Abstract
The mexican-ecuadorian philosopher Bolívar Echeverría (Riobamba, Ecuador 1941 - Mexico City 2010) concerned with explaining the process of producing and consuming use values through reference to the theoretical contributions of semiotics, but without denying the primacy of nature and the primacy of the material as the inalienable foundation of human communication. Here, we find an essential difference vis-à-vis a series of contemporary approaches which are caught up in the concept of communication (or related conceptions, for example, that of “articulation”), and which see its theoretical horizon, real or imagined, as both the explanation and the salvation of the world.
Saussure subordinates linguistics to semiotics (sémiologie) and realizes that knowledge of the “true nature of language” is only possible within the category of “all other systems of the same order”. Echeverría, on the other hand, seeks to classify semiotics (understood by him as the production and consumption of signs) under the even broader field of production and consumption in general. It is clear that Saussure and Echeverría differ notably from one another, since Saussure considers semiotics to be embedded within social psychology, and, in turn, within psychology in general, while Echeverría’s system of reference is the critique of political economy.
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Notes
- 1.
See Bolívar Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” Cuadernos Políticos, 41: (1984), 33–46. Bolívar Echeverría emphasizes the importance of these two authors in his study of the natural form: “To a certain degree I approximated above all Jakobson and Hjelmslev, they are the two that I treat as crucial in questions of semiology and linguistics” (Interview with Bolívar Echeverría, 11 September 1996, in the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the UNAM. In the absence of a unified counting method, the tape position is indicated according to the apparatus utilized (Panasonic 608), here: cassette I, side A, pos. 247–250 [cited hereafter as Interview with Bolívar Echeverría].) In so doing, he draws support from Roman Jakobson, Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics, in Style and Language (New York: Wiley, 1960); Roman Jackobson, ‘Two Aspects of Languages and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’ in Selected Writings, II: World and Language (The Hague: Mouton,1971); Louis Hjelmslev, La Stratification du Langage, in Essais Linguistiques (Paris: Minuit, 1971 [1954]), 55. See Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 42, 3, and 40.
- 2.
See Carlos Oliva Mendoza, “Los Diagramas de Bolívar Echeverría: Producción, Consumo y Circulación Semiótica,” in Valenciana: Estudios de Filosofía y Letras, 11: (2013), 186–187. This mention of the schematic representation and its capacity to represent visually the problem must not be taken as a secondary subject. More authors have noted the importance of these exercises within Echeverría’s thought. As is clearly noted by Carlos Oliva, Echeverría’s “reflection, in much of his work, is full of figures. They are not an exercise of youth or training.” Moreover, the author adds that these figures are “metaphysical schemas that try to show the primordial relation of the human being with the nature and the matter.”.
- 3.
Concepción Tonda, “La Teoría Crítica de la Cultura en Bolívar Echeverría,” in Raquel Serur Smeke Bolívar Echeverría Modernidad y resistencias (Mexico City: UAM/Era, 2015), 163.
- 4.
Interview with Bolívar Echeverría, cassette 1, side A, pos. 264–267.
- 5.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 9. Evidently, by “lenguaje” [“speech”] Echeverría understands what Ferdinand de Saussure (who he cited at various points in the text here analyzed) calls langage. Saussure also uses this term as a synonym for faculté de langage and explains: “l’exercice du langage repose sur une faculté que nous tenons de la nature.” (Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Paris: Payot, 1979, 25). English translation: “the use of speech is based on a natural faculty.” Saussure already indicates here that we should understand by “langage” [“lenguaje” in Spanish] not only the languages [“langue” in French, “lengua” in Spanish] spoken, but also the totality of all possible forms of expression or also of forms of exteriorization; it should be used to refer to any systematization or homogenization of any forms of expression. Note: “Whereas speech is heterogeneous, language, as defined, is homogeneous … Language, once its boundaries have been marked off within the speech data, can be classified among human phenomena, whereas speech cannot” (Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 15). Compare also: “faculty of speech” (Saussure, 10).
- 6.
Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 45. Echeverría refers here to Nicolas S. Troubetzkoy, Principes de Phonologie, trans. J. Cantineau (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970), 38.
- 7.
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 16. “Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of anthropological facts.”.
- 8.
