Perennial Suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence, it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, or who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.
- Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 362-63
The fires of Auschwitz are hot to the touch in “Holocaust,” which subsumes them by means of “holocaust” as a metonymy for the suffering not only in the camps but also at their borders. It is an exercise in what Theodor W. Adorno called “identity thinking”—the subsumption of a particular object under a universal concept. Giovanna Borradori writes in Tiny Sparks of Contingency: On the Aesthetics of Human Rights that, “identity thinking, for him, objectifies propositional content because it uses predication as the master key for identification. In other words, it pretends to unlock the particularity of an entity by the enumeration of its contents” (Borradori 2012, 160). In the case of “Holocaust,” we can see identity thinking when we reduce it to “holocaust” and “during the first half of the twentieth century” and “in Europe” and “perpetuated by the Nazi party on racial and ethnic minorities”—that is to say, we can see identity thinking in historical thinking. By contrast, “Holocaust” exceeds identity thinking by both succeeding and failing in the representation of its content.
The question posed by “Holocaust” is radically open. It implicates the questions I have just iterated (who, what, when, where), but also additional questions in a way that problematizes its original propositional content. Because engaged in representation, “Holocaust” addresses itself to a real object no longer present. This reification of nothingness opens “Holocaust” to radical doubt and, thus, to critical inquiry (and, I note, to irresponsible, irresponsive denial). That “Holocaust” is both irreducibly contingent and indescribably horrible reveals a totalizing system—still in place—of dehumanization.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Hamburg: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966.
Borradori, Giovanna. Tiny Sparks of Contingency: On the Aesthetics of Human Rights. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012.
Felstiner, John, and Paul Celan. "Deathfugue." In Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling, he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us to play up for the dance.
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
He shouts jab the earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are so blue
jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta
your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays his vipers
He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise then as smoke to the sky
you'll have a grave then in the clouds there you won't lie too cramped
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue
he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Shulamith
The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoē/bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.
- Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 12
“The Working Day” as a chapter in Capital and as an object of study records a history of conflict between labor and capital over the length of the working day. The two actors on the stage, the laborer and the capitalist, want opposite things. The laborer wants to work only the number of hours required to pay for his own subsistence; the capitalist wants him to work to death in service of production.[1] This is the case for several reasons: first, because the capitalist buys labor power at a subsistence rate; second, because labor can produce more than it consumes; third; because the products of labor belong to the capitalist; fourth, because the capitalist treats the laborer as an unskilled, undifferentiated, infinitely replaceable body; fifth, because the laborer requires a set number of hours of rest to maintain the labor power he sells; finally, because the capitalist is he who pursues profits to the exclusion of other goals. All this incentivizes the capitalist to work laborers to death as quickly as possible against their desire to prolong the time they can sell their labor power, and “between equal rights, force decides” (Marx 1906, 259). “The Working Day” prima facie represents this “protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working class” (Ibid, 327).
I take this struggle to camouflage another: the struggle of capitalists with capitalism itself. That this is not explicit I take to be evidence that Marx’s writing prefigures deconstruction. I do not mean to suggest a similarity or friendship between the method Marx employs and deconstruction. My claim is more radical: that Marx deconstructed the relationship between labor and capital, and that it is merely the date and situation in which he wrote that bars his entry into the school of deconstruction. The method common to Marx and deconstructive thinkers is as follows: first, they establish a binary opposition between thesis and antithesis. Second, they invert that relation by showing the way in which the thesis responds to the antithesis, and the way in which conceptual commitments to the position of the thesis encrypt this relationship. Third and finally, they show the aporetic inconceivability of the opposition once inverted. That an opposition, when not necessarily entangled, has a contingent and therefore political conceptual superstructure lends material stakes to this project.
Marx’s history of capital presented in chapters VI-IX should convince us that capital bears the responsibilities of a thesis in Marx’s work. Capital reproduces; its reproductive cycle includes the reproduction of those things necessary for its own maintenance, including commodities, which themselves include both money and labor power. The production of a system of divided labor by capital produces as its byproduct the figure of the laborer. Just as the slave would not exist as such if enslaved to no master, the laborer exists only in his productive capacity and is therefore legible only under the aspect of the capitalist’s profit motive.
