So a few more brief reflections on Specters of Marx, to follow up on yesterday’s brief post. I won’t write systematically on the text, but I did want to take a slightly closer look at the final parts of the concluding piece on “The Apparition of the Inapparent” - subtitled “The Phenomenological Conjuring Trick”. The first part of this chapter pursues Marx, pursuing Stirner; in order to deal adequately with the argument Derrida is making there (and with his later - quite interesting - question about continuities and discontinuities between the Marx of the German Ideology and the Marx of Capital), I would need to do a type of textual work - on Derrida and a couple of Marxes - that I don’t have time to undertake here. What I want do instead is focus on the text from around p. 185 onward - from the point where Derrida begins to transition to his most extended discussion of commodity fetishism.
Because I’ve been working on the commodity fetish discussion in such detail, I couldn’t help but be struck by a couple of strange omissions in Derrida’s otherwise very close paraphrases and quotations of Marx’s text. The first occurs in Derrida’s discussion of Marx’s wooden table - the one from the beginning of the fourth section of Capital’s first chapter - the one that, as soon as it turns into a commodity, acquires “metaphysical” properties. Derrida here draws attention to Marx’s claim that the use value of the table does not account for the strange properties the table acquires, once the table becomes a commodity. Significantly, however, Derrida glosses Marx’s argument as an attempt to talk about the social construction of a pregiven thing:
It is so disconcerting, this commodity-thing, that one has to approach it with “metaphysical” subtlety and “theological” niceties. Precisely in order to analyze the metaphysical and the theological that constructed the phenomenological good sense of the thing itself, of the immediately visible commodity, in flesh and blood: as what it is “at first sight” (auf den ersten Blick). This phenomenological good sense may perhaps be valid for use-value. It is perhaps even meant to be valid only for use-value, as if the correlation of these concepts answered to this function: phenomenology as the discourse of use-value so as not to think the market or in view of making oneself blind to exchange-value. Perhaps. And it is for this reason that phenomenological good sense or phenomenology of perception (also at work in Marx when he believes he can speak of pure and simple use-value) can claim to foster Enlightenment since use-value has nothing at all “mysterious” about it (nicht Mysteriöses an ihr). If one keeps to use-value, the properties (Eigenschaften) of the thing (and it is going to be a question of property) are always very human, at bottom, reassuring for this very reason. They always relate to what is proper to man, to the properties of man: either they respond to man’s needs, and that is precisely their use-value, or else they are the product of a human activity that seems to intend them for those needs. (p. 188)
Derrida seems so certain here that Marx takes use value as a sort of unproblematic, phenomenologically-transparent, category, that he doesn’t see, or at least doesn’t feel the need to mention, that in this same passage Marx also claims that the specific determinants of value, taken by themselves, do not account for the strange qualities expressed in festishised forms of thought. In other words, Derrida appears to read into this famous passage a kind of distinction between use value and value that, I would argue, is beside the point of the strategic thrust of this section of Marx’s text. Derrida seems to take “use value” to be, for Marx, a kind of unproblematic materiality that sits fundamentally outside ideology or spectrality - a materiality subject to empirical perception by a kind of phenomenologically unproblematic good sense. Derrida does not appear to consider that this “good sense” might, itself, be one of the targets of Marx’s analysis in this chapter - might, indeed, be a fetishised form of thought and one of the targets of Marx’s critique of the fetish. Derrida then - not surprisingly - takes Marx to understand capitalism as a system for the exchange of these unproblematically material, phenomenologically-transparent “things” - and seems to believe Marx is arguing that spectrality arises from exchange alone - that use values intrinsically sit outside the process, and come to possess “spectral” qualities only when tossed into the ambit of commodity circulation.
Derrida then goes on to convict Marx at great length of not recognising the spectrality that already haunts this apparently unproblematic and phenomenologically intuitive materiality. Use value, Derrida argues, always already presupposes spectrality; Marx is incorrect in positing that use value sits somehow outside the spectral process, etc. Regular readers of the blog will know that I think Marx is very well aware of this. While Marx does himself no favours with his style of presentation, nevertheless, he intends the first chapter of Capital (as I have argued elsewhere at some length) to be a critique of the positions with which the chapter opens - so, a critique of the claim that an unproblematic material use value sits outside the arbitrary social conventions of exchange, and a critique of the forms of critique that rely on the “givenness” of the use value/exchange value distinction, rather that trying to grasp (as Marx thinks his analysis does) how this very distinction, along with both of its antinomic poles, comes into being via specific forms of collective practice.
