Take care all…

I see the point of stitching affective psychology onto marxism (Reich and Marcuse must also be mentioned) or reading it back in, but my own view is it’s a bit of a bailout compared to actually taking the time to work through the full relational implications of making the world under conditions not of our choosing. In this respect I find pragmatic interactionism (Mead, Goffman) the most ‘marxist’ of the (social) psychologies.

One of the most tricky cases for me when it comes to thinking about the value things get accorded in the market is labour itself. As a tutor who must demand payment by the hour I am always at a loss to judge what I should ask for. I tend to compare myself to a building site labourer because the time taken to train for my sort of teaching is probably roughly the same as the time taken to train to be a proficient bricklayer. But most tutors get paid more than that and I find myself wondering if there is any abstract labour theory justification for the difference or if it is just a quirk of the local social recognition of the bespectacled tutor in corduroy trousers with delicate fingers.

P.s. Isn’t it just pushing a concept too far to say that the viewer of the Van Gogh painting is labouring?

(I have no idea how I used to think through problems, before I started a blog… The number of things I have worked through, only because someone has a question or made a comment at just the precise amount of offset from how I was trying to think about it… It’s extremely helpful.)

In a sense, this relates a bit to what we discussing at your place, over whether Marx’s categories are individual or collective categories, and also over in what way Marx’s categories capture subjective experience. I read Marx as walking a very strange line (and as struggling a great deal to find the words to express the line he is trying to walk) where the fetish does capture aspects of perception and thought that become socially plausible – Marx uses the term socially valid – in a particular social context – so he is trying to say something about the emergence of a form of subjectivity. But this form of subjectivity arises, as I hear his argument, from something we are collectively doing – and, importantly, from something we aren’t intending to collectively do (so there’s a strange element in the argument where forms of subjectivity arise from a process that is social – in the sense of collective – but not intersubjective – in the sense of relating to “beliefs”). The thrust of the argument is that our collective practices render plausible the emergence certain forms of perception and thought, because the constitutive practices entail social actors’ adopting those forms.

But this is a particular reading of the passage – a reading that helps me make sense of certain things Marx is doing later in the text (this reading, for my purposes, is particularly helpful in making sense of what I tend to call Marx’s “critical standpoint” – his argument about why capitalism generates, but also thwarts, potentials for transformation – and it’s also helpful for questions Marx doesn’t himself address directly, like trying to understand the sensibilities expressed in the development of the modern sciences and social sciences, the sensibilities expressed in certain kinds of popular political movements, and similar things – this is, if it makes sense, the problem space that makes me particularly interested in a specific sort of reading).

But, in a sense, it’s possible to divide interpretations of Marx in broad brush-stroke terms over how they deal with the fetish argument. And the reinterpretation of the fetish as a psychological fetish is one major line of interpretation, which can be productive for particular problem spaces that my interpretation can’t reach.

Then you have people like Adorno (and, I suppose, in a somewhat more crude way, Lukacs) who try to address both the collective practice dimensions I’m trying to grasp, and the psychological dynamics that might be in play as well. I actually tend to like this kind of work, although I’m not convinced its “there” in Marx, and so I’ve left it aside for my current project. But whether it’s “there” or not, the experiences of the 20th century drove a number of theorists either to look for it, or to try to amend what Marx was doing, out of the sense that the sorts of movements and historical trends they were seeing, needed to be able to thematise affective dynamics.

I’m operating from a slightly different starting point (my Marx isn’t quite Adorno’s Marx), and I might be able to address some of the concerns of this body of theory, by coming at the problem from a slightly different way. But I’m still basically sympathetic to the need to be able to thematise affect in social theory – I just see Marx, particularly in the fetish discussion, as doing something else.

Sorry you were held in moderation – it should happen only the first time you post.

Take care…

the aura is the thinking man’s fetish. The thing that Benjamin calls “aura” is worked on by visual circulation: it is altered by all that looking. By the time the museum patron confronts the masterpiece on the wall, s/he must compare her/his experiences of the object with her/his perception of all that perception that has accreted to it — in short, everything that accounts for its canonical status as art, that valorizes the object socially, and that valorizes the viewer who establishes a relation to the art object… The viewer’s perception of the painted image includes his or her perception of the perceptual status of the object — the sense of the number and kind of looks that it has commanded. This abstracted existence, which exists only in the socially mediated (via lithographs, museum reproductions, etc.) and imagined summation of the work of art’s meaning (value) for everyone else (society), becomes the fetish character of the unique work.

Since attention value accumulates in the commodity, the value of attention labor, like production labor, can only be ascertained after the act — time out of joint again.

Might be fun eventually to try to map/list the many various approaches (not the right word I really want, can’t think of a better one) to time in _Capital_.

I’m not sure “fun” is the word I would use – but yes, the text is obsessed with the creation and implications of the co-existence of different sorts of time, and it would be good to map them out.

On one level, the opening perspective of Capital is explicitly historicist – talking about the discovery of the useful properties of things as the “work of history”. But there’s a strange disjoint in that opening voice, as use value is soon after positioned as a material content that is the “true” basis of wealth, regardless of the explicit social form of wealth – with the suggestion that the form varies historically, while its content remains the same. This is bound together with the notion that the material properties of goods were “always already” there, but come to be discovered in historical time.

Marx drops a sarcastic footnote to the text, giving an example of how the “intrinsick” property of a loadstone to attract iron becomes useful only in certain circumstances. The footnote suggests the need to develop, in a sense, a more complex sort of historicism – one that doesn’t content itself with talking about how intrinsic properties come to be discovered, but that also tries to understand the conditions of possibility for the “discovery” – and suggesting that what is discovered could be conceptualised as a sort of constitutive relation that arises with material objects under certain social conditions, rather than (one-sidedly) as an intrinsic property of the thing. This then ties together with Marx’s later argument about Aristotle failing to discover what “in truth” lies beneath exchange – where Marx places the “in truth” in sardonic scare quotes, again hinting and setting up for the explicit argument that value is not intrinsic – that Aristotle didn’t fail to “discover” value, but rather value wasn’t yet there to be discovered, since value depends on other social and historical conditions that didn’t yet exist in Aristotle’s time…

Sorry to babble – it’s very late here (for some ridiculous reason, I’ve been waking up at 3 a.m. lately… *sigh*). So if I’m making no sense, you’ll know why… I’m basically just trying (and perhaps failing) to continue the thought you were offering above…

I need to give this (and much, much else on yr blog) a thorough go over and a think, but real quick on just one line/point –
“Both are fundamentally retrospective categories”

I agree completely. I think the same is true (though perhaps w/ a different sense) of use value: use values are retroactively posited from practices of use. Use Y means use-value Y exists/existed. Hence the discovery of use values and their measures being the work of history. Not sure that adds anything to what you’re doing, but I think it’s interesting in the sense of being another piece of the temporal registers operating in Marx’s work. Might be fun eventually to try to map/list the many various approaches (not the right word I really want, can’t think of a better one) to time in _Capital_.

take care,
Nate