“The Working Day” inverts this dialectic. “The first birthright of capital,” writes Marx, “is equal exploitation of labour-power by all capitalists” (Ibid, 320). The capitalist is a parasite; he cannot produce commodities without the labor-power he buys, for he outsources the production of the resources he himself requires for subsistence to the laborer. We are now forced to say that the capitalist produces the laborer and that the laborer produces the capitalist. The capitalist cannot see this; it is as natural for him to think himself epistemologically unfettered as it is for the commodity trader who only sees C-C in the circulation of commodities.[2] Just as the form of money is necessarily mistaken by the commodity trader, I believe that law, rendered by Marx as the result of a competition similar in kind to the war between buyer and seller theorized by classical economists, is the organizing principle extimate with capitalists and labor.[3]
Marx seems to deliver his famous panacea at “The Working Day”’s end in ironic despair:
For ‘protection’ against ‘the serpent of their agonies,’ the labourers must put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’ comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear ‘when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins (Marx 1906, 330).
Marx furnishes evidence against this claim throughout the chapter. A law—legislated by the capitalist—limiting the working day is not omnipotent. Marx shows the way in which it merely guides the capitalist as he exploits the laborer. It is not voluntary; not only are the legislators capitalists, but the apparent bargain struck by labor is merely an expression of the limits of capital.[4] Law does not protect labor from agony so much as indicate the limits of tolerability. For a laborer to sell labor power to a capitalist is to sell himself and his family into slavery and death; the law represents the terms by which he has agreed to do so under coercive threat—that threat being death, as the laborer would not exist if vampiric capitalist whom he feeds with his blood failed to produce him.
We can now see the internal logic of laws regulating the working day as they existed at the time of Capital’s writing. Legislated by capital, they serve to protect its body, for “the capitalistic mode of production (essentially the production of surplus value, the absorption of surplus labor), produces…not only the deterioration of human labour-power…It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself” (Ibid, 292). The law, which appears as a compromise between two opposing forces, is in face the trace of an organizing principle of capitalistic self-preservation.
We should not give up on law, for Marx’s reasoning also makes conceivable a post-capitalist future still governed by the rule of law. Just as C-M-C opened the question “how is money produced,” C/L-L-C/L implies that the view I have just elaborated is a misapprehension of the production of law. This is not to discount its material reality—just as the commodities trader comports himself as though he were governed by C-C, even producing theory to that effect (classical economics), Marx has described a material reality as produced by an incoherent ideology. He has also opened the space for a figure whose general law looks something like L-C/L-L’, and, because no longer arbitrary, for a truly just law produced by someone who produces law just as the capitalist produces money—intentionally, and with a goal, which would in this case be not profit but justice.
[1]The laborer and the capitalist are male characters in Marx, so I will refer to them as such.
[2]“Vulgar economy which, indeed, ‘has really learnt nothing,’ here as everywhere sticks to appearances in opposition to the law which regulates and explains them. In opposition to Spinoza, it believes that ‘ignorance is a sufficient reason’” (Ibid, 336).
[3]A Marxist rendering of the formula I see would look something like C/L-L-C/L.
[4]For example, regarding the Factory Act of August 5th, 1850: “it did not, however, prevent them [the capitalists], during 10 years, from spinning silk 10 hours a day out of the blood of little children …” (Ibid, 321).
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Translated by Daniel Roazen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Vol. 1. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1906.
To copy or represent an object, which is to say to project its features onto another surface, opens two sets of critical questions. The first set pertains to the method of projection, and it contains questions responsive to materials and practice. It is a subset of the second set, which pertains to what representation itself requires. That set contains all the first set’s questions in addition to those regarding the constitution of the object to be copied itself qua object of knowledge, which is to say questions regarding its conceptual. The monastic church figured in the appendix below is a copy of Old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, completed circa 360 CE (fig. 1-3). Its architectural presence is dissimilar to that church, but that dissimilarity—in program, disposition of volumes, and massing—is haunted by the specter of the older structure. A close reading of the building will reveal that specter’s trace, thereby circumscribing each building, establishing their unity by means of constituting the epoché of each.[1] We must pass through the first set of questions before addressing the second, for the second seems to me a commentary on the first, though, as we will see, it also renders its subset conceivable.
The plan of St. Peter’s prefigures the monastic church’s plan. Reconstruction is necessary, for the monastic church’s absences are as palpable as its presences. The most notable absence is that of the majority of a nave, which survives only in ruin: low walls extend from the façade, rising to a more substantial wall at their terminus. The nave may have terminated in an atrium or in the the two towers of a Westwork; without further figuration, we are left to guess at what sort of staging device the building employed, though the debt to St. Peters decrypts the trace of some device or another. Indeed, even bracketing that consideration, it is almost impossible that the façade as pictured was the building’s original, given the featureless mass that contrasts with the nave aisle windows. The remainder of the building is a remarkable mixture of presence and absence-indicating commentary.
