Original Article

Politics of the senses: Karl Marx and empirical subjectivity

Bryan Nelson
Social and Political Thought, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M3J 1P3. E-mail: bnelson@yorku.ca A section of this article was presented at the Marxism and Psychology Conference at the University of P.E.I., 57 August 2010.

Abstract This article reconsiders some underlying assumptions regarding Marxs

theory of subjectivity. It contends that Marxs early resistance to Hegel would initiate a productive and multifaceted engagement with empiricism which would extend throughout his philosophical and economic authorship, the foundations of this empiricism drawn from a dynamic conception of subjectivity much closer to the tradition of Hume. Through an examination of some of Marxs major works, including a more detailed exegetical analysis of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, this article explores Marxs empirical theory of the subject and considers the manner in which it informs his materialist conception of history, his dialectical procedure and his comprehension of the experience of the subject under capitalism. Subjectivity (2011) 4, 395412. doi:10.1057/sub.2011.19 Keywords: Marx; Hume; Deleuze; subjectivity; empiricism; senses

Introduction: Postulates for an Empirical Marx

Why does the claim that Marx is an empiricist often generate such fierce opposition? At least since Lukacs, it has become something of a custom to approach Marxs philosophy as Hegelian. And while there can be no disputing Hegels position in the development of Marxs thought, it is striking that even his earliest writings dedicated to Hegel and the Young Hegelians of his own day remain so profoundly antagonistic. Unlike Kant, the rationalists and the Greeks, whose significance for Marx cannot be underestimated, it seems that Hegels role may be best articulated as the figure who Marx feels necessary to posit for himself, more than any other, as an adversary to confront and overcome. But perhaps more interesting than

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his relentless challenges to Hegel, which are now very well known, is the unequivocally empirical position to which Marx will appeal in order to establish this criticism. Rather than the emulation of Hegel, what the early texts reveal so intelligibly is a disavowal of Hegelian philosophy for a position much closer to the empirical tradition (Hudelson, 1982, p. 242). However, beyond this early critique of Hegel, there is no question that Marxs precise relationship with empiricism throughout his authorship remains a controversial topic. Althusser famously demands that Marx would eventually come to reject his empiricism for a scientific and dialectical materialism organised by abstract concepts (Althusser, 2005). At the same time, Charles Taylor outlines the reasons epistemological, methodological and ethical why Marxist thought remains irreconcilable with the empirical tradition, accounting for the almost complete lack of interest in Marxs philosophy among AngloAmerican schools (Taylor, 1966).1 Nevertheless, against Althusser, who finds Marxs empiricism and dialectical materialism mutually exclusive, subsequently dividing his authorship into two distinct epistemological modes; and likewise against Taylor, who finds at their very foundation empiricism and Marxism utterly contradictory, Marx himself would never abandon a certain fidelity to empirical thought. While his often accentuated proximity to Hegel has long overshadowed this integral dimension of his work, Marxs empiricism remains one of the more coherent continuities throughout his ever evolving thought.2 And yet, the more substantial discussions surrounding Marxs empiricism will be predominately circumscribed to the scientific nature of his investigation and the role of his extensive inclusion of empirical research in his mature economic studies. It is specifically in these terms that the empirical or scientific Marx will tend to be identified and evaluated. But beyond this rather narrow conception of empiricism, Marxs work will display a rich and multidimensional engagement with empirical thought. An implicit empirical framework grounds not only his earliest criticisms of Hegel, but extends throughout his cultivation of the materialist conception of history to his most developed analyses of capital and surplus value. Marx is not a Hegelian, Marx is an empiricist. While this thesis may illuminate many facets of Marxs philosophical and economic project, it is absolutely essential to the principal question which concerns this study. This is the question of subjectivity in Marxs thought. Since the publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx, 1992), the challenge of addressing subjectivity in Marx can no longer be said to be due to his neglect of the problem. Although the most relevant passages will predominantly be found here in his earlier writings, Marx certainly provides enough material for a substantial meditation on his thoughts regarding the constitution, psychology and experience of the subject. The challenge, rather, refers to the point of departure of our own analysis. Marx will indeed offer some considerable insights into his thoughts on subjectivity, but we will only achieve a wider theoretical appreciation of these insights if we initiate the
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question through the very empiricism that Marxs work conveys. While clearly forging a new theoretical model of the subject as a social and historical entity, Marx offers a conception of subjectivity which is remarkable in its consistency with some of the most distinguishable features of empirical thought. Before a methodological springboard for scientific inquiry, before a foundation for epistemology, empiricism, in the tradition of Hume and Deleuze, is a radical theory of subjectivity. It is in this context that I will attempt to situate Marxs thoughts on the subject. It is this dimension of Marxs empiricism that remains least explored.

