Marx in Jargon
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Keston Sutherland
First Term: “Bourgeoisdom”
If ever Buffon’s word was true of any man it was in regard to Marx:
The style is the man—the style of Marx is Marx.
Wilhelm
Liebknecht, Karl Marx. Biographical
Memoirs.1
In his 1873 preface
to the second edition of Das Kapital,
Marx offers a brief report on the fortunes of his “critique of political
economy” following its first submission to the public in 1867. The report is
compact and polemical, dismissing in style the substance of a few
representatively negative reviews, succinctly exposing their arguments for mere
detractions—“with the skill of a great master of verbal fence,” as his English
gentlemen
What is at
stake in close attention to the letter of Marx’s text? Is it, in fact,
exclusively to the letter of the
text, what in the long tradition of German hermeneutics is called der Buchstabe, that this observation on
the word “bourgeoisdom” pays attention? Are we not really thinking about the
more complex and larger question of style? If we ask why Moore and Aveling
(with Engels’s editorial blessing) invented a jargon equivalent for Bürgertum when “bourgeoisie” had existed
in English for almost two hundred years, is our question relevant only to a
narrow discussion of translation practice, or is it a question about thinking
in Das Kapital and thinking in Capital? How does Marx’s own writing
help us to answer this question?
In his report
on the reception of the first edition of Das
Kapital, Marx wrote that the Wortführer
der deutschen Bourgeoisie, literally “the spokesmen of the German
bourgeoisie” (F: 98)—these doyens whom he brushes aside gently in the text of his preface with the mocking double
epithet “learned and unlearned,” only then instantly to savage them in a
stylish footnote as breimäuligen
Faselhänse, “mealy-mouthed babblers” (F: 98-99; MA: 20; MEGA II.8:
52)—these world leaders in words had berated [schelten] the style of
his book. Marx was very sensitive to this criticism; or at least, he was
sensitive to the possibility that its judgment of his book might be right, even
if he was not disposed to feel vulnerable to the attacking performance of that
judgment by the spokesmen of bourgeoisdom. “No one,” he wrote, “can feel the
literary shortcomings in Capital more
strongly than I myself.” (F: 99; MA 21; MEGA II.8: 52) The literary
shortcomings: die literarischen Mängel.
Why should a critique of political economy be vulnerable, as Marx felt that
volume one of Das Kapital was, to the
accusation of literary shortcomings, and why should no-one be able to feel
these shortcomings more strongly than Marx? In his 1885 preface to the first
edition of Das Kapital volume two,
Engels describes the “not finally polished” language of the notes by Marx left
to him after Marx’s death. They are in the “language…in which Marx used to make
his extracts: careless style full of colloquialisms, often containing coarsely
humorous expressions and phrases interspersed with English and French technical
terms.”5 In
his notes, at least, Marx relished doing jargon in different voices. For
Engels, as the editor and compositor of Marx’s great work, “careless style” is
a shortcoming in the obvious sense that it is the style of an unfinished text.
But volume one is a finished, “polished” work when Marx comments painfully on
its literary shortcomings. Where is the literary language in his book, and how
is Marx measuring its importance? Is there in Das Kapital an implicit appeal, not to a category of judgment supposedly belonging to its readers called
“aesthetic” judgment, but to their variously informed, variously experienced
and variously practiced taste for
literature?
Perhaps the
most discriminating among the Faselhänse will judge his shortcomings of style more justly than Marx himself could ever
judge them; but Marx says that no-one judges those shortcomings more severely [strenger beurteilen] than he does. It is
important to understand what this comment by Marx means. It is not a Lukácsian
or Althusserian “self-criticism” avant la
lettre. Marx is not announcing to the readers of the second edition of his
text the retraction of any part of its former content. There is no
disciplinarian monologue in which a trace of ideology latent in style is
confessed, exposed and eradicated. It is, on the contrary, a literary writer’s
expression of anguish over a failure of his own literary writing that he
recognizes but that he cannot simply emend. Why can he not simply emend it?
Because the failure recognized by Marx is a failure of style, and style is
successful when it is forceful, intensifying, illuminating and beautiful, and
language is not capable of being emended into intensity or into illumination.
These last
words do not sit altogether easily in criticism of Marx. Wilhelm Liebknecht
could still sing, in 1896, as in the passionate tones of threnody, of how
Marx’s “burning love of freedom” found “expression in flaming, annihilating,
elevating words”6;
but the admonition of the “revolutionary phrase” by Lenin later urged vigilance
against descent into rhapsody, and innumerable mocking references to the rotten
haloes and dazzling bad auras of poetic language made in common by authors as
unlike as Trotsky and Mayakovsky might seem almost to prohibit outright words
like “beauty” and “illumination” from serious discussion of Das Kapital.7 What really is the use of discussing the force of Marx’s language as distinct
from his theoretical propositions? Shouldn’t Marx’s comment about style be
taken for a pragmatic confession of failure to put across his ideas as
unambiguously as possible? What other failure of style could really matter to
Marx? Do we not give undue and even harmful prominence to the problem of style,
which may admittedly in some measure be ineliminable from any attempt to write
prose, when we dwell on this comment of his? Is all such dwelling really just
aesthetic idling, poisonous to the impulse and capacity to know injustice as
Marx meant for us to know it? Will it not always be at the expense of Marx’s theory that we focus on his style, just as it
was, in Goethe’s and Schiller’s view, at the expense of the spirit of Homer “as a whole” [als Ganzes] that Friedrich Wolf, the great philologist editor of
the Homeric texts and the first modern historian of their compositorial
construction, focused in his 1795 Prolegomena
to Homer on the fact that the Homeric texts then available were not those
that “flourished in the mouths of the Greeks,” but that they had been “altered,
interpolated, corrected, and emended from the times of Solon down to those of
the Alexandrians”?8 Is philologia, now as at the end of
the eighteenth century, in Marx’s case as in Homer’s, in competition with theoria for the resources of
intellectual loyalty?