Nave, transept, aisles, tower, clerestory, apsidioles, choir, ambulatory, apse, wooden roof; the monastic church’s outer massing articulates the presence of a traditional basilican vocabulary. The building is, however, hardly monolithic in a historical sense. The variety of building styles visible in the church’s structure decrypt what must have been a lengthy construction history. The northern and southern façades of the nave are petit appareil constructions, as are the façades of the east end. The east end’s piers, however, are of more sophisticated masonry, and two—one on each side—are flying buttresses, technology more advanced than that found anywhere else within the structure. The apse’s piers also contrast with those of the nave, as do its windows. The tower might be the most incongruous feature of the building; its stonework and articulated blind galleries responds to nothing else on the exterior. It, like so much of the monastic church, is clearly of later construction, a revision to the basilican plan.
The monastic church’s interior is a similar amalgamation, and its features depart more drastically from those of St. Peter’s. The apse, whose intricate window exteriors contrast with those found elsewhere on the church’s façades, is of different stonework than the remainder of the building, and its ribbed vaults reflect its windows in their unresponsiveness to the remainder of the interior.[2] That interior does, however, recall the Romanesque articulation on the tower’s exterior. Compound piers respond to arches with recessed orders; engaged shafts subsume blind wall arcades and arcaded galleries under a structural unity, a unity also reflected in the arches in the tribune gallery (something like a blind arcade appears on the nave’s exterior—more so on the southern end than the northern—but the lack of ornamentation indicates that the two features are not responsive to one another). The groin vault of the crossing, however, remains an incongruity—though the aisles also feature groin vaulting, the roof itself is a wooden structure.
The monastic church’s construction history is one of extensive revision, but the multitude of structural and aesthetic tensions that process produced sublimate into the unity we call the monastic church by means of of their reference to an original structure—St. Peter’s—here instantiated most clearly by that wooden roof covering a conventional plan: nave, transept, and clerestory windows (that wooden roof is the monastic church’s most explicit quotation of St. Peter’s, which employed an identical structure).[3] The legibility of the monastic church qua basilica despite incongruities is a good metaphor for the legibility of the many structures we call basilicae qua basilicae. Old St. Peter’s was a Roman basilica, or general meeting place (Stalley 1999, 21). That generalized space proved suitable enough for early Christian liturgy, which, when illegal, occurred in private homes whose architecture was protean. Its genesis was not sacred, nor was it a genesis in a strict sense; it was produced as such by the veneration of future builders who sited it as their object of study and representation.
The lengths to which builders and patrons went to preserve the basilican form, aided and abetted by a liturgy that became the basilican architectonic, is the essential point that guided the building and unifies the study of the diverse group of buildings studied together as sacred architecture. There is therefore something like Walter Benjamin’s constellation, produced not by stars but by the gaze, in the archive of basilicae. The scholarship of builders and scholars produced that archive, which features both the original, Old St. Peter’s and its copies, like the monastic church. To study a building qua basilica is to study the topography of an episteme made legible by the thought-figure of the copy.
[1]“Mensch, es spukt in deinem Kopfe. Commonly translated as ‘Man, there are spectres in your head!’…Es spukt. difficult to translate, as we have been saying. It is a question of ghost and haunting, to be sure, but what else? The German idiom seems to name the ghostly return but it names it in a verbal form. The latter does not say that there is some revenant, spectre, or ghost; it does not say that there is some apparition, der Spuk, nor even that it appears, but that ‘it ghosts,’ ‘it apparitions.’ It is a matter [Il s'agit], in the neutrality of this altogether impersonal verbal form, of something or someone, neither someone nor something, of a ‘one’ that does not act. It is a matter rather of the passive movement of an apprehension, of an apprehensive movement ready to welcome, but where? In the head? What is the head before this apprehension that it cannot even contain? And what if the head, which is neither the subject, nor consciousness, nor the ego, nor the brain, were defined first of all by the possibility of such an experience, and by the very thing that it can neither contain, nor delimit, by the indefiniteness of the ‘es spukt?’” (Derrida 1994, § B pp. 6-7). The quotation, blasted from The German Ideology by Jacques Derrida, begs a circumscription of the “it” doing the haunting—for only common sense allows us to dismiss the question with the answer “a ghost” (how to we come to know the features of the ghost doing the haunting?)—in a way similar to what I mean here.
