At any rate: many thanks again for the comments – and no rush at all to follow up (maybe I’ll actually manage to finish my damned commentary on the first chapter by the time you are able to dip back into the conversation).

On your first comment: given that I’ve now been stuck for close to a week, throwing away half-written follow-ups to this post, your fears of my finishing this any time soon may be somewhat unwarranted… What was funny is that, when I started this, I thought, “I’ll just write something quick on the fetish”. Then I thought, “I can’t really do that, without saying something on the overall textual strategy”. Then I thought, “You know, I should also say something about…” etc. And then, having written a few of these, I thought, “You know, I really should write these on more than the first chapter, to finally work out for myself how I want to read this text.” So I think this will be a quasi-irregular series for a while… You may enjoy this, but I anticipate helping many other blogs create free space on their blogrolls…

In the passage you quote, I think I’ve fallen into my own immanent voice trap – as well as the trap of not writing what is intended as the follow-up to this post quickly enough. This post was originally meant to be about double the length – to cover what it currently covers, but then to move on to clarify exactly the point you’re raising (among other points): to say, basically, that, if you stop here, you come away with some not-quite-right notions about value and abstract labour – which was part of the point I take Marx to have been trying to make, by starting his presentation here.

The passages I’m presenting above are sort of… backwards – they act as though something can be logically deduced, when the something that needs to be “deduced” is actually a nonrational social form – not irrational – at least, not any more irrational than previous social forms – but not something whose contours you could deduce through the decontextualised force of reason alone: which is, actually, how I read the section on Aristotle – that, if logical reasoning were all that were required to “deduce” the existence of Value, and labour’s role in the generation of Value, surely Aristotle could have managed to deduce it. If Aristotle couldn’t, but (as Marx puts it somewhere) a “dwarf economist like Bastiat” suddenly can, something else is going on, other than the power of the human intellect: we are being “primed” to find certain deductions plausible, by background and everyday practical experiences that we have, but that Aristotle didn’t share.

Marx will, in various places, hint that the narrative is “backwards” in this way – sorry: the term “backwards” isn’t a good one – basically, I’m trying to express that most of these categories only make sense at a different level of abstraction to the one being presented here – and I think Marx is very aware of this, and is expecting – as I’ve just written in my latest part-draft of what might become the next post in this series – a WTF? reaction from his readers: he wants this argument to feel wrong, I think – he is setting up for the section on fetish, which begins as though Marx has already established in the preceding sections how “supersensory” are the qualities attributed to commodities: Marx will suggest that these “supersensory” elements are “social” and are qualitatively distinctive “positivities”, but that they are perceived as “material” and as “negations” that remain behind when everything social has been stripped away.

I’m not being very clear here (this is one reason I can’t quite get the next post together – I can’t seem to say what I want to say clearly), and I haven’t hit very directly on the hesitations you express about the quantitative/qualitative determinations of these categories. Briefly, I think it’s probably safe to say that Marx is actually trying to talk about the qualitative peculiarity of Value (and how this is both expressed and masked by the more familiar category of “exchange value”, which Marx – again playing with Hegel – takes as a necessary form of appearance of Value as an “essence” – but a weird kind of essence – a “social essence”, and therefore an essence that is also a product of human practice – a sort of “Durkheimian” social reality, something that exists only because we enact it by practising our collective lives in a particular way). Much too abbreviated. In any event, if I can figure out how to write this next post, I suspect your questions might be easier to take up in that context – unless I change my mind, what I want to write on next are the concepts of abstract labour and Value…

Many thanks again for this – sorry not to do the questions more justice…

I’m ambivalent – on the one hand, I want you to finish this series of posts because I really like reading them and get stuff from them. On the other hand, if you finish the series then there’ll be no more for me to read of them. Can I pick the third (dialectical?) option of wanting you to continue rather than finish?

Your remarks on bodies in your comment are really interesting, if I had more time right now I’d write a blog post in response on useful labor and the body, I hope I remember to do so. (I’m just starting to look into workers’ compensation laws and health and safety laws in the US, among other things that connect w/ this.)