Das Kapital is constructed in a way
that suggests how readers should begin thinking about these questions; but it
does require that anyone who thinks about them should at least be its reader
and not simply the curator of its concepts. It is constructed in parts that are
both stylistically and methodologically distinct; more importantly, it is
written in parts that are stylistically and methodologically disparate. Some
parts are more literarisch than
others. In his footnotes, for example, Marx clearly relishes the risk of style:
the learned and unlearned are there transfigured by alchemical subscript into
mealy-mouthed drivellers, no longer mere savants who are wrong in theory but
now the slaverers of their knowledge, disgusting to the sensitive aesthetic
ear. What does it mean that the first instance of direct satire against the Kleinbürger, “the petit bourgeois,” in Das Kapital occurs in a stylish footnote
to a technical and unambiguous discussion of relative forms of value? The Kleinbürger, Marx writes in subscript,
sees in the production of commodities the “Weltgipfel
menschlicher Freiheit und individueller Unabhängigkeit,” that is, in Moore
and Aveling’s Capital, “the ne plus
ultra of human freedom and individual independence,” or in Fowkes’s Capital, “the absolute summit of human
freedom and individual independence.” (MEGA II.8: 98; MA: 79; F: 161) Why is
this satirical portrait, which might also be called an exhibition of bathos,
mounted only in a footnote, and why in a potentially distracting footnote to a
passage of important economic exposition?9
The most
conspicuously literarisch part of Das Kapital, in which, if anywhere,
style is at explicit and significant risk of failure, is part one of volume
one. In particular, literary style is risked throughout the section of part one
called “Der Fetischcharakter der Ware und
sein Geheimnis,” that is, the fetish-character of commodities and its
secret (influentially mistranslated in both English versions as “fetishism of
commodities” and its secret, as if to suggest that the fetishism in question
were nothing more than a mode of apprehending commodities, rather than the
character of commodities themselves). This most literary part of Marx’s text is
the part that Louis Althusser commands his French readers to regard as “extremely harmful.”10 Das Kapital, Althusser loudly insists in
his own preface to it, is not, like that puerile literary work The German Ideology, in essence a “very
ambiguous” book; it is, and it is imperative that workers in particular
understand it to be, “a book of pure theory.”11 For
Althusser, there is, disastrously, jargon in Marx, especially in the section on
fetishism, but the real, pure Marx is never and categorically must not be in
jargon. What Marx called “literary shortcomings” are equivalent, on this view,
to “literature,” any trace and all of it. In the phantom, immaculately
conceptual language that would be fit to do the work of Althusser’s pure
theory, all style will be contamination. Karl Kautsky in his study of Marx’s economic
doctrines considered this most literary and stylish chapter on the
fetish-character of commodities “one of the most important in the book, to
which every student ought to pay special attention;”12 but
this is the same Kautsky later excommunicated by Lenin as a “renegade,” and
recommendations of this sort can only strengthen the scientific Marxist’s
resolve not to “give way to literature” (to borrow this phrase from an author
who knew how hilarious and insufferable it is).13 Kautsky
also judged, in 1887, that “it is precisely this chapter which has been most
neglected by the opponents, and even by the supporters, of the Marxian
doctrines.”14 If this was true in 1887, today the situation is the reverse. No part of Capital has received so much attention
from literary theorists as part one, section four. Literary theory has made
“commodity fetishism” one of its central and most prodigal motifs. And yet even
those literary theorists apparently most skeptical or dismissive of Althusser’s
disciplinary scaremongering (and comparable essays in repression) have
consistently treated—and still now do consistently treat—Capital, and part one, section four in particular, almost or
exactly as though it were “pure theory.” Literary theorists have done this even
when they have declared as a basic principle of its interpretation that Capital “is not just constative,
descriptive, truth-telling, but also performative, a speech act, a way of doing
things with words.”15 The merits and even the necessity of philologia have been recited in homage to the literary qualities of Marx’s writing, but
this very homage has tended to invoke philology only in order then to justify the invocation in theoretical
terms, rather than in order to reflect on the meaning of the text
philologically.
I want to
suggest in this article a number of reasons why Capital has been read, and is still now read, as “pure theory,” in
ways that have in practice eliminated the problem of style from its
interpretation despite numerous attempts to insist on the significance of that
problem and even to formulate it; and I then want to discuss the style of the
two texts of Capital and the style of Das Kapital, and of part one, section four in particular. I hope to
show through this discussion, first, that Marx was the author not simply of a
theory of capital and of social existence under capital but also of an
immensely daring and complicated satire
of social existence under capital, and that his analysis of “Der Fetischcharakter der Ware und sein
Geheimnis” is, long before Debord conceptualised the term, a work of
sustained, aggressively satirical “détournement”
in which risks and failures of style are arguments in themselves, irreducible
to theoretical propositions;16 and secondly, that resistance to philological interpretation of Marx among
literary theorists, whether principled or unconscious, has contributed to a
major misunderstanding of one of the most important ideas in Das Kapital.
Second Term: “Gallerte”
Conceived purely as a category of natural need, hunger can be
quenched with grasshoppers and gnat-cakes, which many savages consume. But it
is essential to the concrete hunger of civilized people that they should get
something to eat which they do not find disgusting. In disgust and its opposite
is reflected the whole of history.
