregate surpluses could be won through increases in produc-tivity. From this follow both the dynamism of industrial capitalism and its inherently expansionist tendencies.

But how was this virtuous circle established in the first place? Here Karatani ventures a sort of late developer argument: states emerging once capitalism was already established at the level of the world market had to force domestic industrial capital into being through active inter-vention. Thus, he argues, the British state, lagging behind Holland in world trade, was compelled to step in with mercantilist policies favour-ing domestic industries. The manufactures from below that were thereby stimulated happened to consist mainly of inexpensive everyday goods that workers themselves would consume, rather than the luxuries with which merchant capital was primarily concerned. At the same time

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the state intervened as a representative of collective capital, actively pro-moting the formation of a working class.

The knot tightens

Karatanis book concludes with a survey of oppositional traditions and a programme for a new global politics. While resuming themes familiar from Transcritique, he now accepts the implausibility of simply building socialism from the level of the cooperative enterprise. Yet he also main-tains both that the state cannot furnish an exit from capitalism (being itself one-third of the Borromean knot), and that it cannot be abolished from within (being fundamentally constituted by external, inter-state relations). Karatanis vision of revolutionary aspirations foundering in the ever-tightening capitalnationstate knot is reminiscent of the post-historical excursions of the last century.20 Indeed, he partly endorses Francis Fukuyamas appropriation of Kojve:

In my view, the situation that Fukuyama called the end of history means that once this capitalnationstate form is realized, any subsequent fun-damental revolution is impossible. The capitalnationstate circuit is perfectly stable. Because people are not even aware that they are trapped within its circuit, they mistakenly believe that they are making historical progress when in fact they are simply spinning around in circles within it.21

The one thing that could dissolve these binds is a simultaneous world revolution that would remove the external forces constituting the state. If 1848 presented a model for this, Karatani argues that the possibility of a new iteration dwindled in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the Borromean knot tightened and the interests of worker-consumers became systemically entangled with those of capital, nation and state. The October Revolution is dismissed as a mere coup dtat, a betrayal of the revolution, given that Germany was unlikely to follow suithere Karatani rolls out a Menshevik argument against attempts to leap over historical stages. While socialists did deserve credit for taking on the tasks of ethnic independence and social reform, he concludes, in such contexts they could not help but play out social logics of capitalnationstate formation that had begun in Europe under absolutism. If Marxists,

20 Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?, London and New York 1992.21 Karatani, Structure of World History, pp. xiiixiv.

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in this way, fell into a trap laid by the state, a comparable folly was the lure of the nation: Georges Sorel and Japanese thinker Seikyo Gondo are examples here.

From this sombre picture Karatani nonetheless summons up some speculative optimism. It will still be necessary to pursue the programme of associationism, he maintains, sowing seeds of a post-capitalist economy in the present through cooperatives and boycotts. But with-out simultaneous world revolution these will ultimately fail, and given real global divides it is implausible that any simple union of counter-movements could be built. How, then, might the programme work? If Kants kingdom of ends supplies the ethical model for Karatanis mode D, his world republic gives a political onea world federation of nations established with a view to bringing about an end to all hostili-ties. Improbably, Karatani places his hopes for world revolution in the United Nations. The realization of a world system grounded in the prin-ciple of reciprocityof a world republicwill not be easy, he concludes:

Modes of exchange A, B, and C will remain stubborn presences. In other words, the nation, state, and capital will all persist . . . Yet so long as they exist, so too will mode of exchange D. No matter how it is denied or repressed, it will always return. That is the very nature of what Kant called a regulative Idea.22

Structure and strategy

Karatani has produced a book of remarkable imaginative scope, ranging from hunter-gatherers to nineteenth-century mutualists, proto-cities to world empires. In anthropology, he ably draws upon Mauss, Sahlins, Testart, Lvi-Strauss, Polanyi, Clastres and Freud; in philosophy, upon Hegel, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Aristotle and Schmitt, as well as the ubiqui-tous Kant; Marx, of course, is a consistent reference point. He has been well served by his translator, Michael Bourdaghs, who renders Karatanis argument in crisp and lucid prose. How then should The Structure of World History be assessed?