[2]Its status as appendage provides a partial answer to the absence of a crypt in a church whose nave aisles prefigure such a structure.
[3]Another quotation: compound piers replace unarticulated ones, which in turn replace St. Peter’s monolithic columns.
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. "Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International." Marxists Internet Archive. 1994. Accessed October 4, 2015. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida2.htm.
Stalley, R. A. "The Christian Basilica." In Early Medieval Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
- Jacques Derrida, European Graduate School [apocryphal]
Marx’s work in chapter VII of Capital responds to the conceptual research he completes earlier in the book. After six chapters of suspense and incoherency, Marx explains his theory of the profit motive governing the expansion of capitalism: that of surplus value. The positive description of surplus value characterizes the chapter—Marx tells us that it is his most important discovery to that point in his plot, and I see no reason to disbelieve him.
The way in which he explains himself is, I think, at least or more important than the theory of surplus-value itself. Remarkably, it is not delivered as a proof. The introduction of a positive theory of surplus value is a moment to which Marx has built for many chapters; that he would not grant it the rigor of a formal proof is striking. This presence of an absence of method marks surplus value as a reorienting moment in Marx’s texts; Marx leaves it to us, his readers, to extract from his work a method that permits surplus value the rigor necessary for it to play its decisive role—in other words, to reconstruct his proof. This reconstruction should alert us (if we were not already convinced of this) that Marx’s discourse is radically different than that of the metaphysicians and the classical economics to whom he responds. Indeed, we might find ourselves alienated from the Marx of popular imagination.
Our first clue on the path to a symptomatic reading is Marx’s note that the capitalist himself, Mr. Moneybags, is a dramatis personae (Marx 1906, 196).[1] Marx, writing a character, imports a storyteller’s voice into his dialogue; in doing so, he alerts us to the alterity of his object from that of classical economists. The storyteller voice opens different questions than those found in metaphysical writing: his readers need not only be concerned with the object of Marx’s study, but of the conceptual superstructure that produced it. “Marx asserts such and such about the capitalist,” for example, seems a settled point. Such statements may be true in a strict sense, but they are also uncontroversial. David Foster Wallace, for example, asserts that James Orrin Incandenza committed suicide by microwave. That claim (about David Foster Wallace) responds to the question, “Who wrote about Incandenza’s suicide?” The character’s actions are uncontroversial; literary criticism responds instead to the stakes of those actions (Why did Incandenza commit suicide, and why by microwave?).
Marx justifies the capitalist’s claim on surplus value in the voice of that very figure:
Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the labourer, its immediate producer. Suppose that a capitalist pays for a day’s labour-power at its value; then the right to use that power for a day belongs to him, just as much as the right to use any other commodity, such as a horse that he has hired for the day. To the purchaser of a commodity belongs its use, and the seller of labour-power, by giving his labour, does no more, in reality, than part with the use-value that he has sold. From the instant he steps into the workshop, the use-value of his labour-power, and therefore also its use, which is labour, belongs to the capitalist…The labour-process is a process between things that the capitalist has purchased, things that have become his property. The product of this process belongs, therefore, to him, just as much as does the wine which is the product of a process of fermentation completed in his cellar (Ibid, 206).
This voice is dissimilar to the Marx found in the Communist Manifesto; its tone recalls instead the descriptive voice Marx uses at his least ironic moments—in Capital’s opening paragraph, for example (Ibid, 41). We know that Marx’s voice shares an epistemological stance—a voice—with the capitalist because the figure of the capitalist, Mr. Moneybags, knows his epistemological stance in a way foreign to the linen seller (Marx notes nothing invisible in M-C-M’). Marx at his most lucid also appears to overlook nothing in his study.
This should trouble us. Marx takes special care to illustrate the limits of the commodity trader’s epistemological stance and the way in which those limits prevent the commodity trader from recognizing that they overlook essential features of commodities, their object of study. I believe this to be the rationale behind Marx’s rhetorical device, the importation of the dramatic voice. Strictly metaphysical/philosophical/economic reconstructions of Marx’s claims, by way of contrast, open questions that are not themselves metaphysical. The difference instantiates in the object of the claim. Read metaphysically, claims like “The general law of capital is M-C-M’” supposes not only that there is a general law of capital, but that it is in reality something other than M-C-M’ and that there is a man who thinks M-C-M’ to be the best possible representation of the law. Metaphysical readings of Marx, in short, take him to be writing on an object absent from his text. I therefore take Marx’s invocation of the dramatic voice to be a rhetorical tool that shifts the object of his study away from that of the classical economists, which seems committed to a Platonic superstructure (we see these organizing principles by identifying the limits of the discourse).