Theodor Adorno, ‘Theses on Need.’17
The
misunderstood idea in Das Kapital is
the idea that “abstrakt menschliche Arbeit” is a “bloße
Gallerte unterschiedsloser menschlicher Arbeit.” (MEGA II.8: 70) One reason why this idea in Das Kapital has been misunderstood by
readers of Capital is that it is not
present in Capital. Moore and Aveling
translate Marx’s phrase as “human labour in the abstract…a mere congelation of
homogeneous human labour.” (MA: 45) Fowkes writes “human labour in the
abstract…merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour.” (F: 128)
These are mistranslations that cannot adequately be described as mere
shortcomings in style; as this division of my article will show, they utterly
transform the meaning of one of Marx’s most important ideas and the thinking that it makes possible.
Why then are they accepted by readers of Marx as though they did not transform
his thinking? Because, I will suggest, Marx has been read, and continues now to
be read, as though his thinking had nothing to do with literariness and with
style, not at least in any radical sense. A little attrition of figurative or
tonal particularity in the passage from text to commentary can be regarded as
trivial from the perspective of “pure theory” and its higher interpretive
protocols. In other words, so long as Marx’s concepts can be specified, Marx’s
style need only be enjoyed.
The most important way in which the meaning of
Marx’s thinking is transformed, not only by his translators, but likewise and
as though collaboratively by current literary theorists, is through their
elimination of satire from Capital.
Ideas not merely expressed by Marx, but pressed by him inextricably into the
thick of a complex satire intended for a complex and divided audience, are
rescued from that pressure and paraphrased into a form fit for “use” in Marxist
cultural criticism. The elimination of satire is not obviously a conscious
decision made by translators and theorists. More probably, it is negligence
resulting from a rival solicitude. Commentary on “abstract human labour” in the
English translations of Marx and in literary theoretical interpretation of Capital is dominated by solicitude for
conceptual literalism. Readers of Marx want to get the concepts exactly right.
Commentary is dominated by that solicitude to the point where Marx’s risks in
style, his seizure, infiltration and parodic reuse of what he called “the
jargon of Political Economy,” are not simply ignored but are programmatically
decontextualized and obliviated.18 The
product is a text boiled down from its original state of internal generic
disintegration, stripped of its difficult collage of the poetic, the scientific
and the jargonistic within individual
sentences and ideas, its constitutive ambiguity and, most important of all,
its satire, and transformed into a mere array of undifferentiated concepts for
theoretical consumption.
Capital does not include the idea, central to Das Kapital, that “abstrakt
menschliche Arbeit” is a “bloße Gallerte unterschiedsloser menschlicher
Arbeit.” It includes instead the
substitute idea that “human labour in the abstract” is “a mere congelation of
homogeneous human labour.” This substitute, imposed by Moore and Aveling and
continued by Fowkes, has the considerable advantage that its conceptual content
is much easier to specify than the conceptual content of Marx’s original
phrase. Moore and Aveling’s extremely influential account of abstract human
labor is as follows. Human labor described as having, in effect, a single
origin (“homogeneous”), since we cannot see the multitude of its real origins
in the commodities that are its products, is frozen in commodities: it is a “congelation,” from the Latin verb congelare, “to freeze together,” and the
Latin noun gelum, “frost.”19 Human
labor is abstract when it is frozen: lifeless, cold and immobilized. The
important word used in Das Kapital to
describe the opposite condition of labor, that is, unabstract, living human
labor, must then be flüssig,
“flowing,” as when Marx writes that “Menschliche
Arbeitskraft im flüssigen Zustand oder menschliche Arbeit bildet Wert, aber ist
nicht Wert:” “Human labour-power in motion, or human labour, creates value,
but is not itself value,” or “Human labour-power in its fluid state, or human labour,
creates value, but is not itself value.” (MEGA II.8: 82; MA: 59; F: 142) This
use of flüssig in Das Kapital is no doubt significant, and
it of course is used by Marx to describe the lived experience of labor that is
not represented in “abstract human labour.”20 But
whereas “flüssig” is a direct antonym of “congealed” and of “frozen,” “flüssig”
is not a direct antonym of the word that Moore and Aveling and Fowkes translate
as “mere congelation” and as “congealed quantities.” The word they translate
using the abstract noun “congelation” is “Gallerte.” Gallerte is not an abstract noun. Gallerte is now, and was when Marx used
it, the name not of a process like freezing or coagulating, but of a specific
commodity. Marx’s German readers will not only have bought Gallerte, they will have eaten it; and in using the name of this
particular commodity to describe not “homogeneous” but, on the contrary, “unterschiedslose,” that is,
“undifferentiated” human labor, Marx’s intention is not simply to educate his
readers but also to disgust them.
The image of human labor reduced to Gallerte is disgusting. Gallerte is not ice, the natural and
primordial, solid and cold mass that can be transformed back into its original
condition by application of (e.g. human) warmth; it is a “halbfeste, zitternde,” that is, a “semisolid,
tremulous” comestible mass, inconvertible back into the “meat, bone [and] connective tissue” of the
various animals used indifferently to produce it. The sixth volume of the
popular encyclopaedia Meyers
Konversations-Lexicon, published in Leipzig in 1888, provides the following
entry.
Gallerte (also Gállert, old German galrat,
middle Latin galatina, Italian gelatina), the semisolid, tremulous mass
gained from cooling a concentrated glue solution. All animal substances that
yield glue when boiled can be used in the production of gallerte, that is to say, meat, bone, connective tissue, isinglass,
stag horns etc. It is easier to preserve gallerte by dissolving pure white glue (gelatine) in a sufficient quantity of water and
letting it cool there. It is used in various dishes, q.v. jelly. Vegetable gallerte of lichen consists of lichen starch or algae slime and water. In particular it
is prepared from Carragaheen, Icelandic moss and the like, and is often used,
mixed with other medicaments, in medicine. Vegetable gallerte made of fleshy, sour fruits consists of pectins and water.