Establishing Marxs Empiricism

It should not be particularly contentious to postulate that a young Marxs frustration with Hegels speculative philosophy would bring him inadvertently to adopt a critical perspective infused with empirical tenets. For empiricism offers a compelling refutation of transcendental reason, universal categories and teleological orientations. In the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, Marx will repeatedly charge Hegels logic as a grand mystification, one which consequently sacrifices empirical existence to the abstract autonomy of the Idea: For as Hegels task is not to discover the truth of empirical existence but to discover the empirical existence of the truth, it is very easy to fasten on what lies nearest to hand and prove that it is an actual moment of the Idea. (Marx, 1992, p. 98) In many respects, Marx begins to think as an empiricist when he discovers it problematic that with Hegel the empirical remains a category to be transgressed and superseded. What Marx exhibits so vividly in these early writings is a concern that Hegel functions to position what exists empirically in relation to the Idea which logically precedes it, so that the empirical is that which is granted the task of fulfilling the Idea, of facilitating its actuality and its material mediation. From the beginning, Marx seems to resist the notion that the empirical represents a moment of the non-empirical Idea and accordingly, that empiricism merely represents a moment or stage of philosophical thinking. Quite adversely, in the afterword to the second edition of Capital written many years later, Marx will clearly articulate the foundations of his own approach which, contra Hegel, will remain prominently organised around an unmistakably empirical conception of thought: My dialectic method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of
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the Idea, is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the Idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought. (Marx, 1990, p. 102, my emphasis) What Marx wants to underscore here is clear enough: his method is not the method of Hegel. Of course, what exactly constitutes a working method for Hegel and how exactly Marx understands that method remains a difficult question in its own right. Obviously with Marx, it is not simply a matter of returning the dialectic to its feet. But what is more significant is how he draws the distinction. Marx clearly identifies his method as dialectical, but is entirely unwilling to follow Hegel in the elevation of thinking to the status of an a priori category, so that the Idea remains independent and privileged in a dialectical relation. Rather, for Marx, as we see here, the ideal must be understood in two ways, or more accurately, as two moments. First, it is perception, the material world reflected in the mind of man, a materialist expression of what would have to be rendered in Humes terms as impressions in all their immediacy and vivacity. But equally important, the ideal is that which is translated or actively transformed from what is simply given in the mind into something distinctly other: concepts or forms of thought. As we shall see, empiricism is nothing without these two moments. While this passage intends to demonstrate his methodological distance from Hegel, what Marx reveals here is a refusal to abstract the process of thinking from the activity of a subject. By denying the independence of the Idea, its logic and priority, Marx does not so much materialise what remains ideal in Hegel as restore it to the conditions of empirical subjectivity. Marxs own approach must follow from these premises accordingly. This problem deserves more attention. Rather than initiate his thought in a vacuous sphere of abstraction, Marx will always proceed from real empirical phenomena (Wilson, 1991, p. 127). As early as 1844 Marx will insist that: Sense perception [y] must be the basis of all science. Only when science starts out from sense perception [y] i.e. only when science starts from nature is it real science (Marx, 1992, p. 355). There is no question that for Marx all knowledge begins with sense perception. If we wish to speak of origins it can have no other. But there is a danger in overstating the point. For it is all too common that empiricism will be reduced to such elementary axioms without qualification or explanation. This leads to misconceptions. Empiricism is often stigmatised as an epistemology which offers the senses as the solution to the problem of knowledge. This is in no way Marxs position, nor Humes before him. This corresponds to an empty, static image of empiricism, one which offers no account of the dynamic capacities which define the empirical subject. All that can be said about the senses in this respect is that they provide what is given in the mind, in a similar way that the passions provide its orientation and
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direction.3 Therefore, it is precisely the task of empiricism to explain how a subject can generate and organise, from what is simply given as perceptions, something with enough coherence and stability to be considered understanding or legitimate belief. Consider the concept for example. Following Deleuze, in so far as empiricism grounds its investigative point of departure in sense perception, it necessitates the most radical theory of conceptual constructivism philosophy has ever seen: a building, testing and refining of concepts as the basic tools for thought (Deleuze, 1994, pp. xxxxi). Like Marxism, empiricism is a theory of production. Concepts are never handed down ready-made, they are given neither by the senses nor by events; they never precede the activity of thinking itself. The Grundrisse will repeat this sentiment. Here, Marx distinguishes between thought or thinking on the one hand, concepts on the other. Not only is the process of thinking