In the opening passage to the section on commodity fetishism, which Derrida abridges into a discussion of use value alone, Marx points out that neither use value nor the empirically-observable determinants of value can account for the strange forms of perception and thought Marx has been analysing in the first chapter. Marx does not do this in order to argue that “use value” or “value” sits “outside” the fetishising social form he analyses. Instead, his argumentative intent is to ask why various sorts of what are taken to be “mere empirical content” have come to assume the distinctive “forms” these contents assume in capitalist society. Marx’s strategic intention here is to draw attention to the existence of a social form - of something not directly empirically observable, but nevertheless impinging on what can be empirically observed (and on the manner in which observation and interpretation tends to take place), such that content and form are not arbitrarily connected to one another. Marx is beginning in this passage to make the case that we must posit the existence of such a “supersensible” entity, in order to grasp a particular trace or symptomatic distortion that moves through the things we can empirically observe, and through the very forms of observation we find intuitive to apply to those “givens”. This trace is (one of) Marx’s spectre(s) - and it resides - as he explicitly says on a number of occasions - both within, and outside, the process of exchange. Use value therefore does not figure as a simple “outside”, uncontaminated by the spectre - and our intuitive phenomenological experience of “use value” as a general category, has everything to do with our indigenous experience as natives inhabiting capitalism’s all-too-thoroughly enchanted world.
Marx does still, of course, distinguish use value from exchange value - if not for the reasons Derrida seems to attribute to Marx’s argument. Derrida takes Marx to be making a temporal distinction: things are first use values, and then become spectralised when they enter into exchange (cf. p. 200). While Marx will make logical (and, because these things are intrinsically related for Marx, practical) distinctions between use value and exchange value, mapping Marx’s logical distinctions onto a temporal frame - as if something could be a “use value” and only subsequently come to be “spectralised” through market exchange - fundamentally breaks Marx’s framework. Under capitalism, “use value” (this very general, extremely abstract category that appears to lack specific social determination) becomes a “real abstraction” - a general abstract category that we practice into existence. The emergence of this category is intrinsically bound to the emergence of the commodity form, which binds “use value” together with “exchange value” in a tense and contradictory dynamic union. This socially-constituted unity itself generates a practical/logical distinction between use value and exchange value - not because use value precedes exchange value temporally, but because these two categories are united specifically in their antinomy to one another - they are constituted as mutually-determining oppositions in collective practice. Marx will then argue that it is possible - from a standpoint immanent to this antinomy - to derive the possibility for a form of production oriented to use value as an end in itself, rather than production oriented to use value only as a means for producing surplus value. This possibility, however, is an immanently-emergent one - not a possibility available in this exact form in earlier historical circumstances. I realise I am being very abbreviated here - the full argument is complex, and my goal here is simply to gesture at the difference between what I take Marx to be doing, and what Derrida seems to be taking him to do, in what Derrida calls Marx’s “pre-deconstructive” critical theory… ;-P (p. 214).
At any rate, Derrida’s “deconstructive” theory then seems to make a move that, to me, falls behind what I take Marx to be doing. In Derrida’s terms, I take Marx to be offering an argument about a social context whose spectral dimension immanently constitutes itself as “nightmare” that “weighs on” the living, precisely because it also immanently constitutes the possibility for alternative organisations of social life: it is this “contradictory” dimension of the social context (this tendency, in Marx’s terms, for the social world to “invert” itself) that generates the experience of spectrality as an experience of domination. Derrida convicts Marx of positing something that sits outside spectrality, and tries to argue that there is no outside - no perspective that is not-yet-haunted. Marx would agree. Yet, where Marx sees “use value” - however counter-intuitive this claim might seem - as a category specific to capitalist society, and therefore as haunted due to its constitution within a particular sort of spectral social form - a “haunting” that, because it is contingently social, can potentially be exorcised - Derrida seems to speak on a much more transhistorical register, discussing the ways in which technical transformations of any sort make possible types of iterability that are themselves the loci of a sort of spectrality for Derrida, and making similar gestures that suggest that spectrality is a sort of intrinsic and ineradicable property of any kind of sociality. This may well be right - but the question becomes: are Derrida and Marx invoking the same sort of spook? Does Derrida’s critique actually connect with the sort of exorcism Marx is trying to perform?