Fruit jellies or jams are popular additions to other meals.21
The jargon in
this entry overflows. Gallerte is the
undifferentiated mess of glue-yielding “tierischen
Substanzen,” animal substances industrially boiled down into condiments,
that is, into “Beigaben,” “additions”
to meals rather than the staple nutrition of the meal itself. Marx says that
“abstract human labour,” that is, both the units of human labour reduced to
“labour power” and wages in the calculations of the capitalist (calculations
conducted in “the jargon of Political Economy”), and human labour in general as
“value” expressed in commodities, is “a mere Gallerte of undifferentiated human labour.” This “mere Gallerte” is the product not of
reversible freezing but of irreversible boiling followed by cooling. Abstract
human labour is, in Marx’s words, undifferentiated and not homogeneous, because it has a multitude of material origins
(many workers contribute to the manufacture of each commodity, as political
economy had recognised since Adam Smith’s analysis of the division of labour in The Wealth of Nations),22 but these multiple origins cannot be separately distinguished in the commodity
which is the product of the aggregate of their activity. All that is meat melts
into bone, and vice versa; and no mere act of scrutiny, however analytic or
moral, is capable of reversing the industrial process of that deliquescence.
It is
important to recognise that this account of abstract human labour in Das Kapital is not just an isolated
instance of merely graphic metonymy. Marx does not simply use the word Gallerte as literary flavouring to his
theory, a delectable condiment to the staple nutrition of concepts. It is not a
word that can be separated out from the sentence that accommodates it and
enjoyed as style rather than specified as a concept. On the contrary, it
changes the meaning of other passages in the text. It makes possible part of
the thinking that happens later on in Das
Kapital. The image of human labour as Gallerte brings most forcefully to mind not the antonymical word flüssig and its substratum of literary echoes in the metaphysical
tradition of Heraclitus, but another passage in Das Kapital, namely, the passage where Marx insists that labour is
in reality a “…produktive Verausgabung von menschlichem Hirn, Muskel, Nerv, Hand, usw,”
“a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc” (MEGA
II.8: 75; F: 134). This list, trailing off into a throwaway terminal
expression, “und so weiter,” “and so
on,” which Marx elsewhere habitually uses to abbreviate illustrative lists of
commodities and raw materials, is two things at once. It is of course a materialist
reemphasis of the physical human experience at the origin of exchange value,
that is, a labor theory of value; it is also, at the same time, a gruesome
satirical echo of the allegorical account of abstract human labor as Gallerte. The living hands, brains,
muscles and nerves of the wage laborer are mere “animal substances,” ingredients at the feast of the
capitalist. The capitalist in turn is the great devourer of this
undifferentiated human labor. He is not an individual, as Marx often says, but
is “a mere embodiment of capital” (MA: 330), which makes him not just the
oppressor of the workers in theory and in practice, but also gives him a
specific role in Marx’s allegorical satire on consumption. The capitalist is
roughly the industrial processing of the workers in reverse. The worker who
starts out a real body and brain is reduced to Gallerte through submission to capitalist wage labor; and the
capitalist who is in essence nothing but capital itself nonetheless assumes in his
interactions with human beings the local habitation of a body and the name of
an individual. This is what the worker and the capitalist are in Marx’s
allegorical satire on consumption, but Marx also says that this is what they
are in reality, that is, in their “real economic relation” of which all
juridical relation “is but the reflex.” (MA: 96)
What then is the status of satire in Marx? Satire
is not a literary ornament. It is not the surplus of style decorating an
unambiguous substratum of conceptual content, Dichtung merely supervening on Wahrheit.
Satire and allegory are, to use Marx’s words, “phantoms formed in the human
brain,” but they are phantoms precisely as, and because, all theory and
thinking are phantoms, “pure theory” no less than the most messily heterogenous
and undifferentiated.23 Satire
and allegory are also, “necessarily,” as Marx insists that phantoms in the
brain must be, “sublimates of [men’s] material life process, which is
empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.”24 The
opposition between phantom and material is a meaningful opposition in Marx, but
it is not the opposition between unreal and real, or untruth and truth. It is
itself a theoretical opposition, which is to say that the distinction it makes
is never conclusively attested in experience with anything like the force of
apodicticity which theory would claim on its behalf. As Marx puts it, “the
characters who appear on the economic stage are but the personifications of the
economical relations that exist between them.” (MA: 97) The economic “stage” is
allegorical and real, it is where
economical relations are both acted and lived. William Cowper’s rebuke of
overeloquent and artificial preachers who with “histrionic mumm’ry…let down |
The pulpit to the level of the stage” in book two of The Task is from the perspective of Capital a simple instance of bourgeois ideology: the stage is not
the bathos of the pulpit; in reality, the pulpit is never anything but a prop
on the stage.25 What is capital in reality? It is economic profit on wage labor and it is
“vampire thirst for the living blood of labour.” (MA: 282) “It must be
acknowledged,” writes Marx, again invoking Gallerte and hinting ambiguously at an horrific euphemism, “that our labourer comes out
of the process of production other than he entered.” (MA: 329-30)26
Gallerte is not just a specific commodity. It is, on
satire’s terms, the paradigmatic commodity,
the “perfected non-world” of labor in a concentrated purchasable lump.27 A
lexicon of jargon floats in association behind it. It is the tremulous edible
product of industrial reduction and processing. This satire on the reduction
of labor is not itself further reducible to a mere concept, for the following
reason. The difference between a concept and a satire is that satire is always
at someone’s expense. All Marx’s writing, and not just those moments in it that
make economic theory into an overtly literary exhibition, is satirical in this
sense. Marx always writes at someone’s expense. Someone must be the object of
satire and someone must suffer by its influence; and that means not simply that
someone must be ridiculed or described grotesquely and with exaggeration, but
that the whole work of thinking in satire will be in the interests of some real
people and contrary to the interests of others. From Gargantua to Anti-Dühring, Peri Bathous to the pompous
scurrilities of Lacan’s Écrits,
thinking in satire is activated for one constituency of readers through its
infliction on another. Satire is more than a modality of the picturesque: it is
the concentrated literary exposure of social contradiction. It does not merely
provide a distorted image of social reality, it is in active conflict with
social reality. Who then suffers by Marx’s account of abstract human labor, if
it truly is a satire, and who is its object?