The evaporation of the paradox of surplus value that Marx illustrates in chapter VI licenses optimism with regard to the dramatis personae as a route out of the Platonic fly bottle. The remarkable form of Marx’s writing is legible as an attempt to constitute an object for study that reveals the trace of its organizing principles. Marx has already shown the way in which money produces not only the concept of the commodity but also the market on which commodities are traded (its formula is C-M-C and its material conditions are commodity traders like the figure of the linen seller). He also showed the way in which money hid itself from the subjects it produced such that, to the linen seller, the market appears in a C-C form (Ibid, 118). His final move was to show the way in which a certain reading of a C-C market reveals the trace of the absent M, and then to deduce what must be true about the persona who can identify that trace. That persona is Mr. Moneybags. By drawing a continuity between Mr. Moneybags and the commodity trader, Marx indicates that Mr. Moneybags and Marx’s study itself (because identical episteme) are both open to the same methods of inquiry.[2]
This reading of Marx’s project seems to me a radical departure from those of his classical interpreters. I take such readings to evaluate Capital as an anthropological commentary either on Smith and Ricardo or Hegel, or both. Though I do not contest that Marx read those texts, I hope with this reading to complicate the border between scholar and object of study, thereby radically opening objects from the history of philosophy to a re-reading and identifying the recursive potentials of philosophical study.
[1] I steal the term symptomatic reading from Louis Althusser, who means by it something like reading Capital as philosophers. To do so, “…is precisely to question the specific object of a specific discourse; it is therefore to put to the discourse-object [sic] unity the question of the epistemological status which distinguishes this particular form of unity from other forms of discourse-object unity” (Althusser 1997, 15).
[2] “…we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist…” (Ibid, 196).
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading "Capital" 1st ed. London: Verso Books, 1997.
Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Vol. 1. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1906.
Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis, Sainte Marie de La Tourette, Lyon 1956-1960
For a collector–and I mean a real collector…ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.
It is therefore impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation.
We have, therefore, got a double result.
-Karl Marx, Capital, 1906 p. 184
A recurring theme in Marx’s Capital is the way in which the exchange of commodity for commodity both masks and is produced by money. The linen seller at the market in chapter two cannot see money for what it is—to him it it merely an arbitrary sign representing his singular exchange with the bible seller (Marx 1906, 118). Marx’s innovation was to see the money form that prefigured that market exchange: Commodity-Money-Commodity, not merely Commodity-Commodity. He showed both why the transubstantiation of commodities to money as a commodity among other commodities was a necessary component of exchange and why one must perform a historical analysis to uncover its trace in everyday exchanges, which tend to hide the real form of money and produce the smokescreen of its sign, a process he calls the confusion of exchange value for use value.
Marx’s project in chapter V is to refine this story. The real form of money, whose origin he’d mentioned as “foreign” in chapter II, really does look incoherent from the standpoint of exchange. Indeed, from that standpoint exchange itself seems absurd, as the phenomenon that enables the market is also inconceivable from within it (Ibid, 184). Marx therefore introduces “our friend Moneybags” the capitalist who hungers for profit in the form of surplus value (Ibid). It is from Moneybags’ standpoint that one can conceive of money and, therefore, the economy.
Marx’s tasks are the generation of then the establishment of the necessity of surplus value to a systemic understanding of commodity exchange. He has already shown the way in which commodities are illegible without the universal money form. He has also shown the way in which money tends toward accumulation in hoards. His task is therefore to offer a concept explaining how and why money remains in circulation. Surplus value plays that explanatory role. Surplus value is the increment of advance in Marx’s equation “M[oney]-C[ommodity]-M[oney]’, where M’=M+M=the original sum advanced, plus an increment” (Ibid, 168). Such an equation would allow the holder of a hoard to transmute $100 to $110 were they to buy a commodity with the intent of selling it. That would be ample inducement for the breakup of the hoards of rational actors. Marx spends the majority of chapters IV and V showing why the inducement he’s generated must take that form—the exchange of commodities for commodities, he will show, cannot produce any profit.
