Archive for 'Critical Theory'

Where do memes come from? Am I allowed to make one? Tom Bunyard from Monagyric has asked me a question down in the comments that I thought might be worth transposing up here, and passing around. Tom writes:

John’s organised a kind of series of self-critique things for the Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies, and after having been volunteered I’m due to speak myself. I was thinking about saying something around the innate silliness of playing around with arch theoretical models of political emancipation whilst in academia, and thus whilst fundamentally divorced from real praxis (which pretty much defines what I do). At the last session someone had made a comment about theory and practice; whilst the practice that he had in mind was militant struggle, it was quickly interpreted by the culture industry types in the room as a problematic of getting their work identified by the advertising industry so as to secure a career. The distinction between the two notions of practice seemed to define the afternoon for me. I think I want to talk about the limits, flaws and general farce of doing ‘radical’ lefty theory within the academy, particularly in relation to my own attempts to write a PhD that only three people in the world are ever likely to read.

Consequently I’m interested in speaking to a few people as to how they figure the relation of their own political research/writing/whatever to practice; whether they view it (after Adorno) as a kind of practice itself; and to what extent they view this separation (assuming there is a separation) to be problematic. So, as someone working on Marx, how would you respond?

I’ll reproduce my response up here in a moment, but I want to see whether I might be able to turn this into a meme. I’d be interested if the following folks would be interested in answering Tom’s question, and then passing the question on to a few friends. It doesn’t have to be restricted to folks who work on Marx. The core question, as I see it, is:

How do you understand the relation of your own political research/writing/whatever to political practice; whether you view it as a kind of political practice itself; and to what extent you view the separation (assuming there is a separation) between your work and political struggle to be problematic?

I am uncomfortable requiring anyone to link back to this post if you do reply but, if you do, I can create an archive of the responses.

I tag Nate (because we’ve discussed these things before), Lumpenprofessoriat (because turnabout is fair play), Larval Subjects (because I think you will find the tag irritating and probably won’t respond), Trinketization (since it might be useful to have a response from someone who would be at the actual event), Now-Times (with a particular interest in how you might feel about the “after Adorno” aspect of the original question), and Scandalum Magnatum (as I link to your site far less often than I intend). Anyone else who feels inclined to respond is more than welcome.

My own response, lifted up from the comments, was:

First: I’m anti-idealist in perhaps a more extreme sense than many people: I think it’s a mistake to regard the concepts that academics come up with, as though those concepts aren’t related in some way to other sorts of collective practices that are unfolding at the same moment in time. This doesn’t mean that what academics do is “praxis” in some sense of direct contribution to achieving political ends - that is something that would need to be evaluated in a less abstract way. It just means that it’s not going to be “accidental”, that certain forms of theory are trending when they are, and that the tacit sensibilities that find expression in academic theory can be analysed, just as can the tacit sensibilities that find expression in any other form of human activity, as one among many clues to the possibilities we are collectively constituting at a particular moment in time. To stress: I am not suggesting that some sort of special possibility is constituted through academic work - I am suggesting that humans tends to think with our practices in a very broad sense, academics like everyone else, and so even apparently very abstract and removed forms of thought are quite likely to express something that has shifted in much more everyday forms of practice. Grasping that link - which is a lot of what I think Marx does with his critiques of various sorts of formal theory - then makes it possible to analyse the sorts of tacit practical possibilities that are finding nascent expression in various types of formal theory, political ideals, popular culture, etc.

On the more specific issue of whether some sort of formal theory makes a contribution to some particular political project: again, I don’t think this sort of question can be answered abstractly in a meaningful way. I do think that capitalism as a target of political practice, or as an object of analysis, has very peculiar “ontological” characteristics, that are very difficult to grasp without engaging “theoretically” with this object. I think political action in a dynamic social context is difficult, that it’s extremely easy for unanticipated consequences to follow on our actions, and therefore that movements increase their chances of achieving their ends, if they have a good sense of how history might bite them in the butt. This is what I think theory is “for” in a political sense - improving the odds of grasping whether particular sorts of actions are likely to have the results we hope they will. Theory helps us try to deal with the problem William Morris sketches out:

I pondered all these things… how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name…

It helps us work out the name of what we are fighting for, so that other people don’t have to perpetually keep coming along behind us, setting up new struggles to achieve what we meant, but didn’t know how to fight for last time around. At least, this would be my normative criterion for what a good theory would do.

To put the same thing more briefly: if we make history, but not in conditions of our own choosing, then it can be helpful to learn as much as we can about those conditions we haven’t chosen, so that we have as good a sense as possible of the sort of history we might be able to make.