The worker reduced to Gallerte meets with the most horrible fate available in Marx’s
satire on wage labor, but he is not the object of that satire. His suffering
can hardly be increased by literature, and it is precisely in emphasis of this
fact that Marx allocates to him the most repulsive fate in the drama. The
worker’s suffering is for Marx categorically different from the suffering of
the bourgeoisie. The worker’s suffering is not injured vanity, not discomfort
over a grotesque image of himself, but “dehumanization” and “immiseration.” The
object of Marx’s satire on abstract human labor is not the worker reduced to a
condiment but the bourgeois consumer who eats him for breakfast. It is the
bourgeois consumer who suffers by the influence of Marx’s satire on abstract
human labor because that satire is an allegory which condemns his unavoidable
daily acts as disgusting. What ought to be the fluid labor of living human
beings is instead a disgusting, paradigmatically unnatural food product for the
bourgeois consumer, the “vampire which sucks out its [the proletariat’s] blood
and brains and throws them into the alchemist’s vessel of capital.”28 But
Marx, surely, is joking with his talk of vampires, and this, surely, is a book
of theory before us, a “critique of political economy,” from whose scientific
perspective the vampire must surely be an impossible person? No, says Marx in
the Communist Manifesto, the point is
that the vampire is not yet impossible, and it remains the task of revolution
to see that he is “made impossible.”29 Its
fetish-character may prevent the bourgeois consumer from seeing in Gallerte the brains, muscles, nerves and
hands themselves; that is, the substance of the paradigmatic commodity may be
undifferentiable back into the aggregate of its living human origins by any act
merely of conscientious perception; but the bourgeois consumer who thus
compulsorily worships the commodity as an idol is nonetheless cast by Marx’s
satire into the role of the child who daily begs to lick the cauldron clean
after daily observing the mess of human misery boil in it. Can the bourgeois
consumer exit the stage of this satire, protesting his abstinence or his
vegetarianism? No, he cannot, because the rendering of human minds and bodies
into Gallerte is not, on the terms of
Marx’s satire, an abuse of wage labor by the coven of leading unreconstructed
vampires but the fundamental law of all wage labor. The satire, abruptly, at
the moment when its object might wriggle free of it, is revealed in fact to be
“theory.” The bourgeois object of satire is pinned to the fourth wall, since
all his means of moral defense—his philanthropy, his austerity, his
temperance—are, as he knows, incapable of making the slightest impression on a
fundamental law: he is a great respecter of fundamental law, and so he is
reduced to something like the transcendent impotence of the candidate for
everlasting life in supplication of a God he secretly knows to be his own
invention. Social existence under capitalism is thus gruesomely primitivistic,
not simply in that we bourgeois moderns behave toward commodities in the way
that “les anciens peuples…sauvages &
grossiers” or “les Noirs & les
Caraïbes” of Enlightenment ethnography behaved toward their fetish idols,30 but in
the still more disgusting sense that our most routine, unavoidable and everyday
[alltäglich] act, the act of
consumption of use value, that is, first of all, purchase, is in every case an
act of cannibalism.
Style tends to be regarded as something that must
be got right, either in translation or in reading, so that a concept
represented in it can be specified and then put to use in larger and more
important analyses; but this solicitude for the specification and use of
concepts after style has been got
right tends actually to diminish and enervate attention to style by reducing it
to preparatory attention. The result in literary theory is, often enough, that
style is got wrong in preparation for the theoretical use of the concepts represented
in it. The satire on wage labor as the original abomination leading to
compulsory everyday cannibalism is missed. We might say, more strongly still,
that by getting style wrong, literary theory makes sure that it doesn’t get
style at all. Why should literary theory make sure that it doesn’t get style in Capital? Literary theory does this in
order to inoculate itself against its own proper object, literature, as if to
say that literature is an upstart object for imagining that it has any claim to
special propriety among the universe of text materials available for
interpretation. In the case of Marx’s account of abstract human labor, this
apparently democratic impulse to equalize the historical modalities of text in
fact performs what Marx describes as the invariable work of bourgeois ideology.
It occludes social contradiction by reductively neutralizing satire into
“concepts.” Marx’s account of abstract human labor is not only a theoretical
indictment of bourgeois interests, it is literature irreconcilable with the
standard of truth and interpretation that is the reflex of those interests, to
the extent that bourgeois readers are compelled, in order to make their own
kind of sense of it, to separate out its content from its style, to judge and
contest the one and to enjoy or dislike the other, perhaps feeling that they in
some sense stand accused by what Marx is saying, but not seeing that his entire
way of saying it is from start to finish a satire at their own expense.
William Burroughs did not go far enough. The
point is not to make “everyone see what is on the end of every fork,” but to
make you see, as Kafka attempted,
that no one but you could eat from this fork, since this fork was intended for
you.
Third
Term: “Fétichisme”
At five in the evening, the coast, which we had always on our left,
changed in aspect. The palm trees seemed to be in alignment with the shore,
like the avenues with which French Châteaux are decorated: nature delighted
thus in recalling the ideas of civilisation, in the very country where this
civilisation was born and where, today, ignorance and barbarism reign.