entirely distinct from observation and perception, thinking is that which generates or works-up concepts from what is perceived and observed (Marx, 1973, p. 101).4 Concepts embody a certain concretion of their own; they must be forged and are only as reliable as their mode of construction. For Marx, our concepts are never simply mental copies of the material world, but the result of a vital cognitive productivity indicative of a creative, engineering subjectivity. It is in this light that we should read the afterword from the second edition of Capital quoted above: the ideal is not merely what is reflected in the mind as the given, but its active translation into forms of thought. What empiricism will wish to emphasise here is the act of translation by the mind over that which is simply reflected within it. For empiricism, the mind, as the field of experience, is the site of the given, of perceptions which are themselves indistinguishable from the mind itself. This is its passive quality. But at the same time, the mind is also an active principle, which generates and creates, organises and relates. This is why Deleuze will define the empirical subject primarily by transcendence. The subject is that which transcends the given (Deleuze, 1991, p. 24). Therefore, the problem of knowledge is always a problem of subjectivity and the practical activity of a knowing subject. Empiricism is a theory of praxis. Marxs epistemology has long been understood accordingly: not as an accumulation of a fixed body of knowledge, but as a dynamic theory of knowing, a knowledge which develops and evolves only through practice (Pilling, 1980, p. 76).5 Recall Marxs first thesis on Feuerbach: The chief defect of all previous existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. (Marx and Engels, 1998, p. 569) More than a vague doctrine of the senses, it is precisely this notion of practice which will bind Marx to empiricism.
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However, this engagement with empiricism in no way implies that Marx will circumscribe his thought according to the traditional categories of his predecessors of political economy. The problems of surplus value and abstract labour, for example, clearly remain inaccessible to even the most rigorous method of scientific observation and logical deduction. Even the commodity, Marx tells us, the most basic unit of capitalist exchange, is itself supersensible, its full social dimensions remaining hidden, concealed from view (Pilling, 1980, p. 80). This is what makes fetishism possible. What Marx so brilliantly exposes in the first volume of Capital is that as an immanently exploitive social relation, the logic of capital is not only phenomenally imperceptible, but this very imperceptible logic is itself more concrete than that which is most immediately perceptible. The sheer ingenuity of Marxs work is that his approach is at once empirical and revolutionary, a science of thought developed and organised both to explain and transform social reality (Gorman, 1981, p. 421). How does an uncompromising empiricist penetrate the imperceptible logic of capital? How does Marx succeed where so many others failed before him? Marxs empiricism is not the empiricism of Mill, Ricardo or Smith (Little, 1987, pp. 215217). As Marx will denounce in the Theories of Surplus Value: Crass empiricism turns into false metaphysics, scholasticism, which toils painfully to deduce undeniable empirical phenomena by simple formal abstraction directly from the general law, or to show by cunning argument that they are in accordance with that law (Marx, 2000, p. 89).6 For Marx, empiricism does not represent a series of deductions drawn from abstract general laws in order to grasp immediate empirical phenomena according to those laws. Quite the opposite, by grounding his thought according to the real conditions of empirical subjectivity, what empiricism offers to Marx is a substantial foundation in which concepts may be composed and concrete appropriations of thought may depart and evolve. Therefore, Marxs empiricism in no way negates dialectical thinking, but offers to it an empirical infrastructure, one which grounds the dialectic and shelters it from ideal speculation and abstract reductionism.7 Dialectics should be understood as a logic of internal relations. This is the key to Marxs most revolutionary discoveries in political economy. This is precisely what the British economists lacked before him. But we should remember it is not Hegel, but Whitehead who defines dialectics accordingly.8 And when Deleuze attempts to offer a definition of empiricism, he will often appeal to Whiteheads insistence that the abstract does not explain but must itself be explained (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007, p. vii). Likewise, Marxs discussions of surplus value and abstract labour will never offer their dimension of abstraction as the basis for their explanation. Consider abstract labour. Here, its abstraction does not simply represent an ideal quality, but a real quality of labour in its relations of capitalist exchange as value-form, its becoming commensurable or quantitatively equivalent; but it is precisely the task of Capital to explain this real abstraction not by virtue of its abstract character, but in terms
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of its concrete social conditions. Accordingly, returning to the Grundrisse once again, Marx will sanction the scientifically correct method as the decisive process of rising from the abstract to the concrete [so that] thought appropriates the concrete [and] reproduces it in the mind (Marx, 1973, p. 101).9 For empiricism, the abstract is not the illusory, the false or the psychological, but that which requires explanation by something other than its abstraction. Perhaps this is the first principle of empirical thought. Marx understands this and takes it to its most productive point in his economic works.