We might start by remarking how little the book has to say about con-temporary prospects for capitalbarely a paragraphcompared to the

22 Structure of World History, p. 307.

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extended treatment of the pre-capitalist world. The same could be said of present global political conditions. Though it has retained overwhelm-ing military superiority, we are informed that us power is in definitive decline, and that we have therefore entered a new multi-power age of imperialism, as in Lenins day, centred on Mode B, presaging an era of crises and wars; but how and why this has happened remains unclear. Social movements, too, go largely unexamined. Karatani suggests that they remain imprisoned within capitalist nation-states and have little prospect of global unification. The logic of such thinking seems to lead towards a pessimism indifferent to the actual stakes of concrete strug-gles, insofar as these all play out on terrain already lost. Such despair may be understandable, not least in the desert that Japan has become since the turbulent 1960s. But it is another thing to make a virtue of necessity, such that one further disables capacities for concrete action. And a non-indifferent, sober assessment of the strategic terrain would be a fair place to start.

But there are reasons to doubt whether this can be expected of a work such as The Structure of World History. One of these is general, having to do with the disposition of philosophy in the field of the political. The other takes us to the heart of Karatanis intellectual purpose: his claim to have identified the fundamental structures of human history and their basic forms of articulationwhich are, after all, the necessary ground of all rational strategic thought. There is perhaps a certain elective affin-ity between the inherently universalizing standpoint of philosophy and a kind of anti-political orientationlessness with regard to determinate conditions. Philosophers rarely, if at all, think philosophically and strate-gically at the same timeexcept, of course, when strategy itself is treated in terms of abstracted generalities. Elsewhere, Karatani has been at pains to show how the singularities identified by proper names are obfuscated by logical generality, and can only ultimately be grasped in relation to a fully social notion of the universal.23 There would be an irony here, then, if what he might term the thisness of singular strategic conditions were eclipsed by the generic structures of his philosophical history, such that it simply could not be thought. A related diagnosis might be made of the position of the historical itself in this book, which contains a great deal more structure than history. Like politics, history is a domain of sin-gularities and proper names. While these might justifiably be bracketed

23 Transcritique, pp. 10812, 1712.

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to draw out a transcendental structure underlying the flux of events, if this structure is then re-employed to explain phenomena that are of irre-ducible singularity, the outcome may be a damaging reductionism, and something of which Hegelian-style philosophical history has long stood accused: logicizing reality.

Karatanis theorization of the nation as the symbolic displacement of a lost agrarian community is a case in point. It is notable that in his engagements with Gellner and Anderson, his emphasis falls on the most abstract aspects of their thinking, while the comparative, complex and multi-causal explanations that constitute the major part of their writings about nations and nationalism fade from view. That national sentiment involves a sense of fraternal reciprocity between people who lack a con-crete relationship is true virtually by definition. But can the nationalisms of Andersons creole pioneers, or of Gellners post-colonial Africa, for example, really be explained as so many cases of the return of a repressed reciprocity from the agrarian community in particular? In the most abstract sense, a certain reciprocal mode of relation may well still apply at the level of description, but it is not clear that this actually explains anything, even at its own structural level. This points to a certain indeter-minacy in Karatanis notion of structure. Following Hegel, he thinks that underlying structure can be revealed through historical repetition.24 For example, the recurrence of demagogic leadership in times of political crisis, in figures such as Louis-Napolon, reveals essential truths about the nature of the political. A structural mode of causation may then legit-imately be attributed to the forms that are uncovered in this way, such that one can posit the existence and operation of structures behind and through the ebb and flow of events. But there is a risk that structures grasped in this way are actually illusoryperceptual figments that have no objective existence. In such cases, positing their operation in events will amount to a sort of supernaturalism.

Questions of causation

Karatanis peculiarly social reading of Kant in Transcritique has been noted; the concept of transcendental structure as he deploys it here involves an operation of another kind. The notion of a universal and ineluctable condition is now transposed from reason to history, but, in that move

24 Karatani, History and Repetition, New York 2011, p. 20.

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which is precisely not parallelcomes to confront a new problem: what is the causal status of these transcendental structures in the totality of the historical process? Here is a critical lacuna in Karatanis account. Modes of exchange, if they really are Karatanis kind of transcendental structure, are essentially historyless, and their application as explanatory resources to historically specific forms appears fraught with difficulty. Capital and state as modes of exchange become passe-partouts for the whole of history, while the specificities of social formations risk being either identified with an elusive notion of structure or simply occulted.