Chateaubriand, ‘Voyage d’Égypte.’31
The concept of fetishism in Das Kapital, insofar as there is a concept, has its origin in
Marx’s reading and thinking about a French essay in theoretical ethnography
published in 1760, Charles de Brosses’s Du
Culte des Dieux Fétiches, ou Parallèle de l’ancienne Religion de l’Egypte avec
la Religion actuelle de Nigritie. This derivation of the concept of
fetishism in Das Kapital has been
often noticed and reported as fact;32 but
astonishingly, the entire transmission of the concept from de Brosses to Marx
has received no comment from Marx’s literary theoretical interpreters. Marx’s
habit of misquoting famous authors in order to twist their language into a
contradiction of its original meaning is well known: Goethe is détourned in a footnote mocking
Proudhon; commodities are Shakespeare’s Dame Quickly in reverse; and the preface to the first edition of 1867 is concluded
with the high literary flourish of Dante détourned,
“Go on your own way, and let the people talk,” instead of the original “Follow
me, and let the people talk.” (F: 161, 93)33 However
well known this habit of Marx’s may be, no commentator on book one, section
four, “Der Fetischcharakter der Ware und
sein Geheimnis,” has yet
examined Marx’s reuse of de Brosses’s jargonistic neologism in the light of
this habit or as an instance of it. No-one, that is to say, has yet interpreted
the concept of fetishism in Capital as a détournement. The passage of the
term “fétichisme” from eighteenth
century, aristocratic French into nineteenth century, communist German, and
into Moore and Aveling’s English; the violent resituation of the term out of
ethnography which celebrates the enlightenment of European culture into a
critique of political economy which seeks to expose that culture’s fundamental
injustice; the implicit satire, not simply against superstitious thinking and
behavior, but against the centuries-long continuity of bourgeois civilized
disgust at “superstition” itself, activated by the reappearance of the term in
a context for which it was not originally fitted; the whole involuted literary
and satirical structure of Marx’s reuse of the concept has been routinely ignored, as though Capital straightforwardly invited its readers to extract from it
something called “the theory of commodity fetishism.” Each time this theory is
extracted, the impurities of style and satire are washed away with the caustic
of “pure theoretical” paraphrase.
Althusser is not merely the most egregious
culprit. He is the unacknowledged legislator of the majority of literary
theoretical readings yet produced. When Althusser insists on “the necessity of
reading Marx’s text very closely,”
his text becomes an exhibition of Freudian Verleugnung or disavowal in reverse: the adamant avowal of “reading,” pushed at us in overtly pedagogical commands, conceals the real,
underlying disavowal of reading in
his interpretation of Capital.34 Althusser’s
hyperbolic disciplinarianism—Read very
closely!—echoes an instance of Lenin’s. “It is impossible completely to
understand Capital,” Lenin infamously
wrote, “without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic.”35 For
Althusser it is possible completely to understand Capital. On these terms, the interpretation of Marx becomes
fundamentally inimical to “reading” Marx the moment interpretation imports any
problem or difficulty of its own into the work of pure theoretical comprehension.
Theorists who might disavow this purgation of
“reading” nonetheless do not transgress against its rule that Capital, including the section on the
fetish-character of the commodity, be read as “pure theory.” A representative
treatment, more subtle of course than Althusser but innocent of any
transgression of his rule, is this by Laura Mulvey:
The Marxist concept [of fetishism] is derived from a problem of inscription: that is, the way in which the sign of value is, or rather fails to be, marked onto an object, a commodity. It is in and around the difficulty of signifying value that commodity fetishism flourishes.36
Mulvey’s account is similar to the
majority of accounts now current.37 Fetishism in Marx is a concept, the concept is derived from a problem, and the
problem is a conceptual one. Commodity fetishism then flourishes in and around
a conceptual problem. Sticking to Mulvey’s own terms, we might ask: if the
inscription of value, or rather, of “the sign of value” has already failed, how
can anyone be blamed for not reading that inscription? Already the expenses of
satire are discounted. There is nothing disgusting about failing to read the
already failed inscription of a sign of value onto an object. Nothing could be
more innocently remote from the cannibalism and idol worship of savages than
theoretical perplexity over the vicissitudes of signification. If this is the
fetishism we engage in, we have nothing to worry about, however much we may yet
have to speculate on. But we cannot take Mulvey’s account of Marx on its own
terms, because it completely excludes from view the most important fact about
the “concept” of fetishism in Capital,
namely, that it is a satirical and ersatz concept, insofar as it is a concept
at all, and that it is derived not from poststructuralist reflection on
problems of inscription but from Marx’s ironic reading and détournement of an eighteenth century essay in racist ethnography.
Mulvey both excludes philological thinking from her own reflections on Marx and
ignores the philological work done by Capital itself. The exclusion is good for theoretical efficiency. With every trace of
philology excluded from the theoretical equation, fetishism is a concept and Capital is theory. Besides being a
one-sided and impoverished description of Marx’s writing and thinking, the
definition of fetishism as a practice that flourishes “in and around the
difficulty of signifying value” leads to a vision of problem-solving (instead
of revolution) that any vampire would find deliciously sanguine. “For Marx,”
writes Mulvey,
the value of a commodity resides in the labor power of its producer. If this labor power could ever inscribe itself indexically on the commodity it produces, if it could leave a tangible mark of the time and skill taken in production, there would be no problem.38
No problem of what kind? Are we meant to conclude
that the bourgeois consumer is a fetishist because labor power fails to
inscribe itself indexically on its object? Is it the inaptitude of labor power
for acts of indexical inscription that makes the bourgeois consumer into a
cannibal? No, because in the rarefied atmosphere of pure theoretical
interpretation, sanitized of any reference to Marx’s satire, his literary
allegory and his aggression, there is no room for the word “bourgeois” in the
sense that Marx meant it. “Bourgeois” becomes jargon, the diction of a
superannuated political attitude, a verbal embarrassment; and rather than
seeing how pure theory itself contributes to this jargonization of
revolutionary language through its discounting of satire, the practitioners of
pure theory instead imagine that the jargonization was long ago complete and
that their avoidance of revolutionary language is nothing but sobriety and
responsive realism. The failures of indexicality may yet be someone’s fault, in
some just about imaginable appendix to Mulvey’s analysis; but her analysis is
constructed without reference to the possibility that Marx’s whole account of
the practice of fetishism is already at someone’s expense, that the description
of fetishism in Capital is a satire
irreconcilable with the standards of truth maintained in the interests of
bourgeois realism. Capital is
processed into a book of pure theory. Drop the satire and no-one gets hurt.
