Yanis Iqbal summarizes a dialectical materialist approach to knowledge and education, drawing from the work of E.V. Ilyenkov.
When education becomes a commodity – when its exchange-value becomes the dominant structuring principle of its internal composition, eclipsing the use-value – the multifaceted process of learning becomes another disappearing moment in the general movement toward the attainment of money-capital and other commodities. This structural abridgment of learning – manifested in its embodiment in the flows of market mechanisms – neatly slices it into commercialized capsules of knowledge, tearing it off from its material-practical context of object-orientedness. The commodification of education under neoliberal capitalism fundamentally impacts the problematic of knowledge – what Louis Althusser called “the objective internal reference system of…particular themes, the system of questions commanding the answers given.” The ability to ask the right question and to formulate the problem correctly is indispensable to human thinking i.e. the process of understanding the meaning of what we do, recognizing the situatedness of our actions in a social context and translating individual intentions into systemic considerations.
These capsules consist of meaninglessly memorized agglomerations of texts, terms, symbols, signs, markers, and static combinations thereof. Verbal familiarity with, and mastery over, the phrases of a specific field of knowledge insulates the epistemic facts as a separate structure of rules and procedures to be applied sequentially in real life. Thus, a clear divide emerges between the object of knowledge and knowledge itself, between the objective situation and the aggregate of formally mastered rules. Evald Vassilievich Ilyenkov explains: “a paradoxical situation arises where a person does not really know an object, but knows…a special object that exists above and outside reality…a special world of ideal, abstract, phantom ‘objects.’” Contrasting this superficial mode of knowing with the real ability to think, he further notes:
[R]eal ability to think…is…to achieve awareness of the essence of a matter, of a situation in real life, in objective reality. In place of the ability to think in the sense given this term by the materialist theory of reflection, the ability actively trained here is at best refined linguistic dexterity…Fluent mastery of language…is a very important condition of thinking, although it would be more correct to put it the other way around: real thinking is an indispensable condition for the fluent mastery of language. A person who does not know how to think independently does not have mastery of language; rather, language has mastery of him, of his consciousness. His thinking…remains in a permanent state of slavish dependence on verbal stereotypes, on meaninglessly memorized semiotic constructs, on “rules,” stipulations, instructions, prompts, and so on – and precisely here lies the secret of the shaping of the dogmatic mind, of dogmatic thinking – a very bad kind of thinking. Dogmatism does not necessarily find expression in the vacuous repetition of the same phrases; it is sometimes marked by a very refined linguistic dexterity, by the ability to force life into the procrustean bed of dead formulas…But dogmatism remains dogmatism in essence; it flourishes wherever a set formula obscures living reality in its development, in its tense dialectic.
The simplification of knowledge into verbal integuments and linguistic shells results in the formation of purely analytical systems of abstract general conceptions. Since knowledge is primarily restricted to a formal architecture of principles and procedures, only individually isolated inductive generalizations of reality are possible. These generalizations only help in designating and naming the objects of knowledge in ever more abstract ways, in ways that keep eliminating the sensually contemplated concreteness of the given environment. Proper comprehension is ruled out since the empirically given facts are never explored in deeper ways; they are merely emptied of their definitive particularity so they can be subsumed under abstract expressions of bare similarities and identities.
The field of contemporary bourgeois political science, for example, has – due to its passive saturation in the dominant notions of liberal democracy – renounced an extensive study of the existing state-forms, choosing to unscientifically abstract idealist models from the hegemonic codes of governance. The end result: “democracy” becomes an ahistorical collection of multi-party elections and parliamentarian deliberations. These elements are lumped together not because of their interlocking, connective nature but because of their abstract affinities, because they somehow convey the elementary essence of a universal genus. In this superficial process, what is produced is only a thinner abstraction of terminologies. Contrast this with the supra-bourgeois theoretical perspective deployed by Antonio Gramsci in Notebook 15: “political science means science of the State and the State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules.”
Production of abstractions by a theoretically enervated knowledge structure dovetails into the culture of abstraction inherent in capitalist social existence. Abstractions are integral to commodification – an operation in which every concrete production is reduced to its exchange-value in a regime of generalized equivalence and wherein living labor is rendered labor-power i.e. a quantified unit of labour sold on the open market by a person to a capitalist. A framework of abstract knowledge serves as a logical-discursive underpinning for this scenario where we relate to each other as commodities, where abstract comparability replaces the real content of our social being.
For the capitalist, the worker exists only as labor-power, for the worker, the capitalist only as capital; for the consumer, the producer is commodities, and for the producer the consumer is money. A form of education limited to a schematic vocabulary of materiality reinforces these conceptions as it teaches us a type of logic that only forms undifferentiated homogeneities opposed to concrete particularities. Reality is interpreted as a thing, as a mechanical bundle of immutable constituent parts that are linked with each other only externally, only through naked similarities or forced correlations. This schema is devoid of human agency and social relations, mistaking the objective reality to be an inert matter, as a sensuous certainty to be excessively rationalized so that it can be fitted into an explanatory architecture.