It is telling, moreover, that Karatanis causal factors are all exogenous: environmental changes drive the establishment of the first settlements; external conquerors (from where?) lead to the formation of the first states; external trade brings about early capitalism; the British need for protection against Dutch mercantile capitalism (why Dutch?) creates industrial capitalism. If the basic structures tend towards historyless-ness, then the motive forces of history must come from elsewhere. The absence of endogenous modes of causation may help to forestall well-worn accusations of teleologism and so on, but the cost of this move seems to be a way of thinking about history in which the specifically historical itself cannot properly be cognized.

One obvious test of the theory would be to ask: how convincing are Karatanis accounts of the great shifts in human history to date? On the evidence of his presentation, it is, to say the least, an open question. That his theses are dependent on the original work of others is unex-ceptionable in itself; what gives pause is that his engagement with these bodies of scholarship can be remote and sometimes damagingly selec-tive.25 Karatani miniaturizes his key claims in bold aphoristic form: We cannot conclude that the state form arose out of agriculture. If anything,

25 In marked contrast to Karatanis evident philosophical and anthropological erudi-tion, historianssave for cursory homages to Bloch and Braudelare strikingly absent. There is no dialogue with a major project of comparable scope in historical sociology, Michael Manns Sources of Social Power. There is no engagement with William McNeil or Jared Diamond. The Asiatic mode of production is effectively taken on without reference to the chequered history of this concept. Karatani appears to be unaware of the Brenner debate or of the development of capitalist agriculture in Britain prior to the Industrial Revolution. The historiographical debates about the latter are ignored, as are those around Pomeranzs work on the Great Divergence.

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the reverse is true: agriculture began from the state.26 The probable reality is less dramatic than Childes Neolithic Revolution, and surely less so than this proffered reversal. However enlivening the manner, there is room to doubt whether such punctual antitheses, seeming to court incredulity, best capture the dynamic of historical processes that unfolded irregularly across vast spaces over many hundreds of years. Inevitably, in the absence of relevant records, some of the historical theses he advances or adopts as his own are thought experimentsa recurring phrase that conveys something of the quality of the book as a whole.

As Karatani makes clear in his opening sentence, The Structure of World History is a book with a political mission, and it is in this light that his historical construction should be read. The emergence, in epochal succession, of the societal forms defined by the gift, the state and the commodity gives history its shape. But historys motive power is some-thing older and apparently inextinguishable. This is the will to freedom and to the equitable relations that true liberty promotesa staple of nomadic life that would persist, in one guise or another, throughout the history to come. It was this ancestral endowment, preserved amidst the changed conditions of settled existence, that supported the principle of reciprocity in clan society; and it was in turn this drive that oper-atedwith the force of a Freudian return of the repressed, Karatani would sayto inhibit and delay the emergence of emperors and their bureaucracies. The power of the gift validated commodity exchange, as in the practice of kula; and capitalism, the final freeing of the commod-ity, took off in Europe, where dreams of a world-empire state had come to nothing. Today, the will to freedom sustains the idea of mode D. So, Karatanis history seems to have an endogenous mover after all, and that in an unexpectedly strong and paradoxical sense: it is an unvarying psychic drive.

The occultation of endogenous structural factors in Karatanis thinking is perhaps related to that of the moment of production itself, which of course must temporally precede that of exchange, and always exists in some determinate form which is not lacking in structural consequences. A reasonable defence for the focus on modes of exchange might be that it is at this level that specifically social forms can really be grasped in

26 Structure of World History, p. 59.

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their determinacy, and that such forms retroactively shape the moment of production itself. Capital would be nothing without commodity exchange; in terms of social ontologyrather than material-technical factors or temporal orderthe forms of exchange relations may be deemed to have a certain priority, at least in social formations dominated by the capitalist mode of production.27 But what, then, of formations centred on non-alienable property, which would seem by definition to be unthinkable under the sign of exchange? Can the diversity of feudal production relations be adequately characterized in terms of the submis-sion for protection of Karatanis mode B? Marxs own abstract schemas of forms which precede capitalist production in the Grundrisse seem capable of grasping subtle modulations in the social structures of land-holding which remain obscure if viewed under the heading of exchange. Overall, it appears, a polemical positioning on these issues has led to overcompensation in the opposite direction, such that the moment of production is rarely even mentioned, let alone analysed, beyond a quali-fied concession to Testarts belief that smoked fish may have been the first form of accumulated wealth.

