Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One

88 Pages·2011·10.502 MB·English

by  Fredric Jameson

r=f=l OOJt.!¥1:iJfJEIXXJ www.wengewang.com
Philosophy
$24.95/£14.99/$31 CAN
The recent financial crisis, which traumatized the
world's economies, inspired a resurgence of
interest in the grandfather of all leftwing
critiques: Karl Marx's Capital. The new readings
and interpretations that followed had in common
a focus on globalization, It is in terms of
globalization that Capital reveals its increasingly
urgent relevance to modern structures of labor.
But as well as being a timeless work of economic
analysis, Capital is also an audacious attempt to
solve a philosophical and representational
problem.
Representing Capita/looks at Marx's magnum
opus as the attempt to capture and express an
entity-global capitalism-so complex that it is
beyond the imaginative grasp of even the
financiers who pretend to be its masters. Marx's
ingenious response to this challenge is to create
a text that is in constant conceptual motion
transforming each new feature of capital into a
problem in its own right, each newly revealed
characteristic into a new riddle to be solved.
This very process-transforming a dilemma or
contradiction into a new point of departure
captures the secret of capitalism's power. It is
a self-repairing machine that overcomes its
breakdowns by expansion, and globalization is
only the most recent example of this.
Capitalism is an infernal mechanism,
characterized most dramatically by the waste
and damage it leaves behind; and in our time that
damage is realized most powerfully in endemic
unemployment. As Jameson reaches his
conclusion, we see that Capital is a book for our
time because it is essentially a book about
unemployment.
REPRESENTING CAPITAL
REPRESENTING CAPITAL
A Commentary on Volume One
FREDRIC JAMESON
VERSO
London • NewYork
For Maria-Elisa Cevasco
First published by Verso 2011
© Fredric Jameson 2011
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
13579108642
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1 F OEG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www. verso books. com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-454-1
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by MJ Gavan, Cornwall
Printed in the US by Maple Vail
Contents
Introduction
The Play of Categories II
2 The Unity of Opposites 47
3 History as Coda 73
4 Capital in Its Time 93
5 Capital in Its Space 109
6 Capital and the Dialectic 127
7 Political Conclusions 139
Index 153
Introduction
It should not be surprising that Marx remains as inexhaustible as
capital itsel£ and that with every adaptation or mutation of the
latter his texts and his thought resonate in new ways and with fresh
accents-inedits, as the French say-rich with new meanings. In par
ticular the mutation of a capitalism ofimperialism and the monopoly
stage into the latest globalized moment and structure might have been
expected to turn our attention to unremarked features of his labori
ous explorations; and if not that newly expanded system itsel£ then
certainly its crises and the catastrophes appropriate to this present of
time, which like those of the past are both the same as what preceded
them, but also different and historically unique.
These shifts were to be sure marked by a readjustment of Marx's
works themselves: first, in the originality of its modernist moment,
a new kind of fascination with the alienations theorized by the then
recently discovered manuscripts of 1844; then, as the sixties began
to develop their own consequences, a mesmerization by those 1857
notebooks called the Grundrisse, whose very open-endedness seemed
to promise relief from the cut-and-dried schematization of "dialecti
cal materialism" and its various handbooks.1
1 Gramsci famously denounced such handbooks as Bukharin's ABC ofC ommu
nism; while in our time the Grundrisse have seemed to many to open up lines
of flight, dialectical and non-dialectical, beyond reigning orthodoxies: see for
example Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991),
2 INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION 3
But it is not clear that those handbooks imply any comparable
justify by way of close attention to its argument and the latter's stages
ossification in Capital, Volume One itself, the only published work
and point-by-point development. This can be imagined as a series of
whose architectonic Marx himself lovingly projected and brought to
interlinked problems or paradoxes, which, ostensibly solved, give rise
completion, and for which the Grundrisse were preparatory notes.
to new and unexpected ones, of greater scope.
Against Althusser, I will claim that the theory of alienation is still
The process must then be imagined as a specific proto-narrative
very much an active, form-building impulse; while I will also argue,
form, in which the transformation or recoding of a conceptual
this time with him, that it has in Capital been transmuted into a
dilemma in a new and potentially more manageable way also results
wholly different non- or post-philosophical dimension. Yet is not
in the expansion of the object of study itself: the successive resolu
this "Volume One" itself incomplete in a different way than the notes
tions of the linked riddles or dilemmas lay in place the architecture of
and speculations of the earlier, more truly unpublished texts? I will
a whole construct or system, which is that of capital as such. It is this
argue here that it is not, and that the layering of the posthumous
unique constructional process, quite unlike that of most philosophi
volumes (falling rate of profit, ground rent, the multiple temporali
cal texts and of most rhetorical arguments as well, that Marx calls the
ties) are already laid in place here in c;ts satisfactory a form as we are
Darstellung of the material; I will not become involved in the debate
likely to need.2 But I will also claim that any num-ber of features of
about science (Wissenschdft), except to remind us of Althusser's defi
Marxism are absent from this more purely economic volume, and
nition of the latter as a discourse without a subject (that is to say,
that future Marxisms can only be more effective politically by recog
without doxa or opinions).3
nizing those omissions.