Marx distills the position against which he sets himself in a quote from Condillac:
“It is not true that on an exchange of commodities we give value for value. On the contrary, each of the two contracting parties in every case, gives a less for a greater value…If we really exchanged equal values, neither party could make a profit. And yet, they both gain, or ought to gain. Why?…What is more to one is less to the other, and vice versa” (Ibid, 177).
Marx holds both that this sort of mutual cheating is the apparent source of profit within the circulation of commodities and that it is not a source of profit. This disjunction between appearance and reality stems from a conceptual confusion necessary to the C-M-C form. That confusion is one of use value for exchange value. Though the commodity for which each exchanger bids might have a greater use value to them than the one they offer to the markets, Marx has already shown that the possibility of commodity exchange rests upon the equivalent exchange value of one commodity as denominated relatively in the other, and of both as denominated in money (Ibid, 176). That Marx’s linen seller and bible seller can be said to have exchanged $20 for $20 on those terms despite seeming to have both cheated the other out of surplus value is why Marx believes there to be no real profit motive within the C-M-C form.
Marx offers a multitude of cases against those who, claiming profits to be made from savvy commodity training, mistake the means by which commodity markets settle upon their average price for a subversion of those markets’ normal function. His conceptual analysis demystifies sellers who consistently sell their wares too dearly and buyers who acquire goods too cheaply: both are impossible within a rational market, which would correct for such tricks by raising the prices of the goods the seller must buy or lowering those of the goods the buyer must sell, respectively (Ibid, 179). This is so because “the material variety of…commodities is the material incentive to the act of exchange, and makes buyers and sellers mutually dependent, because none of them possesses the object of his own wants, and each holds in his hand the object of another’s wants” (Ibid, 178). Those who, like Condillac, mistakenly see a profit to be made in the C-M-C form (which would appear to them as C-C) mistakenly assume that, “in a society, in which the production of commodities is well developed, each producer produces his own means of subsistence, and throws into circulation only the excess over his own requirements” (Ibid, 177). To a commodity trader, exchange value is the background against which the division of labor producing specialized, alienated use-values is legible. This is just to say that the existence of the exchange of commodities requires money, and that this exchange is only legible insofar as it is rational.
Legible, that is, to we phenomenologists; were those who exchanged commodities for commodities to recognize their exchange as the exchange of an identical money-commodity, it seems as though they would find no reason to engage in the act. Conceptual confusion of use value for exchange value is therefore necessary to the genesis of exchange (Classical economics were right to express the common ground of exchange as that of mutually antagonistic ambitions). It is therefore the trace of the profit motive that drives commodity exchange, though nowhere in the exchange of commodities C-M-C is a profit to be found.
We are now in a position to understand Marx when he says, “…that surplus-value cannot be created by circulation, and, therefore, that in its formation, something must take place in the background, which is not apparent in the circulation itself” (Ibid, 183). That background process is the formula of Capital, M-C-M’, whose trace is the profit motive. The figure of the formula C-M-C was the laborer, but Marx believes that he has identified a new subject who reads the world in terms of M-C-M’: the capitalist, Mr. Moneybags, who Marx identifies with the Jewish figures of the usurer and the merchant. Mr. Moneybags can see the lacunae that are present only in absence for the the laborer, from whom the general form of the formula C-M-C is masked by C-C and who is therefore unable to reckon with money insofar as they participate in the commodity exchange essential to their form of life. We can tell that this is the case because Marx shows surplus value to be prima facie apparent in the formula M-C-M’, unlike money, which must be teased out of C-C. To study the figure of the capitalist, who is present only at the margins of classical economic discourse, is therefore—Marx thinks—to reckon fully with the present age that he himself produces.
Works Cited
Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Vol. 1. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1906.
The exchange of monies implies contradictory and mutually exclusive conditions.
- Karl Marx, Capital, 1906 p. 116
Marx continues his interrogation of the genesis of money in the third chapter of Capital, entitled, “Money, or the circulation of commodities.” In chapter two, he spoke of the “magic of money” (Marx 1906, 105). That phenomenon seems to be the pricing function of money, which is to say its ability to denominate the price of commodities traded on the market. Marx demonstrates in the first section of his third chapter the way in which classical economics mistakes the nature of price, viz. as a representation of an agreement between buyer and seller. Having marshaled the logic of that mistake, which is parasitic upon the nature of the money form introduced in chapter two, he then narrates a different way in which commodities come to have prices: “price is the money-name of the labour realised in the commodity…but although price…is the exponent of [the commodity’s] exchange ratio with money, it does not follow that the exponent of this exchange-ratio is necessarily the exponent of the magnitude of the commodity’s value” (Ibid, 114). Marx’s demonstration of this incoherency involves a novel anthropological investigation into the phenomenon of money.