In a sense, from Derrida’s apparent starting point, where some sort of potential for critique resides in any sort of iterability, it becomes possible to ground the “dry messianism” of which Derrida speaks so highly in this text. Derrida may believe that going beyond this very abstract, intrinsically “negative”, forms of critique, risks the sorts of terroristic inheritance that befell Marxism in the 20th century. Not going beyond this form of critique, of course, risks a complete disconnect between critical ideals and practical transformation… This specific issue of Derrida’s rejection of the practical index of Marx’s work, arises in Derrida’s text in the form of an omission - a sentence excised from the middle of a quotation Derrida otherwise reproduces intact from the first chapter of Capital. Derrida quotes the following passage (which I’ll reproduce first in the form in which Derrida supplies it):
There [in the religious world] the products of the human brain [of the head, once again, of men: des menschlischen Kopfes, analogous to the wooden head of the table capable of engendering chimera - in its head, outside of its head - once, that is, as soon as, its form can become commodity-form] appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race…. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself [anklebt] to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
As the foregoing analysis has already demonstrated, this fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the labour which produces them. (p. 208-209)
The ellipsis in the middle of this quotation is quite extraordinary - so brazen and audacious that Derrida must intend the reader to be “in” on the joke. To provide a bit of context that won’t be clear from the limited summary I’ve provided of the text above: Derrida has taken pains in previous sections to draw close attention to what Derrida claims is the great importance Marx attaches to “the head” in various writings. In reproducing the quote above about the fetish, Derrida adds content of his own in order to highlight the way in which this passage supports this argument - at least, this is the conclusion one would draw if reading this passage from Marx solely via Derrida’s iteration. As the text is annotated and expurgated above, it appears that Marx invokes the fetish - “I call this the fetishism” - in relation to some argument about the “head” and in the context of an analogy to religion.
What Derrida then omits - a single, very short sentence - is the sentence that contradicts this interpretation utterly. Marx does not jump directly from the analogy to religion, to the performative act that names the fetish and binds it to some particular constellation of attributes (and, in fact, the analogy to religion actually follows, in Marx’s text, after a prior analogy to the natural sciences - an analogy that Derrida actually discusses, but displaced, such that Derrida’s discussion does not make clear the promixity of these two “analogies” - to religion and science juxtaposed - in Marx’s text). In Marx’s version of the argument, the following sentence follows directly upon the discussion of the religious “analogy”, and therefore immediately precedes the declarative performance in which Marx names the fetish:
So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. (emphases mine)
It is only here - where Marx has explicitly introduced his movement beyond the “analogies” (not analogy) of the scientific (as well as the religious) realm, and opened up the practice-theoretic index of his argument - that Marx performatively declares that it is this - this element of production (not exchange), this product of the hand (not the head) - that is to be called the fetishism of commodities.
I think the reader is meant to understand the nature of the move Derrida has made here - to appreciate the deliberateness and the severity of the performative transformation his iteration of Marx’s text effects. Derrida has argued throughout the text that we inherit - but selectively. This move is a deliberate critical play off of a central emphasis in Marx’s work: Marx argues that we make history - but not in conditions of our own choosing - and then focusses on grasping those conditions we have not chosen, hoping thereby to open up a space for practice. Derrida is here illustrating the potential for selective interpretive practice to open up and close off dimensions of those conditions we have inherited. Derrida has earlier pointed out that Marx’s argument presupposes that interpretation - precisely as an intervention into inheritance - has its own practical power. Derrida argues:
This dimension of performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets, will play an indispensible role in what I would like to say this evening. “An interpretation that transforms what it interprets” is a definition of the performative as unorthodox with regard to speech act theory as it is with regard to the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach (”The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it [Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt aber drauf an, sie zu verändern])”. (p. 63)
Derrida’s performance - his invocation of a particular spirit of Marx (a “dry, messianic” one) is simultaneously - as he has also told us it must be - an exorcism of another spectre: Derrida excises the “hand” - the practice-theoretic dimension of Marx’s work - out of fear, perhaps, that this dimension of Marx’s text must point to parties, and states, and totalitarian regimes that have cloaked themselves in Marxist garb. Es spukt. Who isn’t frightened when confronted with the cataclysmic results of Marxism’s self-declared heirs? Still, Derrida is spooked to the point that he exorcises Marx’s practice-theoretical orientation from his reiteration of Marx’s text. He selects out a “good spirit” - the spirit of “dry messianism” - in order to exorcise the frightening figure of a terroristic party and totalitarian state that so disastrously realised itself in Marxist garb. This attempt to select the good spirit without raising the bad, in many ways sidesteps the difficult problem that Marx indexes his own critical standpoint to the possibility of a practical, interventionist “messianism” that is nowhere near so dry, abstract, and negative as the one Derrida seeks.