New Inventions of the Subject: Materialism and Empiricism

If it is imperative that Marxs conception of subjectivity be initiated via his empiricism, it is because at the foundation of Marxs empiricism rests his conception of subjectivity. Marx will not organise his thought around abstract categories, but according to the conditions of real empirical individuals, their life and conscious activity. As Marx and Engels establish in the early pages of The German Ideology: The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. (Marx and Engels, 1998, pp. 3637) In so far as Marx and Engels speak of the conditions of real individuals, we must consider such passages both in material and empirical terms: as materialism strives to account for the objectivity of conditions and the material determinations of these conditions, empiricism offers an account for the subjectivity which registers these determinations through experience and expresses them in a practical, sensuous way. More than the theme of history, what the Theses on Feuerbach will emphasise again and again is that in absence of this dimension of subjectivity, human sensuousness and practical activity, materialism is destined to remain a hollow, static discipline. In a revolutionary shift, empiricism will posit the subject as a radical empirical formation, a subject-in-process. Against rationalism and transcendental idealism, empiricism will postulate that the very organisation of experience is not given a priori, before the subject, but develops according to the process of the subjects self-constitution through experience itself. For empiricism, this principle must account for our experience of causality, relation and space and time as much as for art and music. Placing these vastly more complex examples
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aside, let us take music as our illustration as Marx will demonstrate this process himself in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: only music can awaken the musical sense in man and the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers, i.e. can only be for me in so far as my essential power exists for me as a subjective attribute [y]. (Marx, 1992, p. 353) Aesthetic experience is never an essential attribute of the subject, never simply a quality brought by the subject to external phenomena. This explains nothing. The ability to approach music as music does not belong to the subject ahead of the experience of music itself. In this regard, we must carefully distinguish between the capacity to hear (to register pitch, loudness, rhythm, tonal change, and so on) and the capacity to hear music (to identify, appreciate and respond to arrangements of sounds and silence aesthetically). Following Marx, the experience of an object extends as far and only as far as my corresponding sense extends, my experience of that object representing the confirmation of my senses capacity in relation to its object. Thus, what Marx will call a musical sense is a subjective power, a generated or cultivated ability or capacity to appropriate music musically according to an aesthetic sensibility developed by the subject in response to the experience of music itself. Such passages represent the empirical origins of a Marxist aesthetics. For Marx, only music can realise a musical sense. Likewise for empiricism more generally, only experience can realise a subject. Empiricism asks not what are the abstract conditions of possible experience, but the actual conditions of real experience (Deleuze, 1994, pp. 284285). From Epicurus to Hobbes to Hume to Deleuze, from its most primitive to its most sophisticated, what empiricism systematically disavows is an ideal or groundless subjectivity: an abstract subject which anticipates its encounter with the external world, a transcendental ego which arranges that encounter according to an ideal horizon. Contrary to Kants Copernican turn towards a subject which organises empirical phenomena according to transcendental categories, the empiricist must locate the subject as that which unfolds or emerges from the field of experience itself, an originary, essentially unorganised experience which, in this respect, must be understood as transcendental to the subject.10 In many ways, Kant intends to resolve the problem of Hume by internalising the problem within the subject, so that with Kant, the subject functions as a presupposition in order to explain experience according to that which remains outside and prior to experience, that which remains impervious to experience. But against Kant, Descartes and Husserl alike, empiricism will propose that experience does not belong to a transcendental subject, but represents an impersonal, anonymous, subjectless field from which a subject must be composed as a pragmatic
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psychological process of subjectivation. The mind receives a succession of independent, non-relational impressions which must be connected, contracted, associated and synthesised. This is why it is essential for Hume that the mind develop certain unifying processes in which it may orient its experience in terms of association, memory and anticipation. The subject indeed organises experience: subjectivity can be defined in no other way. Kant and Hume are in agreement on this. But what empiricism maintains is that if it is not to remain a vacuous abstraction, the subject itself requires an explanation, an account of how the subject comes to be, the movement through which it develops itself from that which it is not. Subjectivity is a consequence of experience. From this conclusion we may breathe new life into that seemingly worn out maxim which is so often reiterated to define the materialist conception of history: it is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness (Marx and Engels, 1998, p. 42). Perhaps this is as true for Hume as it is for Marx. And while it is unlikely that Marx is working through the intricacies of this problem with Hume in mind, Marxs trajectory towards a more dynamic, multifaceted materialism would necessarily incorporate a subjective dimension which would draw him ever closer to the empirical model. Hume himself would already exhibit a certain sympathy for materialism via his psychology (Deleuze, 1991, p. 28). But materialism only discovers a certain depth when it departs from empiricism. In a letter to Marx in 1844, still quite early in their relationship, Engels will insist upon this very point: We must take our departure from the Ego, the empirical, flesh-and-blood individual, if we are not, like Stirner, to remain stuck at this point [Feuerbachs conception of man]. Man will always remain a wraith so long as his basis is not empirical man. In short we must take our departure from empiricism and materialism if our concepts, and notably our [concept of] man, are to be something real; we must deduce the general ` from the particular, not from itself or, a la Hegel, from thin air. (Marx and Engels, 1982, p. 12) Throughout their correspondences during this period, Engels will demand their work replace this wraith of man, whether Hegelian or Feuerbachian, with a more grounded conception of the subject as empirical man. This would not only remain a central theme throughout The German Ideology produced collectively soon after, it would form the basis of the texts most significant theoretical achievement: man is historical, his subjectivity composed not in isolation, generated from thin air, but against the particular social arrangements which constitute his basic material productive relations. There is no dispute that the underlying historicism of subjectivity represents one of the major landmarks of modern social and political thought. But what is
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less acknowledged is that this discovery is entirely predicated upon an empirical conception of the subject, the subject whose conscious being does not anticipate its experience, but whose experience organises its conscious being. For Marx, like Hume, consciousness must be understood as a consequence of experience, it never constitutes the self-identical property of the subject.11 But while Hume is concerned with the empirical conditions in which experience generates a subject, Marx is concerned with the historical conditions in which this experience is saturated through praxis. This is precisely how Marx can arrive at a theory of the subject whose consciousness is determined by its historical conditions through the very process of its practical sensuous interaction with its immediate material environment. For Marx, subjectivity is a historical problem. But it is a problem which first must appreciate the subject as the constitution of its experience. Although it is empiricism which provides this essential theoretical framework, it is precisely this historical dimension which Marx will supplement to empiricism. Consciousness is itself historical. This is perhaps the greatest contribution of The German Ideology. This is not only the essential oversight of Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians, but of the British empiricists as well. Hume understands that the subject cannot be explained by the associations of the mind alone: this is why, like Freud, Hume must rely heavily on the manner in which custom and tradition orient each individual according to his particular subject position (Deleuze, 1991, pp. 102103). But Hume has no conception of the historical conditionality of subjectivity in Marxs terms. After Marx, history is no longer the context, but the very substance of an empirical process of subject formation. Simply by existing, the empirical subject is a social entity (Gorman, 1981, p. 411). Its consciousness, sensibility, its very abilities and capacities as a moral and intellectual being are entirely constituted against a historical horizon. Subjectivity is inter-subjective. The atomistic, ahistorical individual often encountered in liberalism exists only theoretically as a hypothetical abstraction from an immanent socio-historical field. In its unequivocal rejection of a transcendental subject, empiricism correctly frames the problem of subjectivity according to a constitutive process of subjectivation, the process in which a subject comes to be a subject through experience. But it is Marx who will ground this process according to the historical conditions of our productive social relations, so that the subject not only represents an empirical problem, but a historical problem as well.