This study is radically different from that done by the classical economists with whom Marx was partially in dialogue. The object of his study does not seem to be identical with that of classical economics as such; instead, it seems to be classical economics as it appears qua discourse. Marx does not relate his new narrative about money’s genesis because it is more coherent than that advanced by classical economics; instead, it takes the incoherencies in classical economics seriously. To bring out these two narratives more fully and, subsequently, to show why Marx is not merely a radical economist will be this essay’s tasks.
Marx’s text suggests that something about the position of classical economists within a classical economic discourse both produces the incoherencies inherent to their position and prevents a self-conscious reckoning with them. This is to say that classical economics qua discourse produces the problems it sets out to solve. Marx illustrates this mistake when he asks us to follow a linen-weaver to market, where he exchanges two pounds sterling of linen (of twenty pounds’ weight) for a Bible that is also valued at two pounds (weight unknown) (Ibid. 118). This “alienation of labor,” seems unmysterious to the linen-seller, for he has gone to market and substituted something with little use-value to him for something greater. “The result of the whole process is; so far as it concerns the objects themselves, C[ommodity]-C[ommodity], the exchange of one commodity for another, the circulation of materialized social labor” (Ibid, 119).
Those objects and that market are, however, if we follow Marx, not sui generis facts about how human socialize but are instead themselves produced by money. Marx thinks that money has two functions—pricing and use-value—and that they are as necessary to the exchange of commodities as they are incoherent. Price enables money to act as a universal commodity, facilitating exchange, which, as we saw in chapter two, is the way in which we recognize the use-value of diverse commodities (ostensibly the thing those with money wish to own) (Ibid, 115). Yet money in its pricing mode is abstracted from its legitimating, material substrate (one pound sterling, for example, is not simply a pound of sterling silver) (Ibid, 114). It has no price itself (Ibid, 107). It is instead a “cabalistic sign,” the “money-name of the labor realized in a commodity” (Ibid, 114-115). The exchange of commodities, C-C, cannot happen without money, but that money seems to be of a different substance than the objects of the very exchange it facilitates, bearing a mystical relationship to them. Though money, as we saw, evolved from a commodity (for Marx, gold), it now appears as a third phenomenon which both opens the space for exchange and delimits it. “If the conditions of production…remain constant, the same amount of social labour-time must, both before and after the change in price, be expended in the reproduction of a quarter of wheat. This circumstance depends neither on the will of the wheat producer, nor on that of the owners of other commodities” (Ibid, 114). It depends instead on the man (and for Marx it is always a man) with money always already in his pocket.
The question I see posed in Marx’s anecdote at the market is, “What relationship does an ideal, abstract concept like money bear on the material phenomenon of the commodity?” Put another way, Marx asks how we come to ask after the value of commodities, a question both made possible by and answered incoherently by money. The pressing nature of these questions is one of the political control those with money are able to assert over commodities, which seems itself both mystical and unassailable. Marx argues that it is an incoherent one, and that this incoherence has a historical basis. Marx notes that the C-C form of monetary exchange only appears as such to those with a stake in the market. Marx sees market transactions as proceeding C-M[oney]-C: “the exchange becomes an accomplished fact by two metamorphoses of opposite yet supplementary character—the conversion of the commodity into money, and the re-conversion of money into a commodity” (Ibid, 118). M intersperses itself into the equation by means of importation—of a developed currency system into a less-developed community (Ibid, 111). This is the locus of the sui generis appearance of prices, and the incoherence between price as money’s instantiation qua name of commodity: a heterotopic market that appears as a monolithic fact of human nature to those who do not study it properly for the traces of commodity left in money as it expresses price.
That, in short, is the historical phenomenon that Marx accuses classical economics of blindness to, on pain of dissolution as a discipline. This historicization of money and reification of its incoherencies poses grave problems for classical economists who would posit price as a representation of the agreement reached by buyers and sellers. Marx’s response to them, I would imagine, would sound something like an admonition that their science relies upon the unquestioned axiom of C-C exchange. This axiom would bar their view of money’s pricing function, which is only legible insofar as money exists ideally, which is to say in a coherently incoherent relation to commodities. (coherent under the aspect of history, incoherent under the aspect of logic) We are now in a position to understand Marx’s claims that: money is a social reality, and that it seems arbitrary. The question now becomes: where is Marx situated such that he can see the incoherent C-M-C form?