This says nothing about whether some particular kind of theory, in some specific institutional setting, is actually helpful for this end. There will always be at least a tacit theory underlying any form of practice - formal types of theory tease out and make explicit what is tacit in what we are already doing. This process of making the implications of our own practice explicit to ourselves isn’t limited to academia, but it isn’t necessarily barred to academia either. Farce isn’t limited to academia either… ;-) And there is a form of idealism, to me, nascent in the idea that real life is somewhere “out there”: Marx’s position is that humans, in a sense, aren’t that clever - we aren’t that original or creative in our thoughts - our thoughts are already “material” - our categories are things we do. He spends a lot of time showing that the same sorts of sensibilities that are cropping up in more “academic” forms of theory are sensibilities that are also being enacted in settings that take themselves far less seriously - showing that academic thought mobilises very similar sorts of perceptions and thoughts as those mobilised in the marketplace.

His strategy undermines academic pretension - but it also undermines romantic notions that there is some special sort of institutional setting where “real thought” can happen because that setting is somehow less divorced from “real life”: humans, for Marx, generate new possibilities collectively, initially in mundane actions - and largely, in the first instance at least, unintentionally. Explicit theory and conscious political practice then fumbles along behind, trying to work out and realise the potentials opened up by our collective accidents. Where this happens, what sorts of practices and institutional settings are associated with doing it in a way that is potentially transformative - all of this strikes me as a case-by-case thing…

The entire long series on the first chapter of Capital, volume 1, was written as an exercise in unpacking Marx’s argument about commodity fetishism. En route, the series has done much more than that - but it has also done a bit less. Among other things, I’ve never gotten around to detailed textual analysis of the passages in which the argument about commodity fetishism is immediately presented. One of the things that I’ve been noticing, as I read other commentaries that attempt to interpret these same passages, is that certain specific “moves” in Marx’s argument tend not to be mentioned, or tend to be glossed in ways that, from the standpoint of my own reading, seem fundamentally to alter the thrust of the argument. What I want to do in this post - and this likely won’t make for entertaining reading - is to move through the first several paragraphs of the text somewhat closely, to gather together some notes on how I read this argument.

Marx begins:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood.

I have suggested in earlier posts in this series that the “empiricist” voice that opens Capital sees the commodity this way: as a “given” - an irreducible “elementary form” whose characteristics can easily be perceived. The “transcendental” and “dialectical” voices introduced as the chapter unfolds call into question the apparent self-evidence of the commodity, enabling Marx to say, at this point in the text:

Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Why does the commodity possess such “metaphysical” properties? Almost all commentaries get the first step in Marx’s argument, which is that the use values of commodities cannot account for the strange properties Marx has discussed through his exposition of the “transcendental” and “dialectical” voices:

So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value.

Many commentaries, however, want to interpret this statement in terms of a dichotomy between use value and exchange value - to assume that Marx is setting up here for an argument that use value is not mysterious, but exchange on the market introduces some sort of mystification. Where commentaries put forward this line of analysis, they often overlook or else interpret away the next move of Marx’s argument, which discusses how there is also nothing mysterious about the component parts that make up value:

Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development. And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.

So the “parts” of the commodity, as these have been determined at this point in the argument, do not - as parts - account for the genesis of the mystification Marx has associated with the commodity-form. So where does the mystification come from? From the unique relation in which these parts have come to be brought together and connected to one another, in a situation of generalised commodity production:

Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself.

The strong assumption that Marx is primarily concerned with opposing use value to exchange value, in order to make exchange value the primary target of his critique, tends to make it very difficult for commentators to grasp what the text is doing here. Marx is not distinguishing use value at the beginning of this section, in order to praise use value for its demystified character. He is trying to distinguish use value along with other parts of the commodity-form - the parts associated with value, as parts, are treated as no more mysterious here than the part that is marked out by the term “use value”. The argument here is not that we need to find a privileged “part” to serve as our standpoint of critique - it is, instead, that, if all we do, in analysing the commodity-form, is break it down into parts and examine those, then we will never be able to understand the genesis of certain “metaphysical” qualitative properties that Marx has been analysing throughout this chapter. This argument, in other words, is a further development of Marx’s critique of naive empiricism: he is arguing here that no amount of breaking things down into their components will ever answer the question he is trying to pose - proceeding in that manner will only lead to a point where the analysis must naturalise or treat as given the qualities Marx is trying to grasp.

Those qualities, Marx is arguing, do not arise from some “part” of the commodity-form - but from this form itself - from what happens, in other words, when these particular parts are brought together into a relation of a particular sort. The strategic thrust of this moment of the text is not to direct our attention to the mystifications of market exchange, but instead to direct our attention to the need to analyse parts only in and through an understanding of the relationships within which those parts are suspended.