But Marx’s thinking in Capital is philological as well as satirical, just as the risks of
style in his satire are themselves the work of thinking and not a mere
decoration of it. To understand what Marx means by the fetish-character of
commodities, and why fetishism in Capital is at best only ambiguously a “concept,” we need to reconstruct the literary
composition of his chapter, paying close attention to its satirical
transformations of its literary source material; and we need to ask at whose
expense the theory is written, and what kind of expense Marx meant to inflict
by it.
Charles de Brosses was the first to use the word “fétichisme,” a word that his first readers must surely have found jargonistic, and his long essay offers the first theoretical commentary on it.39 His essay cannot however be made to qualify on Althusserian terms as “pure theory.” Giorgio Agamben’s criticism of de Brosses, that his “astonishment…before the fetish not only has no reason to exist, it betrays a forgetfulness of the original status of objects,” is a good example of how the attempt to read Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches as pure theory ends up occluding what is most characteristic and important about the essay.40 Throughout the essay de Brosses protests on behalf of his own constituency of enlightened moderns, that is to say, sane and mature, monotheistic European intellectuals capable of abstract reasoning (and not the vulgar working people of 1760), that “one cannot prevent oneself from being astonished by the fact that nations and ages [siécles] so remote from each other should agree on the same idea” (that is, the idea that inanimate objects and animals must be worshiped).41 This confession of astonishment recurs throughout the essay. Both the disgusting phenomenon of fetish worship itself and the global and transhistorical epidemic of its practice, spanning the centuries and the continents from ancient Egypt to the present-day “nation” of Africa, are irresistibly astonishing to anyone disciplined by the practice of rational inquiry into the causes of appearances.42 The astonishment which Agamben, in a gesture of Heideggerian reproof, dismisses as “forgetfulness of the original status of objects” is for de Brosses not simply a shortcoming of Dasein before the ontic, remediable by an act of phenomenological remembrance, but a form of polite, literary socializing among equals, a way of dramatizing and giving confessional literary color to his recognition of the kindred intelligence of his readers.43 We, gentlemen readers, must irresistibly be astonished by the practices of savages, since our literary astonishment, most emphatically performed—and not any straight ethnographic empiricism, had this even been imaginable in 1760—will give proof that our difference from savages is by now an intellectually and morally categorical difference and not merely one of degree. The practice of literary astonishment is irresistible in the sense that it fulfills a moral imperative and is evidence of civilized thought. Judge then of my astonishment, as the conventional English appeal is flourished throughout the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. It is the attitude of the equable inquirer, innocent of perversity, confronted by some extravagance that gives him the chance to establish sympathetic mutuality with his readers on the grounds of their common difference from the stupid and the unenlightened. The attitude, that is, which Samuel Beckett parodies in the figure of the divinely appointed inquirer Jacques Moran, astonished by the impertinence of his pubescent son in Molloy. Whatever we might think is its psychogenesis or its significance for a theory of objects, de Brosses’s astonishment before the practice of fetish worship was then and is now an irreducibly literary and conversational astonishment. It may ambiguously be good material for a modern diagnosis of the psychic symptoms of enlightenment; but for Marx, it was first of all unambiguously good material for a satire on the conventional literary means of establishing defensive moral mutuality among aristocrats. De Brosses’s astonishment is the artificial testimony of the author’s involuntary reflex, a moral reaction to barbarism, and the sympathy of his readers will be all the more readily forthcoming since it will function to consolidate in their minds “l’accord unanime des hommes intelligens & des nations éclairés,” the unanimous agreement of intelligent men and enlightened nations.44
De Brosses, of course, is not content simply to
remain paralyzed in this attitude of polite astonishment, like the homme sauvage paralyzed in superstitious
reverence before a snake or a wooden idol “forged by the excess of his
stupidity.”45 The drama of literary astonishment involves a second act. He recovers wit
enough to propose a theoretical account of why fetishism has been and is still
an indigenous practice in otherwise widely contrasting and historically
unconnected cultures.
