Abstract

Tendencies of dematerialisation observable in capitalism from the 1960s, from political economy (the rise of immaterial labour) to artistic practices (the emergence of conceptual art) have prompted attempts at rethinking materialism. These attempts centre around the search for a materialism capable of accounting for the symbiotic relations between material objects and their idealisations. Recent trends in the so-called material turn, such as Karen Barad’s Agential Realism, could be read as responding to this challenge. Yet the peculiar absence of Marx from these theories creates a considerable blind spot. The Soviet thinker Evald Ilyenkov’s 1962 article “The Ideal” offers a dialectical perspective into these problems by returning to Marx’s broad interpretation of the concept of the ideal as a form of social practice. By stressing the objectivity of ideal forms against their individualist understanding as mental projections, or positivist views that reduce it to the neural structure of the brain, Ilyenkov posits the irreducibly social nature of knowledge. Through an account of sense-perceptions, which are understood as possessing a social history, Ilyenkov opens the question of how ideal and material parameters converge in a communist society. The political programme underlying his interpretation of the ideal could be defined as a struggle for cultural forms that do not oppose the subject as something alien and hostile but become its direct function.