Truth being what you agree to conclude with, as Wittgenstein
For as I will show, Capital-and from now on I omit the "Volume
puts it, the exposition of the structure and dynamics of capitalism
One"-is not a book about politics, and not even a book about labor:
will be complete when all those interlinked problems have been laid
it is a book about unemployment, a scandalous assertion I mean to
to rest. Topics which do not find their place in this series are gener
ally taken to be arguments against Marx or against his conception of
and also, for a variety of views and studies, Karl Marx's Grundrisse, ed. Marcello capitalism, although (when not pseudoproblems) they may simply
Musto (London: Routledge, 2008). be problems of a different kind, relating to quite different issues.
2
This obviously controversial assertion (for me simply a working framework) is Bourgeois economists are generally concerned to offer practical solu
implicitly or explicitly denounced by everyone committed to the six-part plan tions to crises within the system, within the market (problems raised
outlined by Marx in his April 2, 1858 letter to Engels. Indeed, according to
by inflation or stagflation, of growth or slowdowns); they wish to
Ernest Mandel, Roman Rosdolsky, in his pathbreaking The Making ofM arx's
correct the system in one way or another, but not to theorize it as a
"Capital," "has isolated no less than fourteen different versions of the plan for
totality, which is Marx's ambition (and that of most Marxian econo-
Capita/between September 1857 andApril1868" (Capital, Volume One, trans.
mists who followed him). ·
Ben Fowkes [London: New Left Review, 1976], p. 28; all page references in the
Such a theorization is· not a philosophical project, nor does it aim to
text are to this edition). The most powerful current political argument for the
formulate this or that conception of capital; nor is Marx's argument a
incompleteness of Volume One is that of Michael Lebowitz (see for example
philosophical one, setting this or that idea of truth in play. But it may
Chapter 7 in Following Marx [Chicago: Harvester, 2009]). I will discuss Lebow
certainly be observed that the objections to Marxism are philosophical,
itz's position further in the Political Conclusions, below; it is not incompatible
with my reading in this book. Meanwhile, there is also a good deal of current
attention to Engels' editing ofVolumes II and III; see for example Vollgraf and
3 Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and
Jungnickel, "Marx in Marx's Worten?" in MEGA.-Studien 1994/2.
Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 171.
INTRODUCTION 5
4 INTRODUCTION
for political theory, the traditional questio~-':hat is the state?-has
for they replay the empiricist objections to the deployment of frame
mutated into something unanswerable wtth tts postcontemporary
works like that of totality or system, which are for them imaginary
version, where is the state? -while the former thing called power,. as
entities. (And it is also true that the replies to these arguments seem
l~ast a~ do~lar btl~,
solid and tangible, seemingly, as a gold coin, or at a
to take a philosophical form in their turn, a form generally identified
has become the airy plaything of mystics and phys10log.1sts ahke: !t 1s
as dialectical.) But I claim here that Capital is neither a philosophi
wro~ght ~h1s
the problem of representation which has all destabthzed
cal work in that sense, nor is it an economic one, in the specialized
confusion, and it can be said to be history Itself whtch has deregu
meaning projected by most academic economics departments.
lated it, so that if the dilemmas of representation are postmodern
I am of course also concerned that the following pages not be
and historical, it can also be said that history as such has become a
construed as a literary reading of the book. Nowhere has the Marxian
doctrine of base and superstructure been more damaging than in problem of representation. . . .
Maybe theology could have done a ~ett.er job W:1th capltaltsm,
Marxism itself, where the specialists of the base-the commentators
consisting as it is of a free play of categones m the v01d a~d an .exer
on capitalism, the strategists of revolution-are encouraged to feel
in~erplay th~
cize of figuration without a referent: an of dtalecncs of
little more than contempt for the culture workers of the superstruc
the One and the Many, of subject and obJeCt, Qf the Circumference
tures, unless the latter offer legal and juridical analyses or happen
whose center is everywhere and the ens causa sui. But even t~eology
to produce this or that politically relevant Ideologiekritik. The liter
atempo~al) fin~
of the Spinozan variety (notoriously _woul.d dtfficul.ty
ary approaches to Capital, such as they are, will have been intent
accommodating a totality so peculiar as capuahsm, m whtch spanal
on characterizing the form of the work (is it for example comic or
anomalies are so paradoxically interactive with tempor~ ~nes. .
tragic?), or on reading it as a narrative of some kind, with the various
As for the question of representation, I understand 1t m relauon-
forces (capital, labor, the state) sorted out into a cast of characters or
ideolo~
ship to conceptualization as well as to (and as. a corollar!
image patterns. 4 But this is perhaps to misunderstand the direction
of the relationship of thinking or ideology wtth narrative). Marxs
literary theory has taken in recent years, as it has moved to confront
frequent (and frequently referenced) use of the ter~ Darstell~ng
a dilemma not unrelated to the one that has tended to discredit tra
needs to be understood in this way, and not merely m a rhetoncal
ditional philosophy-namely the dilemma of representation as such.