When one sees similar practices among men living in ages and in climates so far removed from each other, who have nothing in common besides their ignorance and their barbarism, it is still more natural to conclude that man is made this way; that for man left in his rough and savage natural state, unformed and uninstructed by imitation, primitive morals and the means of production [les façons de faire] are the same in Egypt as in the Antilles, the same in Persia as among the Gauls: everywhere the same mechanism of ideas, from which the same actions follow. And if one is surprised by this particular point, which indeed seems very strange; if one is astonished to see fetishism widespread among all the uncultivated peoples [les peuples grossiers] of the universe, and in all times, and in all places; to explain this phenomenon one need only recollect the proper cause of it already cited: it is the constant uniformity of the savage man with himself; his heart exposed perpetually to fear, his soul greedy without pause for hope, deliver up his ideas to error and deviation and carry him off into a thousand acts devoid of sense; his mind, without culture and without reasoning, is incapable of apperceiving the little that it finds of the connection between causes and the effects that wait on them. Since no-one is astonished to see children fail to elevate their minds above their dolls, to see them believing that their dolls are animate and acting with them accordingly, why should he be astonished to see people whose life passes in continual infancy, and who are never more than four years of age, reason without the least accuracy, and act according to how they reason? Minds of this calibre are the most common, even in the ages of enlightenment and among the civilized nations.46
Literary astonishment is, in de Brosses, the conventional prologue of theoretical illumination. If one is astonished (and one must be astonished, since the enormity of the facts is irresistible), one need only recollect. Theoretical illumination is the recollection of what is natural and manifest but tends in practice to be forgotten or overlooked. What the recovery of wit after astonishment in this case establishes is that les peuples grossiers are of course infants. The drama of astonishment is de Brosses’s, he is at once its enlightened author and the protagonist of its comic action. The infant cannibals of the universe have a specific part to play in the noble comedy of de Brosses: they are the monsters who are domesticated through de Brosses’s disciplining of his own astonishment with the cool instrument of theoretical reason. Once the “liaison entre causes & effets” is heroically restored to view by our ethnographer protagonist, the comic bewilderment of misidentifications and cross-nakedness is all resolved, and there, in the limelight of theoretical illumination, standing before us, the audience of mutual sympathisers, is the monster unmasked—it is our own child, tenderly observed from above, prattling at its toys in a paradise of innocence!47
Fetishism in Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches is not a
“concept,” it is the subject of a drama. The drama depends on a specific
historical dramatis personae with
specific relations between them. The luminary astonished by the cannibal does
not remain astonished: the action and coherence of the drama require that he
should discipline his astonishment and rescue the cannibal. The second act of
ethnographic inquiry, after the
confession of moral astonishment, is to put in place the “liaison entre causes & effets” even and precisely in those
circumstances apparently most uncongenial to rational thinking: the mise en scène of comic bewilderment and
misidentification. What this literary practice of astonishment and discipline
creates and depends on is the image of the stupefied individual, which it then
satirically dominates as the specimen subject of its work of theoretical
diagnosis. The figure of the stupefied individual is conceived in the drama of
literary astonishment and its theoretical disciplining; and the stupefaction of
this figure can then be defined, in part circularly, as his inability to act
out that same drama as its protagonist, his lifelong confinement to a cameo, in
other words, the incapacity of the savage for astonishment at what is
imperatively astonishing and his inability to discipline the astonishment he
cannot feel. This is the ethnographic negative mirror image instituted by the drama
of astonishment and its disciplining. The practice of illumination defines
itself through literary and theoretical definition of the stupefied figure who
is incapable of it. The ethnographer establishes his own maturity, what Kant
famously called his Mündigkeit, the
condition of intellect necessary for autonomous life, through his diagnosis of
the infantilism of barbarians.48 The whole drama is thus a satire, ostensibly at the expense of a barbarian
figure that modern ethnography would dismiss as a figment, but covertly at the
expense of still infantile moderns whose lightly distorted image is locked in
that figment as in an obligatory cameo. The drama is a satirical exercise in
establishing sympathetic mutuality between members of the same class. As the French
scholar M. V. David has commented, “one mustn’t forget that Dieux fétiches is not merely a learned
work, but also an innovative and polemical work.”49 Not, that is, merely a theory of fetish worship, but a stylish attack on the
commonalty of fetishists still the majority in “the ages of enlightenment and
among the civilised nations.”
Slavoj Žižek is one of the few theorist commentators on Marx’s
concept of fetishism to offer a brief discussion of de Brosses’s essay.50 His interpretation of “fétichisme” in
de Brosses might seem to be saying something similar to what I have said about
the drama of literary astonishment and theoretical disciplining; but there is a
significant difference between his account and mine. Žižek writes:
The notional background for fetishism…lies in evolutionist universalism: “fetishism” has a place within the notion of a universal human history progressing from the lower stage (the veneration of natural objects) to the abstract spiritualized stage (the purely spiritual God); it allows us to grasp the unity of human species, to recognize the Other, while none the less asserting our superiority. The fetishist Other is always “lower”—that is to say, the notion of fetishism is strictly correlative to the gaze of the observer who approaches the “primitive” community from the outside.51
This seems at first
glance to be something like the point I’m making. I argued that the figure of
the stupefied individual or savage is instituted by de Brosses through a drama
of literary astonishment and theoretical disciplining. This figure is not,
however, the equivalent of Žižek’s “fetishist Other,” and is not
exchangeable for him, because he is not in de Brosses’s essay the product of
“the gaze of the observer,” he is the product of a satirical literary
conversation. Žižek’s fetishist, on the contrary, is not a dramatis persona, he is a psychic
projection. His appearance is not made, as the appearance of the figure of the
stupefied individual is made, in the mise
en scène of literary writing seeking to establish sympathetic mutuality
with readers of a specific class; his appearance is fabricated by “us” when we
“recognize the Other, while none the less asserting our superiority.” In other
words, Žižek’s interpretation of de Brosses’s “fetishist” is psychoanalytic and
not literary, and his account of the fabrication of the image of the fetishist
is a theoretical account of how “our superiority” is asserted. Žižek is
reading de Brosses not as literature in conversation with a specific historical
class but as material for a generalised and abstract diagnosis of the
mechanisms of narcissism. Du Culte des
Dieux Fétiches is processed and reduced into material for pure theory.
When Žižek moves on in his argument from de Brosses to Marx, the only transmission of the concept of fetishism visible to his gaze is a purely theoretical transmission. The language of de Brosses’s essay is nowhere mentioned or implicated, and there is no consideration nor even any recognition of the fact that Marx read an antiquated and objectionable, racist and aristocratic, unscientifically ethnographic essay called Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches.52 Žižek’s only direct question, similar to Mulvey’s, is how Marx and Freud displace “the notion of fetishism” with respect to its previous anthropological use.53 My point is that Marx did not displace a notion. He wrote a stylish and satirical détournement, not simply of the word “fétichisme” or of the concept of “fétichisme” in de Brosses, however Marx may have interpreted that concept, but of the whole drama of literary astonishment and theoretical disciplining that institutes the figure of the stupefied fetishist in de Brosses.