The Historicism of the Senses: Subject and Object

It is against this background that the significance of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts will be most apparent. Clearly experimental and not intended for publication, it is here where Marx will most vividly articulate the foundations of his own empiricism of the subject bound to larger themes of
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labour, alienation and private property. Hence, let us concentrate the remainder of this study on a more detailed analysis of some of these key passages. The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history (Marx, 1992, p. 353). Perhaps we should initiate our analysis here. While the Manuscripts will still very much raise the question of subjectivity through an ongoing dispute between Hegel and Feuerbach, there is no doubt that what Marx produces is something entirely new, irreducible to either of these two sources. From the outset, Marx will distance himself from a position which draws the subject from reason, right or religion. Rather, more than any other of Marxs writings, the Manuscripts will be organised around the problem of experience: the nature of experience, what renders experience distinctively human and how capitalism systematically impairs and degrades the depth and magnitude of this experience. It is in this respect that Marx will qualify his approach simultaneously as a naturalism and humanism, not only an empiricism of experience, but an ethics of experience as well. This empiricism and humanism will remain indivisible in the text, any attempt to dislodge one from the other not only artificial, but limited in scope. For Marx, the empirical constitution of a subject may not be isolated from a historical constitution of man. Marx holds that subjectivity must be understood in terms of praxis, a dynamic process in which the subject comes to itself, as it were, from the outside, from an engagement with the outside (Fromm, 2004, p. 28). The site of the subjects realisation is always located beyond the subject in a material field external to itself. The subject is never a given, or given to itself. Marx is no phenomenologist. Unlike Husserls transcendental ego which is directly conscious of its own essence, Marxs species-being discovers itself only through an expression of itself in sensuous form. Thus, the manner in which the subject encounters itself, its nature, its needs, its powers as well as the limits of those powers, as an individual and as a species, is expressed according to its objective relations, its relation to its objects: To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being with natural powers means that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being and of his vital expression, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. (Marx, 1992, p. 390) That the subject can only express its life in real, sensuous objects is to maintain that the subject is always expressed by something external to itself. Hunger, for example, may be a drive, a natural need (albeit a socialised need from the start), Marx explains, but in so far as the object of my hunger is external to my hunger itself, something of myself is expressed by virtue of the external object which satisfies it. My powers, accordingly, the very abilities and capacities which define what I am and what I can do, may only be explored through their expression in an external, sensuous form so that the expression of a power is at
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once to have that power expressed to me, its manifestation and externalisation simultaneously its exploration and cultivation. Powers are never understood simply in terms of their potentialities. In this respect, studies of the Manuscripts which extract a theory of subjectivity via Marxs concept of labour are entirely justified. For Marx distinguishes man as the species which is not only produced by nature, but produces itself through its own practical activity. Human labour is never merely the production of objects, the manipulation of nature or the expulsion of energy. Labour is the very substance which transforms both object and subject in the process of production. In the production of objects labour represents the objectification of man, his becoming-objective in a concrete, sensuous form. Labour is thus not only the manifestation of subjective powers, it is the practical condition which facilitates the subjects experience of itself in an external material field. But in so far as man externalises himself in his labour and hence, actualises himself externally in the material world in the form of sensuous objects which stand out against him, so that in his perception of his objects of labour he perceives something of himself, Marxs theory of subjectivity must include a second, more foundational dimension, namely an empiricism of experience itself. This is a psychological requirement. Following his detailed examination of estranged labour, this is precisely what will motivate Marxs discussion of the senses later in the third manuscript. As we saw in the case of music above, Marx will speak of the senses as essential powers which express ones abilities and capacities as an empirical subject, as the power to experience or to raise experience to new heights, new potentials. However, we have also seen that the actualisation of these powers is always consequential, the result of an active engagement with the outside, an objective encounter, the appropriation of the object: All his human relations to the world seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving in short, all the organs of his individuality, [y] are in their objective approach or in their approach to the object the appropriation of that object. (Marx, 1992, p. 351) Marx explains that man is endowed with natural, vital capacities, but these capacities will remain only virtual until composed and organised according to the experience of their corresponding objects. The capacity of the eye is distinct from the capacity of the ear, each sense appropriating its object in an altogether different way. Likewise, the cultivation of each sense signifies its qualitative differentiation, its coming into being as a distinct, uniquely organised sense with its own distinct power: An object is different for the eye from what it is for the ear, and the eyes object is different from the ears. The peculiarity of each essential power is precisely its peculiar essence [y]