Saussure, 17. “But to me the language problem is mainly semiological, and all developments derive their significance from that important fact. If we are to discover the true nature of language we must learn what it has in common with all other semiological systems.”.
- 9.
Saussure, 16. “A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from Greek sēmîon ‘sign’).” Elsewhere he speaks not of “social psychology” but “group psychology” (Saussure, 78). Note that Saussure implicitly understands social psychology as a science whose object is “society” [“la vie social” (Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 33)]. So what interests Saussure is to establish the semiotics he has founded within the social sciences, with the only limitation being that he here thinks about above all social psychology, which is to say, he seems to see society first of all determined by one aspect of those dynamics that Marx calls “ideological forms,” distinguishing them from the “economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science.” See Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Nahum Issac Stone (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1903), 12.
- 10.
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 68.
- 11.
Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 300.
- 12.
Already in his earliest works, Echeverría suggests the importance of other types of languages distinct from commonplace ones. However, in so doing he does not refer to economic praxis, as in his more recent works, but rather to political praxis. See, in this regard: “For the guerrilla discursive propaganda is essential, but this arrives afterward, when it can fall upon fertile soil.” (Bolívar Echeverría, “Einführung,” in Ernesto Guevara, ¡Hasta la victoria siempre! Eine Biographie mit einer Einführung von Bolívar Echeverría. Zusammengestellt von Horst Kurnitzky, trans. Alex Schubert. Berlin (West): Verlag Peter von Maikowski, 1968, 16–17). It is clear that these formulations are separated by a chasm from the idea of a ‘coercion-free discourse’ or anything of the sort.
- 13.
Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social”, 42. Here, Echeverría refers to the following text: André Leroi-Gourham, Le geste et la parole, I: Technique et langage (Paris: A. Michel, 1964), 163.
- 14.
Diana Fuentes, “Semiótica de la Vida Cotidiana: Bolívar Echeverría,” in Mabel Moraña, Para una Crítica de la Modernidad Capitalista: Dominación y Resistencia en Bolívar Echeverría (Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Boívar/Corporación Editora Nacional/El Equilibrista, 2014), 238. As mentioned before, is here where Echeverría believes that, through the task of providing a concrete content to praxis, is possible to reconstruct Critical Theory.
- 15.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes (London: Penguin 1976), 179–180. “Hence commodities must be realized as values before they can be realized as use-values. On the other hand, they must stand the test as use-values before they can be realized as values. For the labor expended on them only counts in so far as it is expended in a form, which is useful for others. However, only the act of exchange can prove whether that labor is useful for others, and its product consequently capable of satisfying the needs of others.”
- 16.
Marx himself notes this contradiction and shows its importance, mainly in the chapter “The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret thereof” of the first volume of the Capital.
- 17.
Observe also, in this respect, the powerfully Eurocentric tendency of Stalinism, in which the scarce efforts (by Lenin, above all) in the first post-revolutionary years to eliminate or soften racist oppression toward the non-Russian inhabitants of the Soviet Union (efforts which materialized as a degree of sovereignty, in particular autonomous regions under the banner of different nationalities), were practically abandoned, restoring the Tsarist model of Russian control over the entire territory.
- 18.
Aureliano Ortega Esquivel, “El Pesamiento Teórico-filosófico de Bolívar Echeverría en el Contexto del Marxismo Mexicano,” in Diana Fuentes, Isaac García Venegas y Carlos Oliva Mendoza Bolívar Echeverría: Crítica e Interpretación (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México / Itaca, 2012), 185–186. According to Aureliano Ortega Esquivel, Mexican commitment to leftist thinking and Marx’s works can be classified into four different groups: dogmatic Marxism, academic Marxism, pre-critical or non-dogmatic Marxism, and critical Marxism. Of these, the only group that actually interpreted Marx taking into account the Mexican context without subordinating it to the Eurocentric point of view was the last one. Among others, the most important members alongside Echeverría were José Revueltas, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Pedro López Díaz, Jaime Labastida, Carlos Pereyra, and Juan Garzón Bates. The theoretical distance between the first group and the last one can be explained, mostly, by two reasons: first of all, the dogmatic thinkers were more politically than philosophically active, with their works presenting anecdotal and descriptive studies of Mexican reality. Thereby it is possible to find books like La Derrota Ferrocarrilera de 1959 (Aroche Parra 1960) and Evolución del Movimiento Juvenile Mexicano (Ramírez y Ramírez 1966). And, lastly, the critical group, in addition to their philosophical vocation, had an important poetic and literary background, mostly incarnated by Revueltas, who wrote Ensayo Sobre un Proletariado sin Cabeza (1962). This allowed their thinkers, in the next decades, to write El Sujeto de la Historia (Pereyra 1976) and La Filosofía Política: arma opresiva o liberadora en América Latina (López Díaz 1981).
