This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.

So what is the peculiar social character of this labour? [...]

I tend to read Marx as working a great deal with notions of ambivalence – it gives his work a very supple normative core, enabling it to provide a basis for interpreting movements as romantic, affirmative, utopian (in the sense of unrealisable), etc., by providing a way of slicing through aspects of capitalism, turning things around and asking, “Well, what else could we do with this?” – taking seriously the notion that things don’t have to remain in the state in which we’ve inherited them, but also providing a basis for understanding why emancipatory transformation might be so difficult, because the context itself makes it easy for the eye and the heart to be diverted and become confused…

Running this morning (this is my “horror day” teaching…) – just wanted to say thanks for the recommendations and comment.

take care,
Nate

The question, I suppose, is what you mean by the “ontological understanding of ‘time’”. Personally – leaving Marx aside – I think the distinctive “structure” of time in the modern era (and the perceptions of this structure) is something that would need to be theorised. I (again personally) don’t think that we are dealing with a “mere” perception – I think a temporal pattern is being enacted in collective practice. I just tend to think that the pattern is not itself as “rigorous” as would be implied by a strictly quantitative interpretation of what Marx was trying to get at by the notion of socially average labour time – so, I think there are tendencies, for example, for technologies, forms of organisation, etc., to spread in dramatic, “snowballing” cascades – but a complex range of more aleatory (at least with reference to this kind of theory) factors determine how this unfolds, such that the general pattern is observable at a very general level and on a long historical scale, but with a large number of eddies and side currents running in tandem with this overarching trend.

I think there’s quite a lot of textual evidence in Capital that Marx is aware of what I’m calling eddies and side trends – which is what makes me wonder whether he does believe that there is something underneath that could be quantified, or whether this interpretation might be one of many unfortunate instances where people have interpreted Marx to be saying something that he is in fact criticising. It’s just that the main lines of interpretation here are, I think, sufficiently strong, that I’m not sure how confident I am in pushing an outlying reading of Marx in this particular respect – so I dither a bit. And, since I’ve been more interested in what can we pull from Marx (and many others) for contemporary theory than in Marx’s “intent”, I haven’t done the sort of work on Marx’s text that would be required to fight back against the weight of this particular tradition on the brains of the living…

The “dead weight of tradition” issue is interesting. I tend to read this in a Benjaminian sense: as a comment about the historically constituted potentials that the present bears within itself – potentials that, in alienated form, function more as forms of compulsion or constraint, than as potentials that could be developed into new forms of freedom.

The relationship to Hegel is also interesting – but I’m not sure how you read Hegel? Are you wondering whether Marx retains a sort of transhistorical notion of “progress”? The sort of narrative that seems to be reflected in his more generalising statements about human societies and how they come to be transformed? I think it’s unclear, by Capital, whether Marx understands himself to be unfolding just the latest example of how the development of technology has prepared the way for the revolutionisation of a form of social life, or whether he is doing something more historically specified – trying to argue more that, in spite of appearances, there is no “material” reason that our society can’t be transformed – while analysing the “appearances” that can disguise this contingency, and also analysing (although here, I think, in a more undeveloped way than he could have) the forms of subjectivity that point toward a different form of social life.

I’ll have to apologise – my laptop battery is inexplicably about to run out of power (should have another couple of hours in it – technology, you know… ;-P). I’ll post this, with apologies that it isn’t quite all I had intended to say, and I haven’t had a chance even to look over it…

“The tradition [and metaphysical assumptions] of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living.”

However, I would tend to argue that any talk of the ‘persuasiveness’ of the interpretative categories used by Marx relates more to the ‘deep structures’ (or ‘non-random forms of perception’) that coalesce around the concept of ‘time’ rather than ‘labour.’

In brief (and ever so crudely), I feel that the ontological understanding of ‘time,’ (something Marx inherits from Hegel? Something at least mentioned in the ‘will’!) is the limiting factor in ideas about ‘labour time.’ A limit that compels Marx down the futile path of trying to quantify socially averaged labour time (and I agree that he can be read backwards) and a limit that ensures that in his narrative the concept of ‘technology’ is always ‘coupled’ with the (temporal) concept of ‘progress.’