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(Marx, 1992, p. 353). Therefore, it is the object of experience which organises the senses, their powers and limitations, the appropriation of the object the composition of its corresponding sense, the experience of that object only limited to the extent that its corresponding sense is limited to experience it. Or more simply: it is experience which organises the experience of the subject, which realises its senses and powers to experience. It is for this reason that Marx understands the subjects appropriation of the object as the confirmation of its essential powers, as the realisation of its individuality and affirmation of its reality. As man relates to the world primarily through his powers and powers of experience, it is precisely through these powers that the world becomes something real for him, affirming his experience of it: Man is therefore affirmed in the objective world not only in thought but with all the senses (Marx, 1992, p. 353).12 That the senses only come into being through their objects may appear a curious position. But from this position we must draw two conclusions. First, as we have seen, the subject is never realised in a void, but according to the experience of its objects, the appropriation of its objects and its objects of labour. The subject expresses itself and is expressed to itself through its objects, the experience of its objects the organisation of its experience and powers to experience, the subject itself the consequence of this organisation of its experience and realisation of its essential powers. Second, in so far as the senses are composed through the appropriation of their objects, which themselves possess a particular history, society, set of human relations, the senses themselves must be understood as historical. Perhaps Marx understands the organisation of the senses as the first task of history. The senses are never reducible to physiology, utility or necessity. For Marx, this is merely indicative of a restricted, diminished sense, a sense abstracted from its social form: Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical need has only a restricted sense (Marx, 1992, p. 353). Rather, Marx contends that the senses are in no way monolithic in scope, but are in fact, always split or doubled; they have, as it were, two sides. We may designate the direct senses as those which represent the passivity of experience as need: practical, asocial or pre-social, the biology of the sense organs which belong to a natural history of the species. The eye evolves to solve the problem of light and distance, the ear to discern certain vibrations, the epidermis to respond to certain stimuli, and so on. The directness of the senses refers to the immediacy of experience, the unmediated force or vivacity of sense impressions which Hume introduces in the opening pages of the Treatise. But on the other hand, as Marx will detail, the senses are simultaneously human or social senses which embody an altogether different history, objective relation and signification: Apart from these direct organs, social organs are therefore created in the form of society; for example, activity in direct association with others, etc.
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has become an organ of my life expression and a mode of appropriation of human life. (Marx, 1992, p. 352) The manifestation of the senses, as human senses, is indicative of the effective mediation of the field of experience by the field of history, the sense organs now taking on a social, inter-subjective quality as social organs: Obviously the human eye takes in things in a different way from the crude non-human eye, the human ear in a different way from the crude ear, etc. (Marx, 1992, p. 352). This is what renders human experience possible. As a social entity, species-being lives, produces and reproduces itself entirely against a historical backdrop, and hence experiences its existence according to the dynamics of its particular social reality. As Marx states above, social organs are composed in the form of society: they are cultivated in direct association with the activity of other human beings, communism merely representing the social organs in their most complete, emancipated form. Thus, as an expression of collective human praxis, the social organs will appropriate their objects in an entirely different manner than those of the crude direct senses, the experience of the object losing its abstract objective character and becoming something else, something human: For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human sense, the humanity of the senses all these come into being only through the existence of their objects, through humanised nature. (Marx, 1992, p. 353) As a historical entity, species-being approaches its objects endowed with a kind of social priority, a perception invested with historical privilege, so that the object, as a socially appropriated object, is experienced not principally as an object socially mediated but as an object immediately social. Therefore, the subject will always discover itself inhabiting a world distinctively human, even its perception of the natural world marked by the humanity of its senses. For Marx, this uniquely human experience must raise the problem of method once again. For as long as science departs from sense perception, as human perception, it is not nature, properly speaking, which immediately confronts man but man himself: Man is the immediate object of natural science; for immediate sensuous nature for man is, immediately, human sense perception [y]. [y] But nature is the immediate object of the science of man. Mans first object man is nature, sense perception [y]. (Marx, 1992, pp. 355356) Sense perception is not only the point of departure for natural science; it is also its most immediate object. For as mans first object of natural science is man himself in the form of sense perception, the first object of the science of man is nature, the
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nature of his sense perception. Thus, sense perception represents the point in which nature and history lose their qualified distinction. It is for this reason that Marx writes that he looks forward to the day when there is only a single science.