To combat the logic of neoliberal education, we need to use the philosophy of dialectical materialism which does not aim to simply build concentrated constructs of realities but analyzes objects and conceptions of objects in a goal-directed and critical manner. This philosophy asserts that reality is not just an inorganic totality; it is an integral whole unified in all its diverse manifestations, an organic system of mutually conditioning phenomena. A dialectical viewpoint perceives an object through its internal law of development, through the systematic unfolding of the immanent life of the subject-matter. To understand the inner nature or substance of the object, one should take into account the relationship of the given object to itself, that is, the interrelation of its various sides, layers and elements.
These layers are capable of self-movement, of imparting to themselves a suitable form in the process of development. The form in this case appears as a tightly contained structure of content, as a historically determinate and finite mode of existence of substance within the given conditions. In other words, to understand a phenomenon means to establish its unique role in the concrete system of interacting phenomena in which it is necessarily realized, and to find out those properties which make it possible for the phenomenon to occupy this particular place in the whole. To understand a phenomenon means to discover the modality of its genesis, the origins of its necessity in the concrete totality of conditions. In “The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital”, Ilyenkov writes:
The concreteness of a concept lies…in the unity of definitions, their meaningful cohesion – the only means of revealing the content of a concept. Out of context, an individual verbal definition is abstract and abstract only. Immersed into the context of a scientific theoretical discourse, any abstract definition becomes concrete…A concept revealing the essence of the matter is only unfolded through a system, through series of definitions expressing separate moments, aspects, properties, qualities, or relations of the individual object, all these separate aspects of the concept being linked by a logical connection, not merely concatenated in some formal complex grammatically…there are in general no things in the world that would exist in isolation from the universal links – things always exist in a system of relations to one another. This system of interacting things (what Marx calls concreteness) is always something determining and therefore logically primary with regard to each separate sensually perceived thing… each individual phenomenon (thing, event, etc.) is always born and exists in its definiteness and later dies within a certain concrete whole, within a system of individual things developing in a law-governed way…If an individual thing is not understood through the universal concrete interconnection within which it actually emerged, exists, and develops, through the concrete system of interconnections that constitutes its genuine nature, that means that only abstract knowledge and consciousness have been obtained. If, on the other hand, an individual thing (phenomenon, fact, object, event) is understood in its objective links with other things forming an integral coherent system, that means that it has been understood, realized, cognized, conceived concretely in the strictest and fullest meaning of this word.
In short, to capture reality in all its concrete diversity – as a concrete concentration of many determinations – we need an intentionally projected schema, an abstract conceptual matrix that presents an integrated and structured analysis of the totality in which all the aspects of the object’s development can figure with their specificities and interrelationships. The question is: how to single out an object’s concrete system of interaction from the empirically given picture of the total historical process? At the beginning, one is faced by the complex-whole which appears to be chaotic. The inner connections of the more simple elements of the subject-matter must be discovered. For this, we require the more fundamental, abstract categories as the logical basis for the complex-whole. These categories are not abstracted arbitrarily; only that phenomenon is selected which objectively constitutes the universal, simplest, elementary form of the being of the object as a whole, its real cell.
The concrete characteristics of the objectively simplest, indivisible element of a system of interaction serves as the starting point for the reconstruction of the complex-whole, step by step from the lower to higher levels of concreteness, with their internal historical and structural interrelationships, to again arrive at the totality of the complex-whole, but this time with the comprehensive understanding of the working of its inner components, its laws of motion and tendencies. The advanced abstractions obtained in this process of reconstruction are modifications of the elementary abstraction; the abstract-simple, driven by its inner-contradictions, grows organically into the concrete-complex totality.
Each abstraction is an individual and one-sided expression of the concrete whole, reflecting the particular features of the individual object which make it a necessary element of the whole. Insofar that this abstraction is one-sided, it is sublated i.e. it is simultaneously negated and preserved. Hence, when the analysis moves on to the higher levels of determination, the preceding more abstract-simple categories are not abandoned but retained as one aspect of the determination of the more concrete totality. Thus, in a dialectical methodology, each abstract proposition is a moment in a concrete understanding of empirical facts, a one-sided expression of the real contradictory concreteness of the object, and also a piece of concreteness in its development.