(For those who have been reading regularly, my point here is similar to the one I expressed in developing the distinctions between Lukács and Marx: Lukács treats the commodity-form as a category that expresses exchange on the market - a form of practice with a very long historical provenance - and therefore views what is historically new in capitalism as the product of the quantitative expansive of this very old practice; Marx, by contrast, treats the commodity-form as a category specific to capitalism, expressive of a new social relation in which market exchange and other sorts of practices have recently come to be embedded, therefore fundamentally transforming the qualitative characteristics of these older forms of practice, by placing these practices into new relations. The relations, as well as the parts, have qualitative characteristics - and the argument about the fetish, in part, is an argument about how the qualitative characteristics of the relationship have come to be read off onto the parts, so that certain qualitative characteristics are read as intrinsic attributes, when these characteristics are instead, according to Marx, the contingent products of the suspension of the parts into a particular whole.)

The next few sentences are very compressed. Marx argues:

The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.

Many commentaries see these sentences, again, as a reference to market exchange - to the abstraction from qualitative specificity and therefore the equation of goods and people that occurs when these are exchanged on the market for money. I see the argument here as much more complex than this - the Lukács piece cited above, particularly the discussion of equality in the final section, begins to outline how I see this argument, as does my earlier discussion of Diane Elson’s work. I won’t replicate that content in this post. The short version is that - at this particular moment in the text - I don’t take Marx to be talking about the reduction of everything, through market exchange, to the common denominator of money. I take Marx to be talking instead - again remembering this is an extended critique of naive empiricism - about how social actors have no way of knowing how much of the labour they empirically expend in production, will get to “count” as part of “social labour”, until market exchange reveals this result. Marx argues that this structuration of collective practice - in which social actors only find out after the fact whether, and to what extent, their activities get to “count” as part of social labour - can be seen as social actors enacting a distinction between empirical labouring activities (which can be directly perceived by the senses), and some subset of those activities whose empirical extent will only be known after market exchange takes place. This process of culling activities empirically undertaken, down to activities that get to “count”, Marx argues is tantamount to collectively treating certain activities as though they possess a “supersensible” essence - which Marx names “value” - thus enacting “value” as an intangible social reality.

Marx will later talk about the creation of value (and surplus value) as a process that takes place both inside and outside of circulation: the market isn’t the only institution relevant to the social process being shorthanded here. At this point in the text, Marx hasn’t yet introduced the categories he will need, to make the nature of his argument more overt, and so it is easier to “hear” the text as an argument about circulation. It is particularly important to remember that Marx is gradually unspooling further determinations of his initial categories all the way through the text, such that the argument at any particular moment, is expressed only in terms of the categories he has derived to that point: he adopts this strategy because he thinks it’s the only way to reveal the relationships that connect the categories to one another, in the context of an argument whose primary objective is to disentangle the qualitative characteristics and potentials of that relationship, from the qualitative characteristics and potentials of various moments. This makes the strategic thrust of the early moments of Capital difficult to appreciate, until further along in the text. Unfortunately, the received impression that Marx is trying to make an argument about “the market”, combined with the focus on circulation in the opening chapters of Capital, can occlude the strategic thrust of the text overall.

Marx then moves to a set of analogies. First, from the physical sciences:

In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things.

What Marx is reaching for here, I would suggest, is an example that involves a relation that comes to be misperceived as an object - where the emphasis is on the relationality of the example - on the need to grasp the relation, in order to grasp the process. Marx seems to realise the risk of this analogy, in the course of an argument against the tendency to treat the qualitative characteristics of social relations as the intrinsic properties of natural objects, and so reaches immediately for a more social analogy. Here he turns to religion:

But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race.

Here Marx tries to drill in that he is not trying to talk about some natural property, which comes to be filtered through socialised perception into some particular form. He is trying to talk about a distinctive sort of social entity - something entirely enacted in collective practice. He thinks his readers will find it intuitive to think of religion in this way - as a collective practice in which social actors behave as though intangible, supersensible creatures exist. This analogy has its limits as well, however: Marx worries that his readers will think that the supersensible entities of religious practice are the products of shared belief - “products of the human brain”, as Marx puts it. This also isn’t quite what Marx is reaching for: social actors (aside from the occasional political economist or philosopher) don’t need to “believe” in the existence of supersensible entities like “value”, in order to organise their collective practice to behave as though such entities exist. This is what Marx is trying to capture with his next sentence:

So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.

So it is this collective enactment of supersensible entities like value, which social actors effect unintentionally, that suspends the “parts” of the commodity-form into the distinctive relation that produces the “metaphysical” traits Marx has been analysing in this chapter. It is here that Marx finally gives this process a name:

This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

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