Private Property and the Emancipation of the Senses

Given the moral orientation of the Manuscripts, it would be inappropriate to conclude without at least briefly considering the implications for the experience of Marxs empirical subject under capitalism. Marx writes in the Manuscripts that in their immediate praxis, the senses become theoreticians. As they appropriate their objects, the senses become the active expression of their particular historical conditions; they embody and reflect, as it were, the social character of their appropriated objects. Thus, under the conditions of private property the constitution of the senses begins to change, their organisation and manifestation determined according to their most immediate objects, the objects of capital. As the commodity, the principal unit of capitalist productivity becomes the privileged object of our collective activity and interaction, it is the commodity which forms the basis of our comprehension of ourselves as individuals and as a species. Capitalism is not only the organisation of production, it is the organisation of experience itself. Marx is convinced of this. For Marx, capitalism represents the corruption of the senses, the deterioration of their social quality, their inability to experience in a human way. As the senses are composed according to the experience of private property, the diversity of the senses, as the very possibility of experience, is reduced to a one-dimensional sense of possession, of having: Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realisations of possession only as means of life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, labour, and capitalisation. (Marx, 1992, pp. 351352) This degraded, one-sided mode of experience is emblematic of the reification of the senses, their estrangement under capital: Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all the senses the sense of having (Marx, 1992, p. 352). How are we to understand this estrangement of the senses? Rather than an antagonism of human nature separated from itself, the theory of alienation should always be approached in terms of the diminishing of an essential power, of a particular ability or capacity of the subject, regardless of what the natural limits of that ability or capacity might be. What is estranged from the subject is a potential, what it can do, what it can think or what it can experience. Thus,
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the estrangement of the senses signifies the diminution of the very power to experience, the inhibition or contraction of the breadth of possible experience, the reduction of experience to a distinctly capitalist privatisation of space, parcelisation of time, quantification of labour, rationalisation of movement, valorisation of the object and competitivisation of the other. In this respect, the estrangement of the senses cannot be said to be limited to the experience of the proletarian class alone, but is rendered universal under capitalism. However, as Marx wants to remind us, the depth of the human experience is in no way limited to that offered by capital. The capitalist subject does not represent a universal archetype. Rather, for Marx, capitalisms historicism, its very artificiality as a historical formation, is indicative of the immanent possibility of its transgression. Although in 1844 Marx is yet to elaborate on the extensive theoretical implications of such transgression, the Manuscripts clearly understand this supersession of private property as not only the emancipation of labour, the liberation of an economically dispossessed, socially dissociated and politically disfranchised producing class, but likewise, as the complete emancipation of the senses: The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become human, subjectively and objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object, made by man for man. (Marx, 1992, p. 352) For Marx, the supersession of capitalism announces the restoration of the humanity of the senses. As the object is appropriated as a truly collective, social object, made by man for man, the eye, the ear are regenerated as truly human senses, an experience liberated from the restrictions of capital and mediations of commodities. And while empiricism must reject any teleological claims of communism, it does provide Marx with the theoretical bases to demonstrate the subjects essential plasticity, its dynamic capability to be composed and transformed according to its conditions and experience of its conditions. Indeed, throughout Marxs work, there is a sense that communism does not so much represent the end of history as the beginning of a new kind of subject. Such conclusions will perhaps best epitomise the distinction between an empirical and Hegelian reading of Marx. Empiricism is the first theory to postulate this radical plasticity of the subject. This is essential both to Marxs historical and moral theory of man.