Derrida’s exoricism - deliberately? - is not complete. There are still traces in Derrida’s text of Marx’s practical orientation. Much earlier in the text, Derrida worries that Marx might become some sort of politically-neutralised, “academic” reference:
This recent stereotype would be destined, whether one wishes it or not, to depoliticize profoundly the Marxist reference, to do its best, by putting on a tolerant face, to neutralize a potential force, first of all by enervating a corpus, by silencing in it the revolt [the return is acceptable provided that the revolt, which initially inspired uprising, indignation, insurrection, revolutionary momentum, does not come back]. People would be ready to accept the return of Marx or the return to Marx, on the condition that silence is maintained about Marx’s injuntion not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that “changes the world”. In the name of an old concept of reading, such an ongoing neutralization would attempt to conjure away a danger: now that Marx is dead, and especially now that Marxism seems to be in rapid decomposition, some people seem to say, we are going to be able to concern ourselves with Marx without being bothered - by the Marxists and, why not, by Marx himself, that is, by a ghost that goes on speaking. We’ll treat him calmly, objectively, without bias: according to the academic rules, in the University, in the library, in the colloquium. We’ll do it systematically, by respecting the norms of hermeneutical, philological, philosophical exegesis. If one listens closely, one already hears it whispered: “Marx, you see, was despite everything a philosopher like any other; what is more [and one can say this now that so many Marxists have fallen silent], he was a great-philosopher who deserves to figure in the list of those works we assign for study and from which he has been banned for too long. He doesn’t belong to the communists, to the Marxists, to the parties, he ought to figure within our great canon of Western political philosophy. Return to Marx, let’s finally read him as a great philosopher.” We have heard this and we will hear it again.
It is something altogether other that I want to attempt here as I turn or return to Marx. (p. 38-39)
Even in the truncated quotation on commodity fetishism, discussed above, Derrida reproduces the line - quite unnecessary to his own argument - about the fetishism of commodities relating to the nature of the labour that produces them. This line steps explicitly outside the boundaries of exchange - in which Derrida has been trying to encompass Marx’s argument - pointing to production and, ultimately, to the practice-theoretic nature of Marx’s approach. Derrida’s “dry messianism” allows no space, however, for the specificity of the ideals that would emerge from Marx’s practice-theoretic approach.
A strange, conflictual text in the end: spooked by the spectre of practical transformation, but unable completely to exorcise this frightening ghost, even by invoking the intervention of the “good” desert spirit of dry messianism. Derrida does, of course, offer a great deal of metacommentary on precisely this paradox - cloaking himself, as the French Revolutionaries in Roman garb, in the metaphors and imagery he draws from Marx, in order to rebuke Marx’s own critique of movements that clothe new content in old phrases. Derrida simultaneously illustrates the potential for performative creation, and the repetition that drags the dead along its wake, in and through this form of critique. The resulting argument is masterful - and yet… this performative interpretation - which would transform what it interprets: Derrida himself tells us - in the guise of telling Marx - that this kind of exorcism will fail - that spirit and spectre interpenetrate, that emancipatory spectrality is not subject to calculation and command. But perhaps this conclusion - the vision of noble, but ultimately self-defeating, interpretive performance, ever-renewed, ever-abstract, an eternal negation - is a more particular spectre than Derrida credits it as being. Or, to say the same thing another way, perhaps Marx’s goal was more immanent than Derrida seems to assume: not the Enlightenment goal of banishing all spectres, of stepping into the clear light of objective contemplation of “givens” naively perceived, but rather the goal of overcoming a particular form of spectrality, one that inheres specifically in the reproduction of capital, and involves the realisation of possibilities with which we haunt ourselves.
Enough for now - time to get some coffee, and some food (and apologies that I’m in need of both to the degree that I will toss this up without editing - I’ve been doing this rather a lot lately, to the detriment of the flow of the writing and at the risk of foolish and easily corrected analytical errors - apologies - with the formal writing commitments I have on the table right now, this is unfortunately the only way I can steal time to blog)… I should note that other aspects of this text, with assorted tangents on other topics, are also being discussed over at Praxis, and that Praxis helpfully pointed to the far more systematic and thorough review of this text posted by Steven Shaviro.