- 19.
Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 34. The cited phrase continues: “[an identification] that led K. Korsch in 1950 … to raise again, for the second half of the century, the theme, vulgarised in the 70s, of the inadequacy of Marxist discourse for the requirements of the new historical form of the revolution.” Echeverría is referring to Karl Korsch, “10 Thesen über Marxismus Heute,” Alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, 8, no. 41 (1965), 89–90.
- 20.
In this Echeverría can be distinguished—despite all the similarities—from Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School. Thus, for example, while the critique and analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment admittedly mentions “European civilization” (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. G. Schmid Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002, 9) as the central object of the investigation, its ethnocentric character is not taken as a theme.
- 21.
Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 35 n. 4.
- 22.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 125.
- 23.
Echeverría, l “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 97.
- 24.
Echeverría, 44, n31. Echeverría refers here to Walter Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” in Angelus Novus: Ausgewählte Schriften 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 10–11.
- 25.
Echeverría, 44–45f “Like the instrumental field to which it pertains, the code has a history because the process of communication/interpretation is not only fulfilled with it but also in it; because in serving on the evident level, it is itself modified on the profound level. In principle, every time the code is used in the production/consumption of meanings, its project of meaning is put into play and can be at risk of ceasing to be what it is. The project of meaning, which is the establishment of a horizon of possible meanings, can be transcended by another project and move on to constitute the substantial stratum of a new establishment of semiotic possibilities [posibilidades sémicas]. In truth the history of the code takes place as a succession of layers of patterns for meaning, resulting from the refunctionalization—more or less deep and more or less broad—of earlier projects for new meaning-granting impulses.” In this regard, see moreover a similar reference to the same text by Benjamin elsewhere: “In Benjamin’s essay “On Language in General and Human Language in Particular” an idea predominates which has been central to the history of twentieth century thought … human beings do not only speak with a language, using it as an instrument, but, above all, speak in that language … In principle, in all singular speaking it is the language that is expressed. But also—and with an equal hierarchy—all singular speaking involves that language as a totality. The entire speech [lenguaje] is in play in every individual act of expression; what each of those acts does or ceases to do alters that language in an essential way. The specific language is nothing less than the totalization of all of these speakings” (Echeverría, “La Identidad Evanescente,” in Las Ilusiones de la Modernidad, Mexico: UNAM/El Equilibrista, 1995, 60).
- 26.
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 78. Saussure says in this regard: “Language is no longer free, for time will allow the social forces at work on it to carry out their effects. This brings us back to the principle of continuity, which cancels freedom. But continuity necessarily implies change, varying degrees of shifts in the relationship between the signified and the signifier.” But the moment of the absence of freedom, which Saussure emphasizes, only applies to the specific language, the langue, and not to the ability of speaking in its totality (langage or faculté de langage in Saussure’s original text in French, speech or faculty of speech in the English translation of Saussure’s text, lenguaje or facultad de lenguaje in the Spanish translation of Saussure’s text and in Echeverría’s article), which was, as we will see below, of significant importance for Echeverría’s reflections.
- 27.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 284: “A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.”
- 28.
See Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 40–41: “Among the means that intervene in productive consumption there are some that only offer it an indication of form for themselves: raw materials or objects of labor; there are others, by contrast, that open up before labor itself an entire set of possibilities for giving form, between which labor can choose for transforming raw materials: these are instruments” [emphasis added].
- 29.
Echeverría, 41: “The most completed form of the social object is without a doubt that of the instrument. In it, the two tensions that determine all objective forms—the pretension of a form for the subject and his disposition to adopt it—remain in a state of confrontation, in an unstable equilibrium that can be decided differently in each case. The proposition of a formative action on raw materials, inscribed in the instrumental form as a technical structure, not only allows—as in all social objects—but also demands, to be effective, a formative will to action that takes it up and makes it concrete. The general transformative dynamic that the instrument entails must be completed and singularized by labor.” Echeverría refers to the following passage in Capital: “Living labor must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real [wirklich] and effective [wirkend] use-values” (Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 289).