Acknowledgement
I am deeply grateful to Prof. H.T. Wilson for his support and assistance in the composition of this article.
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About the Author

Bryan Nelson is a PhD candidate in the Social and Political Thought programme at York University, Toronto. His research concerns contemporary continental philosophy and radical democratic thought.

Notes
1 For a brief overview of Taylors discussion see J. Bohman (1986, p. 341). 2 R. Hudelson (1982) and D. Little (1987) will argue for a consistently empiricist Marx. 3 This is what Marx identifies in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as the direct quality of the sense organs. See my discussion below. 4 On this question see H.T. Wilson (1991), Marxs Critical/Dialectical Procedure, p. 57. 5 Chapter 3, Section III of G. Pillings text Empiricism and the empirical is particularly helpful here. 6 This passage is in reference to Adam Smith and the reasons for his inability to distinguish between surplus value and profit. 7 For a detailed examination of the empirical foundation of Marxs dialectical method, see H.T. Wilson (1991), Marxs Critical/Dialectical Procedure. D. Little (1987), on the other hand, is able to affirm Marxs empiricism only at the expense of his dialectical method. 8 On the relationship between Whitehead and Marx see A.F. Pomeroy (2004). 9 Once again see H.T. Wilson (1991), Marxs Critical/Dialectical Procedure. 10 Deleuze will often describe his own philosophy as a transcendental empiricism. 11 Even for Locke consciousness will identify the essential sameness of the self. Not so for Hume. Hume will never detach consciousness from experience in this regard. Perhaps it would be most accurate, therefore, to assert that for Hume, consciousness follows experience without being distinct from it. 12 See E. Fromm (2004), Marxs Concept of Man, p. 28.

References
Althusser, L. (2005) For Marx, Translated by B. Brewster. London and New York: Verso. Bohman, J. (1986) Making Marx an Empiricist: On recent analytic Marx interpretations. Praxis International 6(3): 341352. Deleuze, G. (1991) Empiricism and Subjectivity, Translated by C.V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition, Translated by P. Patton. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (2007) Dialogues II, Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. Fromm, E. (2004) Marxs Concept of Man. New York: Continuum. Gorman, R.A. (1981) Empirical Marxism. History and Theory 20(4), Beiheft 20: Studies in Marxist Historical Theory: 403423. Hudelson, R. (1982) Marxs Empiricism. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 12(3): 241253. Little, D. (1987) Dialectics and science in Marxs Capital. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 17(2): 197220. Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse, Translated by M. Nicolaus. London: Penguin.
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Marx, K. (1990) Capital Volume I, Translated by B. Fowkes. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1992) Early Writings, Translated by R. Livingstone and G. Benton. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (2000) Theories of Surplus Value. New York: Prometheus Books. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1982) Collected Works Vol. 38. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1998) The German Ideology including Theses on Feuerbach and The Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Prometheus Books. Pilling, G. (1980) Marxs Capital: Philosophy and Political Economy. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pomeroy, A.F. (2004) Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism. New York: Suny Press. Taylor, C. (1966) Marxism and Empiricism. In: B. Williams and A. Montefiore (eds.) British Analytical Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 227248. Wilson, H.T. (1991) Marxs Critical/Dialectical Procedure. London and New York: Routledge.

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