(Back to work again for me…)

I always do get something of a chuckle when you say something like ‘this will have to be short/quick” and then ream off several hundreds words (looks to me like your responses is about 1000). I wish I could do that!

Anyway, go and write more great stuff on Marx!

Not so much…

Sorry!

First on the issue of immanent voicing: I’ve been wondering how to express this myself – as in, I think that whole of volume 1 is structured as a “science”, in which Marx refuses to discuss categories that have not yet been derived (and he will often point readers to later volumes, saying that the categories will be derived there) – so that aspect of the “immanent” presentation continues. However, the really irritating (to me) speaking in the “voice” of perspectives that Marx disagrees with, without flagging that he is doing so: this dies down quite rapidly. So, the first chapter is almost impenetrable, if you don’t know Marx is up to something strange. This fog is already lifting by the second chapter, though, and Marx becomes increasingly clearer that he is deriving categories, and is planning to do so in a certain rigorous order, which allows him to demonstrate their connections with one another, etc. – basically, the text becomes much more explicit about what it’s doing and, when Marx does shift into the “voice” of a perspective, he’ll often flag it explicitly by saying, “But let’s now hear [the factory inspectors/capitalists/etc] on this”.

At the same time, though, he doesn’t really explicate what’s going on with the derivations – why he “orders” the text the way he does, and the connection of this strategy back to Hegel. Also, I actually don’t take the shift with the working day chapter to be, for example, a shift into Marx’s own voice: I take this chapter to be a reflection on forms of governance intrinsically related to the reproduction of capital, and so I take the factory inspectors’ reports (however much Marx might also share their indignation at working conditions) to be spoken in the voice of the perspective Marx is trying to highlight at that point in his derivation: the voice of the regulatory state.

So I guess I’m trying to say that this is an active presentational issue for me – as in, I’m undecided how to present this, in the thesis itself, so that on the one hand I’m not overclaiming and acting as though it’s just impossible to figure out that Marx is up to this, while on the one hand I’m doing some justice to the structure of the text, which I think Marx never properly explains to his readers, even as the immediate, paragraph-by-paragraph, movement of the text becomes much easier to track…

There are also – this will come out (hopefully!) in the chapter I’m trying to write now – one major area where I think Marx’s voice remains a bit cryptic through the entirety of volume 1: this relates to what he means, when he draws distinctions between what is necessary for material production per se, versus what is necessary for material production in its capitalist form. It’s extremely easy to read these passages as Marx stepping out of an immanent frame altogether, to pronounce a verdict on capitalism from an asocial “materialist” standpoint. My argument is that Marx understands these sorts of claims as a determinate negation – not that he doesn’t make distinctions between capitalism and necessary aspects of material production, but that the sorts of abstractions associated with the latter are our abstractions – they are determinate negations that arise from a particular “something” – the determinate negations emergent immanently in capitalist society. On this level, I think Marx is never really sufficiently clear – whether because he is inconsistent in his own argument, or because he doesn’t want to step outside a particular immanent perspective, or because I’m making all this up and he’s just a good ol’ fashioned crass materialist after all ;-P But this sort of problem is the subject of the current chapter (which will follow the one above).

In terms of the second and third volumes: in a sense, the problem is that they are incomplete. So I also don’t tend to read them as immanently voiced (and in this I follow Patrick Murray, who phrases this point in terms of the first volume of Capital being Marx’s “only scientific work”, in this peculiar quasi-Hegelian sense). My claims in the thesis are intended to be specific to the first volume. References within the first volume, though, make clear that Marx is still intending roughly to follow the process of derivation of progressively more concrete categories, with the intention then of sort of closing the loop on his theory of practice, and demonstrating how social actors driven by their experiences of everyday aspects of capitalism, could unintentionally produce the sort of structure that is the subject of volume 1 (Marx says somewhere – perhaps in the section on relative and absolute surplus value? I’d have to look at my notes – that the first volume is intended to establish what the “form” is, while the later volumes are intended to talk in more theory of practice terms).

On the non-presuppositional issue: a couple of different reactions. I would take the idea behind a “presuppositionless” theory to be that whatever presuppositions the theory deploys, are unfolded somewhere immanently to the theory itself. So, at the beginning, there are all sorts of presuppositions that look quite arbitrary. As the account becomes more fleshed out, this arbitrary appearance should gradually disappear, and it should be shown why those specific presuppositions were actually “necessary” in the sense that they emerge immanently within the account.