- 30.
Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 192–193. This concept should be clarified precisely, since within a single society there can exist various codes at the same moment. Echeverría speaks elsewhere of “a subjective-objective being, provided with a particular historic-cultural identity… the historic-concrete existence of the productive and consumptive forces, that is … the substance of the nation.”.
- 31.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 284: “The simple elements of the labor process are (1) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2) the object on which that work is performed, and (3) the instruments of that work.”.
- 32.
Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. B. Fowkes, (London: NLB, 1971 [1962]), 103.
- 33.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 284.
- 34.
Marx, 284.
- 35.
Marx, 284.
- 36.
Marx, 284–285: “All raw material is an object of labor [Arbeitsgegenstand], but not every object of labor is raw material; the object of labor counts as raw material only when it has already undergone some alteration by means of labor.”.
- 37.
Marx, 285.
- 38.
Marx, 285: “As soon as the labor process has undergone the slightest development, it requires specially prepared instruments. Thus, we find stone tools [Werkzeug] and weapons in the oldest caves.”.
- 39.
Marx 286.
- 40.
Marx, 286–287. Among other things, Marx distinguishes between means of labor “in general” and those “already mediated by labor,” referring to the subcategory of those which, without intervening directly in the labor process, are nevertheless its unconditional premise: “Once again, the earth itself is a universal instrument of this kind, for it provides the worker with the ground beneath his feet and a ‘field of employment’ for his own particular process. Instruments of this kind, which have already been mediated through past labor, include workshops, canals, roads, etc.”.
- 41.
Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, 103.
- 42.
Schmidt, 102.
- 43.
Schmidt, 102. Here Schmidt cites George W.F. Hegel, Jenenser Realphilosophie (Leipzig, 1932), 221.
- 44.
Schmidt, 105. Schmidt notes: “Lenin stated correctly that Hegel was a precursor of historical materialism because he emphasized the role played by the tool both in the labor-process and in the process of cognition”
- 45.
Schmidt, 105.
- 46.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 285.
- 47.
Georg W.F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Erster Teil. Die Wissenschaft der Logik, Vol. 8 of Werke, in 20 volumes, compiled on the basis of his works from 1832 to 1845, eds. E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), §209, appendix, 365. Cited according to Marx, A Critique of Political Economy, 285 n2. Compare, moreover, Hegel’s observations which precede his reflections on tools in the Logic: “That the end relates itself immediately to an object and makes it a means … may be regarded as violence … But that the end posits itself in a mediate relation with the object and interposes another object between itself and it, may be regarded as the cunning of reason.” See Georg W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, (London: Routledge, 2002), 746.
- 48.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 290.
- 49.
Interview with Bolívar Echeverría, cassette I, side A, pos. 258–265.
- 50.
Bolívar Echeverría, “La Identidad Evanescente,” 59.
- 51.
Echeverría, “La Identidad Evanescente,” 59. Echeverría refers explicitly to Marx, here, and writes: “from an instrument of abundance, the technical revolution becomes, in the hands of capitalism, a generator of scarcity” (59). This is necessary to maintain the capitalist mode of production, which functions only on the basis of exploiting the labor of others and, in turn, requires a general scarcity that, according to Marx, and followed on this point by Echeverría and other serious economists, under current technical conditions can only be guaranteed artificially. In this respect, Capital Vol. I, Chapter 15, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry:” Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 492 ff.
- 52.
Echeverría, 57. [“Sprachphilosophie” means “philosophy of language”].
- 53.
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 9. Horkheimer and Adorno note in this paragraph the trajectory of European civilization as a trajectory of attempting to break or liquidate nature and falling again into what it intends to break; nonetheless, they fail to the ethnocentric character of the European civilization toward other human groups.
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Gandler, S. (2023). Multiple Subjectivities in Neoliberal Times: Reflections from a Critical Theory in Latin America. In: Hines, T., Jansen, PE., Kirsch, R.E., Maley, T. (eds) The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_8
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