For now, I just want to say that I really like your point that Capital’s narrative voice, so to speak, is not Marx speaking at least in the beginning of the book. I think his occasional anti-semitic joke could be read as support of that (something about the language of commodities being hebrew), that he’s placing or finding that joke in the mouths of others. What I like about this is that it works against conceiving of value as a substance even though Marx writes sentences that sound like value is a substance (which lends itself to the mistake of thinking that value derives from actual labor time expended in producing an object rather than from socially necessary labor time; Harry Cleaver calls the value as substance reading ‘the phlogiston theory of value’ which I rather like). Marx writes those sentences but as your post insists, those are the sentences in the voice(s) of the book not the voice of Marx, so to speak.

Other stuff… you write:

“The material forms of the commodities you intend to exchange are qualitatively different from one another: the goods aren’t in any qualitative sense the same. You would hardly desire to exchange one for the other if the goods were identical: what would be the benefit? Yet exchange makes an equation: it determines that the goods must be exchanged for one another in some specific quantitative proportion – the goods must therefore be “equal” in some sense.

If we aren’t equating a material property of the goods, then we must be equating something else – Marx suggests that this must be a purely social property – without “an atom of use value”. “

It’s easy to read the first of these quoted paragraphs as saying commodities exchanged aren’t REALLY equivalent, that use value is qualitative while exchange value is purely quantitative. That’s attractive, but I’m not sure… it seems to me that qualities are not solely but largely a matter of interpretation. And it seems to me that exchange value is not purely quantitative (zero quality) but … mono-qualitative, having exactly one quality (qua exchange value), that of being exchangeable. Put more simply and I think better, it seems to me that exchange-ability is also a quality and also a material property. I think this is important among other things in order to avoid a material vs social distinction – the social is also material, just differently material. This is I think important in part in connection to certain types of use values which satisfy needs of the fancy/imagination – presumably those needs are social (needs to look good, or needs to display status in relation to others, etc) but also material (among other reasons because use values are presumed to be
material, right?)

As I read the bit on Aristotle, Marx has Aristotle saying “five beds for one house? Insanity! Beds and houses are absolutely different from each other!” But they’re not. They’re different but not absolutely different.

I’m not sure how much sense I’m making but I can’t do better just now, so I’ll leave off. Again great post and I hope you’re well.

Nate

For some reason, I find this material very difficult to write – perhaps because, with this chapter in particular, I read the work as extremely condensed and abbreviated, such that anything I’m writing always seems to be leaving something important out… The theory is that I’ll gradually blog it, and then sort out some of the blog material into a couple of upcoming conference papers, and then have a clearer sense of how to revise this material for thesis purposes…

But yes, I think the connection to Hacking and Canguilhem is right. A great deal in Capital can be read as talking about issues of embodiment (Marx tends to treat ideas as derivative of practices – as “reflexes in the brain” – which isn’t quite how I’d put it, but it at least captures the notion that there is a close connection between what we do – how we practice our individual and collective selves – and fundamental categories of perception and thought in terms of which we then interpret the world, and those practices through which we engage with it) – a great deal can also be read as an argument about what happens when the connection to embodiment or collective practice comes to be forgotten, such that the ideas appear to float above, or “cause” in a one-sided, non-reciprocal way, other aspects of social life. Marx’s explicit methodological statements can sometimes then go too far in the opposite direction – suggesting something more reductive than, I think, what he actually does in his analysis…

The issue of bodily norms is an interesting one: there’s quite a lot in Capital that can be read as an argument about embodiment – and differential embodiments: different – sometimes mutually contradictory or conflictual – “trends” or tendencies in the embodiment of the context. There are also obviously some elements that can be used to talk about why the concept of a “norm” becomes such a persuasive, intuitive concept – and then will also provide some examples of how particular norms come to be wielded – in law, in religious movements, in direct disciplinary practices in the factory setting – and there are some Foucaultian reaches here toward notions of why the production of particular kinds of bodies and orientations to managing the life of populations become important in specific ways. But I’m just meandering randomly… ;-P Basically: Marx is prone to making tantalising side references to all sorts of issues that he can’t find the time to thematise in any comprehensive way – so there are gestures to things that could be very interesting around the issue of the emergence of bodily norms, but you have to trawl through a great deal of M-C-M’-style discussions to get to it…

