Totality

Martin Jay…Marxism and totality

Totalisation; holism; plenitude; system; structuralism; whole and parts; identity

Hegel; Marx; Althusser; Adorno; Jameson; Lukacs;

Adorno; Derrida; Lyotard; Martin Jay

Totality refers essentially to the whole. Its usage as a concept is predominant in Marx and Hegel and most dialectical philosophy. However the category of totality is also important for classical sociology as well as in a looser sense, holistic theories of society. Whilst totality can mean literally everything it can be used more precisely to designate the constitution of a whole; that is to say the relation between a whole and its elements. The totality in this sense represents a system with internal relationships or alternatively an entity that does not relate to anything outside of it – it is complete.

Despite the prevalence of the concept, it has not received systematic study notable exceptions being Lukacs, Martin Jay, and the author of History and totality John Grumley (?). This is in spite of the fact that the concept carries with it definite political importance.

The question of totality should interest any analysis of the present. One reason for this is it has been a point where epistemology and ontology coincide. Classical Marxism is one important instance of a union between an existent social reality and categories of reflection that arise within it. In Lukacs the conflict between classes, the practice of the working class, is a recovering of an objective unity between the subject and his own objective ground of being. Totality qua epistemological category, is the methodological principle of thought’s abstraction from its fundamental identity with what is (in what ever shape it presents itself e.g. Bourgeois naturalism, the state, nationalism, the imperatives of capital), to its reconcilliation in the actualised potential of social consciousness realising itself in social being. Dictatorship of the proletariat.

Uses of totality

Longitudinal: This refers to a totality that covers an expanse of historical time – it is a periodisation, or a linearity.

Expressive: Expressive totalities can be historical too – it refers to subject based explanations of contradictory social reality

Centred: Centred totality can be expressive and historical. By centred it is meant that there distinct point of origin of reality, or locus where it is concentrated. Centred totalities are often vertical hierachies. Both expresive and centred totalities have organic or synthetic unity.

De-centred: De-centred applies to diffuse and multitple determinations of the totality. Totality is the combination of different layers an orders of semi-autonomous but overdetermined singularities.

Closed: A closed totality is just a rigid static and simple form of longitudinal expressive or centred totality. This is not really a defined category, but commonly used to describe something as self-contained and impervious.

Open: Open totality tends to refer to assemblages that have no outer limit, no definition nor barrier to contain them. Open totalitites are potentials.

Simple: Simple means that there is no division nor contradiction within the totality.

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Resources	Negri and Hardt “Totalities” excerpt from Empire	The premature obituary of the book
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