Mode D?

It is notable that the mode D of generalized reciprocity, with which Karatanis philosophy of history is brought to term, is a regulative Idea that, while necessary, can never fully be realized. Thus, the prospect of simultaneous world revolution dwindles into a familiar bifocal scheme: in the far distance, a compelling historical image; closer to the present, a nave vision of world peace-making held within the narrow horizon of the existing global order. The explanation for Karatanis appeal to the un to make the world revolutionthe un whose founding acts included handing over the better part of Palestine to Zionism in 1947, in flagrant disregard for population ratios of Jews and Arabs on the ground, and backing the 1950 us war on Korea, the turning point in Japans con-servative restoration; the un which provided cover for Japans role in the occupation of Iraq, opposition to which was this books starting pointcan only lie in his highly personal form of Kantian cosmopolitanism. Elsewhere, Karatani has tried to differentiate this from Habermass usage of the oracle of Koenigsberg to support the bombardment of

27 For an exceptionally lucid exploration of thinking along these lines, see Chris Arthurs work, especially The New Dialectic and Marxs Capital, Leiden 2004.

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Yugoslavia.28 But Habermas is closer to the truth of Perpetual Peace and Idea for a Universal History, in which Kant explained that Man is an animal who needs a master (Herder famously retorted: The man who needs a master is an animal) and that rebellion against tyranny is in the highest degree wrong.29 There are certainly tensions in Kants thinkingindecision, mere inconsistency, or the contortions of a dance with the censorsthat can enable the drawing of contradictory political conclusions. Scholarly acknowledgement of these is a prerequisite for any serious political engagement with his thought. But Karatani tends towards a simpler edulcoration in his eagerness to claim Kant as the prophet of a post-capitalist utopia.

Where does all this leave Karatanis postulated mode D? A reasonable conclusion here might well be that we could better do without such regulative Ideas. Yet Karatani thinks we cannot, for the compulsion to project some such redemptive meaning onto historyand specifi-cally to postulate a higher return to a state of reciprocity, beyond capital and stateis an inescapable transcendental illusion without which we would slip into schizophrenia. What could this mean? Schizophrenia, in one influential account of the condition, is produced by a double bind of conflicting logical demands, which compels the formation of a delusional system in which these can be resolved. The simultaneous world revolution may be said to perform a similar function in Karatanis philosophy. However, since it is a pure speculation rather than a claim about reality, it cannot be dismissed as mere delusion. If, for Karatani, the complete denial of meaning in history would amount to a lapse into schizophrenia, this may be because without such structural dis-placements into speculation the present would have to be interpreted delusionally. The opposed demands that would here compel either delu-sion or its displacement into speculation are the conflicting logics of elementary forms of sociality, or modes of exchange. And since modes B and C, state and capital, always come together in some relatively non-contradictory combination, the real conflict is always between them and mode A, or the reciprocity of the gift, to which human society in some sense always wants to return. Thus it is essentially the experience of a double bind between an elementary reciprocity and capitalstate social logics that produces the stark choice between a deluded, schizophrenic

28 Karatani, Transcritique, p. 317 fn. 42.29 Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, Cambridge 1970, p. 126.

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reading of the worldin which this key contradiction of sociality is deniedand one that acknowledges it fully, but in order to do so must project its speculative dissolution.

But an idea of revolution that has become the backstop of thinking that would otherwise be delusional is a long way from the sort that can be the object of a politics more serious than Karatanis suggestions about the un. What seems to have happened here is a sort of ethicization of social-ist politics: it is Kants moral lawnot within me, but within human sociality as such. It may well be that Karatanis simultaneous world revo-lution simply cannot constitute a real object of political action, at least in present conditions. But if the ethical subject is to be more than a rather pious individual, it will have to engage in another kind of specula-tion: that belonging to the salto mortale of political action. Such action is always speculative, since its outcomes cannot be known in advance. But it is ultimately as ineluctable as any of Karatanis transcendental struc-tures, and the weighing of its possibilities is the work of strategy.