Welcome to rough theory
The original concept for this site was to provide a location where I could do “theory in the rough” – experimenting with draft concepts and posting work-in-progress. Initially, I assumed, I would be posting mainly for myself and the small number of other people involved in a research project with which I was associated at the time. Before too long, however, conversations broke out, here and at other blogs, and these interactions with a supportive and thoughtful community have made the site far more valuable and productive than I could originally have imagined.
I began the site early in my doctoral studies, and in the beginning the entries skittered across various situational topics. As the focus of my doctoral thesis came more clearly into view, the posts here also became more consistently focused on the problem of how to interpret the opening volume of Marx’s Capital – a theme that has now dominated the blog for the past couple of years.
An early draft of that dissertation can be found under the Thesis tab; even earlier draftwork and conceptual sketches can be found under the Marx tab. I am currently reshaping this argument for publication, so that my claims, and the evidence for them, will be accessible in less fragmentary form than was possible in the working drafts I posted to the blog originally. While I’m still working offline on this formal presentation, a quick overview of the argument might be useful here.
In brief, what I have been trying to do on the blog, and now in more formal writing, is to present a new interpretation of the opening chapters of the first volume of Marx’s Capital. This interpretation is designed to explore what might change in our reading of Capital, as well as in our understanding of capitalism and in the analytical toolkit available to critical social theory, if we understand this work as perhaps the only major critical analysis of capitalist production that has adopted a thoroughly immanent standpoint of critique.
To support this interpretation, I introduce three strategies for reading Capital. The first strategy involves recognising the anthropological character of the argument – understanding that Marx’s goal is to understand the complex array of historically-specific practices through which particular dimensions of our social experience are produced. The second involves translating some of Marx’s Hegelian language into the more contemporary vocabulary of emergence, in order to make more visible why Marx believes that the same set of social practices are capable of generating divergent and even contradictory potentials for future social development. The third involves paying close attention to “literary” features within Capital – voice and tone, character, dramatic structure, and plot – in order to bring to light the often-parodic, self-deconstructing character of the text.
In the current version of the thesis, which has developed a bit from the version posted under the thesis tab, I divide the analysis into two major parts. The first part, spanning chapters 1-5, introduces the core concepts and analytical framework for this reading, contextualises this argument against the broader literature, and provides preliminary textual evidence for the reading strategies I recommend by demonstrating how these strategies transform our sense of the meaning of the opening chapter of Capital. The second part, spanning chapters 6-11, examines what I describe as Capital’s first major dramatic arc, by means of a close reading of the chapters through which Marx gradually derives the category of labour-power.
In the first and second chapters, I explore how the reading strategies I propose differ from other common approaches to Marx’s text – in particular by opening up a way to understand Capital as an immanent social critique that mines its normative standards from the contingent practical potentials that are generated by the same social practices that also produce the social phenomena being criticised. In the third and fourth chapters, I apply these strategies to the opening chapter of Capital, using them to draw out the parodic, performative, self-deconstructing character of the text, and culminating in a new interpretation of the argument about the fetish character of the commodity. In the fifth chapter, I re-examine Marx’s comments about his relationship to Hegel in light of these strategies, and introduce further evidence that Hegel should be seen, not simply as an inspiration for Marx’s method, but also as a subterranean target of Marx’s critique.
In this second part, I shift gears, drilling down more deeply into the text of chapters 2-6 of Capital, which I treat as a single overarching “act” or narrative arc within the overall architectonic structure of Marx’s work. Read as a dramatic whole, this act relativises many of what appeared to be firm ontological distinctions introduced in the opening “definitions” in Capital’s first chapter. In that chapter, the main text seemed to tell us that commodities are external objects, clearly distinct from subjects, and that use-value, as a content grounded in intrinsic material properties of goods, is clearly distinct from the contingently social form of exchange-value. In various subtle ways, however, the opening chapter of Capital already hints that these ontological distinctions may not be as firm as their initial presentation suggests. In chapters 2-6 of Capital, the text systematically destabilises these distinctions, driving toward the introduction of the category of labour-power: a commodity that is decisively a subject, and whose peculiar use-value defines its social specificity.
Running parallel to this overt plot is a subterranean dialogue with Hegel that implicitly positions the Hegelian dialectic as a character performing analyses of the wealth of capitalist societies, alongside empiricist and transcendental characters that Marx associates with political economy. All three of these perspectives, the text subtly suggests, are socially valid in a limited and partial way – expressing insights generated by specific forms of practical interaction with particular dimensions of the sphere of circulation. All three perspectives are also guilty of over-extrapolating from these bounded social experiences – making bad metaphysical assumptions that assume that the contingent consequences of specific sorts of social practice are expressions of the intrinsic properties of material, social or human nature. By the end of this dramatic arc, Capital has relativised each of these positions, either by explaining the practical origins of the phenomena they treat as given, or by demonstrating how these positions cannot account for other, conflictual dimensions of social experience.
At the same time, Capital begins in earnest to explore the connections between specific forms of everyday practice, and the specific performative stances and practical impacts those practices generate. This analysis proceeds by means of micrological deconstruction of the practices associated with the use of money, the process of exchange, and the circulation of commodities. To express the performative dimension of the practices being analysed, Marx frequently organises the analysis into miniature plays, bringing small troupes of social actors onto the economic stage, often ventriloquising their affects and thoughts in small passages of dialogue, and treating material objects as stage props. The same actors and props are frequently recycled, demonstrating how different sorts of productions can be played out with the “same” component parts, and drawing out the different qualities that actors and props can enact in subtly different roles. By exploring how Marx stages these performances, I show how attention to the “literary” dimensions of Marx’s text is essential to understanding its distinctive substantive claims – including a novel non-reductionist analysis of the relationship between forms of subjectivity and forms of objectivity, and a distinctive standpoint of critique that consists in the attempt to render more visible emancipatory implications of everyday forms of social practice.
In the course of this close reading, I demonstrate that many common forms of Marxist theory – including substantialist understandings of value, some new dialectical interpretations that emphasise the relative autonomy of capital, and interpretations that rely on the opening definition of the commodity as an external object – have taken too literally claims that Marx introduces in his main text as performative enactments of positions he intends to relativise, rather than as claims he endorses in the form in which they are initially presented.
In the coming year, I plan to start posting interpretations that have, until now, remained mostly offline – looking at Capital’s later chapters to show how my approach to the text plays out when I move through the remainder of the first volume. I hope to have time for a series of posts gradually advancing through the whole of the first volume of Capital, and exploring the implications for other common interpretations of Marx’s work.
In my life away from the blog, I am the program director for the Social Science (Psychology) degree at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. I am also a Lecturer of Social Theory, and teach social research methods and social theory to undergraduate and postgraduate students.