re_rresentatio~ re~urn~d
or linguistic/literary sense. The issue of was
It is now around the question of representation that contemporary
w~1~e
to the philosophical agenda in modern nmes by Hetde?ger,
interrogations of truth must turn, as well as those concerning total
its political function has been widely challenged today m the cnsts
ity or the Real. The problem of representation today eats away at all
ex,~mple Del~uz:;
of parliamentary democracy (see for Foucault,
the established disciplines like a virus, particularly destabilizing the
Gayatri Spivak). Heidegger understands representanon more nar
dimension of language, reference and expression (which used to be
modern~ty cons~que~c.e
rowly as a historical symptom of and. a. of
the domain of literary study), as well as that of thought (which used
the latter's subject/ object split. The Marxtst tradtno~-. tts cnnque
to be that of philosophy). Nor is economics exempt, which posits
of epistemology and the contemplative, its denunCiation ~f on~­
invisible entities like finance capital on the one hand, and points
dimensionality and of reification more generally-w~ul~ ennch thts
to untheorizable singularities like derivatives on the other. And as
analysis with an identification of modernity and capttahsm. I myself
4 Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Tangled Bank; Robert Paul Wolff, Moneybags Must
See for example Martin Heidegger, "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," in. Holzwege
Be So Lucky; Hayden White, Metahistory. The best linguistic study of Marx 5
remains Ludovico Silva, El Estilo de Marx (Mexico: Siglo Ventuno, 1971). (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950).
6 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 7
would prefer to grasp representation as an essential operation in of thought without reducing them to what Marcuse so memorably
cognitive mapping and in ideological construction (understood here called one-dimensionality. Thus, for example, social class is at one
in a positive sense).
and the same time a sociological idea, a political concept, a historical
I wo~ld therefore also wish to stress the relationship between rep conjuncture, an activist slogan, yet a definition in terms of any one of
resentatiOn and representability as we find it in Freud,G where the these perspectives alone is bound to be unsatisfactory? We may go so
unconscious construction of the dream scans the signifier for usable far as to claim, indeed, that this is why the very form of the definition
elements and building blocks, for the presentation/r epresentation as such is unacceptable. Social class cannot be defined, it can only
of desire and the drive. Freud's work thus presupposes two features: be provisionally approached in a kind of parallax, which locates it in
~rst, t~at any full or satisfactory representation of the drive is impos the absent center of a multiple set of incompatible approaches. How
sible (m that sense every form of desire is already a representation). much the more so will this be when it is a question of capitalism itself
And second, that we must always pay close attention in this process as the totality of which social class is now a function?
to representability, something which has to do on the one hand with Yet the conclusion to draw here is not that, since it is unrepresent
the possibility in the drive of some minimal expression, even if as a able, capitalism is ineffable and a kind of mystery beyond language or
mere symptom; and on the other with the material available for that thought; but rather that one must redouble one's efforts to express the
express~on (in. Freud's case, the language and images of everyday life). inexpressible in this respect. Marx's book gives us the supreme example
Here histo~y Intervenes, for what may serve as a satisfactory vehicle of a dialectical effort to do so, and this is why the way in which he
for expressiOn of some feature of desire at one moment in history finally did represent it is so significant and urgent for us today.
may not be available at another.
Of capitalist space we can posit a Spinozan pantheism, in which
But this will be more comprehensible when we shift from the arcana the informing power is everywhere and nowhere all at once, and yet
~f the psyche and its drives to the question of capitalism as a total at the same time in relentless expansion, by way of appropriation and
Ity. No one had ever seen that totality, nor is capitalism ever visible subsumption alike. Of the temporality of the matter it is ~~ou~h to
as such, but only in its symptoms. This means that every attempt to observe that the machine is constantly breaking down, repaumg Itself
c.onstruct a .model of capitalism-for this is now what representa not by solving its local problems but by mutation onto larger and
tion means m this context-will be a mixture of success and failure: larger scales, its past always punctually forgotten, its nested fu~ur~s
some features will be foregrounded, o~hers neglected or even misrep irrelevant up to the point of the quantum leap (so that structurahsms
resented. Every representation is partial, and I would also stress the notion of the synchronic sometimes strikes one as a conceptual ideol
fact that every possible representation is a combination of diverse and ogy expressly invented to deal with this peculiar new reality).
heterogeneous modes of construction or expression, wholly different Two specifically dialectical problems would seem to dog any
types of articulation that cannot but, incommensurable with each description of this complex reality as it wraps itself in a time and
other: remain a mixture of approaches that signals the multiple per space it has itself projected.· The first is that of technology as such,
spe~ttves from which one must approach such a totality and none of which is to say of reification: is it cause or effect, the creature of
which e~haus.t i~. This ve~y inc~mmensurability is the reason for being human agency or the latter's master, an extension of collective power
of the dialectic Itself, which exists to coordinate incompatible modes or the latter's appropriation? We are here conceptually paralyzed by
6
Sigmund Freud, lhe Interpretation ofD reams (London: Hogarth, 1953), stan 7 See for example on the unavoidable multiplicity of"definitions" of class, Stanley
dard edn, vol. V, Chapter Six, Section D ("Considerations ofRepresentability"). Aronowitz, How Class Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).