I take Marx to be making a weird sort of argument about this kind of theory – at least when he transposes it into a theory of the reproduction of capital. His argument is that capital, in certain respects, behaves like a “presuppositionless” entity – it thereby cuts itself off from its own history. It does have historical preconditions (Marx makes any number of references to these in the text, and the whole section on primitive accumulation reflects on this), but these preconditions are distinct from “capitalism” – capitalism is, in this sense, treated as a sort of “emergent” system, with autopoietic properties once formed. So the emergence of capitalism’s peculiar “order” – its historical genesis – is arbitrary and not the subject of the account of the social form unfolded in most of the first volume. The goal here isn’t to grasp genealogy, but rather contemporary genesis – what the full-blown structure is, and how it is reproduced in contemporary practice. It’s this contemporary structure that (contingently) has “presuppositionless” properties for Marx.

That said, this “presuppositionless” logic only grasps a quite narrow object: Capital is chock full of discussions of things that are structurally contingent from the standpoint of the reproduction of capital. And, of course, Marx also believes that capitalism generates resources that point beyond itself – so it isn’t really the “totality” that it appears to be, from the standpoint of some dimensions of its process of reproduction.

So I think there’s an element to which Marx uses these notions of “presuppositionless” process, to capture what things look like from the standpoint of the reproduction of capital – in order then better to ground an argument about the way in which this is itself a situated or partial perspective – one that doesn’t recognise that the whole structure “presupposes” the possibility for its own overcoming. I take this, more than historical antecedents, to be the sort of “presupposition” to which Marx is trying to draw attention.

I guess this is a long-winded way of saying that I agree with you, for slightly different reasons. At various points in the drafting process, I put more on this into this chapter – it just always made me feel as though I was getting too far ahead of my narrative, and so I kept pulling it out (some of it may survive in footnote form – I can’t remember now). It may well need to go back in I think I’m very uncomfortable with programmatic declarations about where the text is going to go, as I experience them as difficult for the reader to interpret before they’ve gotten to the point where I can show them what I mean, so I suspect I’m more nervous than maybe I should be about foreshadowing these sorts of things…

Thank you for reading this – it’s a long haul through this text I appreciate the feedback more than I can express – I was sort of reading over this, this morning, much too close to the text, and thinking it didn’t make any sense (which… er… may still be true, but it’s at least good to know that some folks are managing to work their way through it )

Gotta work on the new chapter

This is an extraordinary piece! And I think it offers a fine beginning to your dissertation. I do have a couple of general, and perhaps rather vague questions for you, though.

First off, I’m wondering if the strategy you outline and justify here holds for the whole of Capital. That is to say, while the majority of Volume 1 strikes me as immanently voiced, I’m not sure Volume 2 is (I never got to Volme 3, so I can’t comment). Moreover, by the time Marx gets to the Workday in Volume 1, the voicedness of the text seems to disappear. When Marx juxtaposes the worker a work horse in order to foreground the horse’s “natural” working limit of 8 hours in relation to the “unlimited” working potential of Man (I can’t remember if this is a fotnote, which might make a difference for your argument), for instance, it’s hard to conceive of Marx as ventriloquizing another position. So, here’s my question: do you think your interpretative strategy incorporates more than it makes problematic? I mean, I completely agree that the initial 200 pages are immanently voiced, but what about the remaining 400 of Volume 1? And, given the specifically economic argument of Volume 2, it’s hard to see how it remains within the purview of a ventroliquized consciousness.

I’m also wondering about the importance of non-presuppositional beginnings. For, on the one hand, Hegel’s philosophy has a huge — and at the same time most minimal — presupposition: History. The push, in short, on reconciliation is to transform this basic ground of all thought into living substance (to paraphrase Hegel, to transform the soul into Spirit). So, there’s a sense in which your emphasis on the non-presuppositional character of Hegel and Marx is a little misleading. I take Marx’s discussion of Barter-exchange near the beginning of Capital 1 to be a similar historical presupposition that gives rise to the commodity proper, and his discussion of Gold as that which fixes the relative exchange value of goods within a given circuit of exchange to be another such foothold, both of which require a specific, non-arbitrary history.

The notion of beginnings also intimates a more logical question. If Marx’s work relies upon a previous thinker and his mode of argument, how is it not the case that Capital presupposes Hegelian philosophy? this is really a minor point, but I thought that, since you spend some time outlining the manner in which Marx’s argument follows the non-presuppositional character of Hegel’s Science, it might be worth noting that the very mode of presentation has a historical antecedent, which implies a certain point of departure that lies outside of the text.

But these minor questions aside, I think this draft does an excellent job in foregrounding the Practice theoretic concerns that motivate your reading of Marx. And you’ve offered a compelling reading strategy. It’s a fine piece, N, and it makes an excellent introduction to your work!