In the internal development of an object – until the entire totality of the given reality has been established – new abstractions keep emerging which, while evolving on the basis of previous abstractions, possess characteristics contradicting the characteristics of the less developed reality. In this intricate ascent from the abstract to the concrete, abstractions are generated not through the identification of general affinities but through the delineation of positions in a definite system of interacting phenomena, in a system forming a coherent whole. Abstractions of reality are made through the cognition of the universal objective interconnection and interdependence of a mass of individual phenomena, through the unity of the distinct and the mutually opposed parts of reality. Ilyenkov notes:
[C]oncreteness understood as an expression of living, factual, objective bond and interaction between real individual things cannot be expressed as an abstract identity, bare equality, or pure similarity of things under consideration. Any instance of real interaction in nature, society, or consciousness, he it ever so elementary, necessarily contains identity of the distinct, a unity of opposites, rather than mere identity. Interaction assumes that one object realizes its given specific nature only through its interrelation with another object and cannot exist outside this relation as such, as ‘this one’, as a specifically definite object…the really concrete unity of two or more interacting individual, Particular things (phenomena, processes, men, etc.) always appears as the unity of mutually exclusive opposites. Between them, between aspects of this concrete interaction there is nothing abstractly identical or abstractly general and neither can there be. In this case, the common as concretely general is exactly that very mutual bond between the elements of interaction as polar, mutually complementary, and mutually presupposing opposites. Each of the concretely interacting sides is what it is, that is, what it is in the context of a given concrete link, only through its relation to its own opposite.
The end result of the production of all the necessary abstractions is a theoretical proposition that represents the logical combination (synthesis) of particular definitions into a combined overall theoretical picture of reality, as movement of thought, from the particular to the general, as the concrete unity of abstract definitions in their mutual connections. This syncretic combination of the separate abstract definitenesses of the given specific object begins importantly from the logical unit whose form constitutes the really universal basis or foundation on which the whole wealth of other formations grows. Dialectics, therefore, assumes the interpenetration of the universal and the particular, a dynamic continually going on in any actual development.
Since the dialectical materialist method of education goes beyond the immediate totality of terminologies to create true concepts which reproduce reality in thought through the detailed assessment of the knowledge of the concrete, the practical essence of learning is restored. When the material reality is transformed into a concept, the latter becomes a critical component of the material life-activity of humans, and an opposite process is initiated – the process of the materialization of the concept. In other words, we enter a conceptualized material world, which we continue to transform, as we materialize the concept we inhabit in our own activity. An article in “Social Text” remarks:
The processes…that comprise the concrete-real [socio-historically constituted material relations] are forever changing. Thinking, which is one of those processes, is also forever changing, i.e. producing changed thought-concretes [intellectual versions of historical concreteness]. At the same time, any change in the thinking process, in thought-concretes, changes the concrete-real in two ways: a change in thinking is a change in one component process of the social totality, and, on the other hand, any change in thinking has impact on all the other social processes, thereby changing them. In turn, a changed social totality reacts back upon the thinking process to change it in the ceaseless dialectic of life.
With the increasing hegemony of neoliberal pedagogy, we need to foreground the method of dialectics. According to materialist dialectics, the foundation of a system of theoretical definitions – the basic concept of science – should take as its starting point and object of logical reproduction the specific phenomenon, the concrete whole which lies in reality. Science must begin with the unfilled immediacy of real history. Logical development of theoretical definitions must then express the concrete historical process of the emergence and development of the object. Knowledge therefore can be nothing other than the theoretical expression of the real historical development of the concreteness under study.
Bourgeois education only teaches abstract teaching guided by general words, memorized terms, and phrases; it sees very little of the wealth of real phenomena. A proper science is never developed; only the terminological surface of the object is touched, reducing the student to a consumer of a defined set of results conveyed through abstract definitions, axioms, and postulates. Knowledge is never reflected in its essential features – that is, in concepts; it is incoherently packed in empty abstractions that are then incapable of being correlated with reality. Bourgeois sociology is a paradigmatic example of this type of knowledge that consistently fails to inclusively consider reality.
Instead of conducting a socially detailed analysis of the contradictory struggle and internal development of concrete opposites in historically limited socioeconomic formations, bourgeois sociology searches in vain for general principles or sociological laws which transcend specific historical stages. An abstract framework attributes functional statuses to discrete strata but does not explore the mechanisms whereby these functions actually operate. The latter can only be shown in a separate analysis of conjunctures. “The system of explanation”, Simon Clarke comments, “then becomes tautological for anything that happens in the concrete situation can be linked, ex post facto, to the functional requirements of the system.” As there is no theory of the functioning of the system, functioning is simply confirmed by the persistence of the system.
In opposition to bourgeois sociology, dialectical materialism clearly repudiates the construction of two sequential schemas of abstractness and concreteness. Sociological abstractions cannot be purely formal in the sense that the theory has no substantive content, indicating only the types of relationship which must pertain between various dimensions of the object of study; the specific content of the inner connections of the object cannot be left to be determined by a separate, subsequent analysis of concrete situations. In short, sociological abstractions cannot be prefabricated in their character, subjectively superimposed on a particular object of scientific inquiry. Rather, they should emerge organically from the specificity of the object itself. Thus, contrary to bourgeois sociology, the movement from the abstract to the concrete does not refer to a mechanical movement from cognitive abstractions to a description of the empirically concrete; it corresponds to the development of ever-more concrete abstractions – of concepts that possess increasingly complex determinations. To summarize, general abstractions that are short on determinations have to be laboriously transformed, analytically concretized into determinate abstractions until the complex-concrete has been achieved in all its fullness. This dialectical logic and philosophy can and must be extended to every other area of knowledge.