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading "Capital" 1st ed. London: Verso Books, 1997.
Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Vol. 1. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1906.
It is in section three of Capital’s first chapter where I find the most intriguing formulation of Marx’s initial project: “here, however, a task is set us…the task of tracing the genesis of this money form, of developing the expression of value implied in the value relation of commodities…to the dazzling money form” (Marx 1906, 55). This formulation locates a lacuna in classical economic discourse (which posits first that commodities have an inherent value because scarce, and second that money is a commodity representing that value) that the concept of money both opens and obscures (Althusser 1997, 21). That lacuna is the metaphysical nature of money itself. Marx argues that money is not only a commodity among commodities but also a commodity produced by the practice of exchanging commodities, a practice which itself produces the value of commodities (Marx 1906, 104). Inverting the classical economic paradigm, Marx therefore states that, “the value of commodities has a purely social reality” (Marx 1906, 55). As Marx follows this premise, he interrogates the empiricist presuppositions upon which classical economics rests and, finding moments of aporia, inaugurates a new discourse.
Interrogating the genesis of the money form with Marx, this essay proceeds in three stages. First, it will unpack Marx’s formulation of the metaphysical nature of commodities, viz. their production by “use value” and “exchange value.” Second, it will show the way in which those concepts, taken together, constitute a paradox. Third, it will show that a conceptual confusion as to the nature of value—Marx’s “riddle of money”—produces that paradox. The essay will conclude by discussing the implications of Marx’s interpretation of classical economics for that discourse.
When Marx defines the commodity as that which is “outside us…that by its properties satisfies some human want or another,” he is steering his readers away from the apolitical, empiricist stance on the metaphysical nature of commodities such as iron and paper taken by classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo (Ibid, 41). Whereas Smith and Ricardo imagined commodities as objects already existing in the world in some mode, sui generis, Marx notes that, for example, we would not call anything in the world a hammer were assemblages of wood and iron not used to drive nails, nor would we call anything wood were it not drawn from forests to form hammer handles, heat homes, and so on (Marx 1906, 44). Marx calls this means of apprehending commodities their use-value and contrasts it with the exchange value of the same.
Commodities, he notes, both facilitate labor and are, “the material depositories of exchange value” (Ibid, 43). The exchange of a given amount of one commodity for a given amount of another appears naïvely as an arbitrary relation determined at the time and place of barter. As Marx notes, however, exchange requires a ground of equivalency for the establishment of a commodity’s value (Ibid). That equivalency, which presumes an a priori absolute difference between the use values of the commodities to be exchanged, effaces of the material character of the labor that produced the commodity. In that way, exchange reveals monolithic human labor common to all commodities (Ibid, 45).
Having established two ways of thinking about commodities—as objects that satisfy human needs and objects exchangeable for one another, Marx moves to unify them: “it is not possible,” he thinks, “to express the value of linen in linen…the relative form of the value of the linen pre-supposes, therefore, the presence of some other commodity…under the form of the equivalent” (Ibid, 56). Marx seems to have established a paradox. The use value of a commodity arises from its particular form of labor, but that particularity is incomprehensible without the desire for a labor alien to it. That desire is itself incomprehensible without the recognition of a universal human labor that, if taken seriously, would undermine the concept of labors alien to one another and thereby the process of exchange (Ibid, 97). He also provides a way out: “commodities,” Marx explains, “do not take themselves to market” (Ibid).
We have now caught up with Marx in his fascination with the genesis of money. Marx, showing first the way in which human activity produces the material world and second the way in which commodities are paradoxical in nature, exposes the ways in which commodities instantiate in the world—namely by means of human beings producing objects without conceptual rigor. There is no paradox in that process, and this is what he means when he posits the social reality of commodities. Money is the point at which classical economic discourse self-undermines qua philosophically rigorous discourse, evaporating into a cloud of ideology. Tracing the genesis of money, Marx finds it to be an object whose use value is valuation, or the facilitation of exchange between different commodities. It is in that capacity the “crystallization” of classical economic ideology—and what’s more, the inauguration of a more rigorous epistemology that recognizes objects in the world as “crystallizations” of social processes rather than empirical facts displaying some spooky metaphysical property called reality. That more basic break with not only economics but the background of Western philosophical tradition is, I think, the project of Capital as a whole.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading "Capital" 1st ed. London: Verso Books, 1997.
Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Vol. 1. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1906.
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