As I do this close re-read, I’m also wrestling with the issue of how Marx himself understands the “normalising” impulses he’s trying to analyse. He’s very struck with how much the political economists take such impulses for granted – as though this is how social life should always work, through some kind of unintended, but impersonal and coercive, normalising impulse.

There is a complex argument about the ways in which impersonal constraints come to be “personalised”, as people sort of introject these collective constraints into their personality structure, or rationalise compliance with constraints in various ways – some of this will come out as I keep writing. But Marx focusses a lot of his attention on trying to argue that there is something “impersonal” happening in the background: his argument here is a bit like Weber’s in Protestant Ethic – that you get to a point where, even if you don’t “believe in it”, there are still negative consequences if you don’t abide by it – these consequences only occur because social practice enacts them but, from an individual’s point of view, they are “objective” in that they can’t effectively be overcome by individual noncompliance or by a straightforward process of “demythologisation” – changes in collective practice on a broad scale are required.

Many theorists, certainly since Marx, would think such things. Marx is interesting in how hard he tries not to naturalise the sense that this is how things would always operate, in any social context, and in how he tries to illustrate in reasonably concrete detail (“concrete”, given that he’s basically trying to analyse something that’s fairly large in scale) how people can be motivated by a, b, and c, but somehow manage to generate x, y, and z – and then how the existence of x, y, and z, as overarching characteristics of a social environment, make it plausible that you would have lots of people running around motivated by a, b, and c, and so it goes… ;-P

I’m still trying myself to work out how “lockstep” Marx thinks the process is. I’m too fuzzy tonight to explain what my worry with this is (it basically boils down to whether Marx thinks he is talking about tendencies and plausible approximations, or whether he is serious when he talks about “laws”). Hopefully I’ll manage to work out what I think Marx thinks in this series of writings… ;-P

Sorry to babble… Very tired today for some reason… I’m trying to write the next post in this series – which, unless I change my mind, will explore what Marx means by “abstract labour” (which is, essentially, a further development of these points about social norms – that’s what “abstract labour” is: the coercive social norm) – and to set up for an argument that many interpretations of Marx mistake him to be talking about some kind of “conceptual abstraction” from various forms of concrete labouring activities, or else they take him to be talking about the way in which concrete labouring activities becomes less and less meaningful as capitalism develops – Marx will talk about both of these things, but neither is, I would argue, what he’s trying to pick out with the notion of “abstract labour”.

At any rate: I seem to be able to blurt fine on this when I’m just babbling in comments, but every time I turn back to the section on the dual character of labour in the first chapter of Capital, for some reason I end up deciding I really need to something else just to make sure I’m not missing something. So, since I wrote this post, I’ve run off and read a bunch of Lukacs, skimmed a pile of people trying to interpret the upcoming section on “commodity fetishism”, flipped back through volumes II and III of Capital, and am now flipping through the Grundrisse… It’s not quite an infinite regress. But I’m not exactly sure it’s what one would call progress either… ;-P

Apologies that this comment talks more about my work process than anything of general import – this will probably give a fairly accurate sense of where I am right now… ;-P

I’m struck by how fundamental the sense of the statistical average/median/norm seems to be to Marx’s account here, particularly if, as you suggest, he later queries the ‘objectivity’ of these logics. It’s intriguing given the analysis of the historical specificity of statistics and norms in, say, Hacking, or (in a more ‘biological’ sense) Canguilhem (and, in a moment of characteristic narcissism, I’m already wondering about bodily norms); and, of course, because ‘exchangeability’ can be seen to filter into so much of life in a way that seems to ensure the preservation of capitalism. With bated breath, I’ll await the next instalment…!