Rough Theory

Well maybe just a little bit about sex in Capital… Backtracking a bit from the passage discussed in the previous post….

The second chapter of Capital begins where the previous chapter ostensibly left off: with a programmatic declaration about what commodities are unable to do, given that they are only things, not people.

Commodities cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are the possessors of commodities. Commodities are things, and therefore lack the power to resist man. (1990: 178)

This passage looks like a “dialectical” derivation of a new category from the defects of the old: commodities, as simple objects, are unable to take themselves to market – and yet they are, intrinsically, objects that are exchanged; ergo, we can dialectically derive the existence of… owners! In the previous post, I suggested that such dialectical gestures should be read as ironic – not in the sense that Marx denies the results of the dialectical analysis (there really are owners of commodities, so the “result” is sound), but in the sense that the form of presentation does not reflect the actual form of analysis through which Marx arrives at his own critical interpretation of the reproduction of capital.

The next sentence already begins to destabilise the apparently confident assertion that commodities are passive objects, and casts doubt on the reliability of the character narrating this passage: “If they are unwilling,” the text tells us, “he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them” (178). Commodities have just been described as passive objects – unable to take themselves to market just as, at the end of the previous chapter, they were described as unable to speak. What sense can be made, then, of the notion of “unwilling” commodities that have no desire to be taken to the market and sold?

Marx dangles a footnote from this line that suggests an answer to this question:

In the twelfth century, so renowned for its piety, very delicate things often appear among these commodities. Thus a French poet of the period enumerates among the commodities to be found in the fair of Lendit, alongside clothing, shoes, leather, implements of cultivation, skins, etc., also ‘femmes folles de leur corps’. (178n1)

In the main text, then, a character declaims that commodities are passive things that rely on their owners to carry them to market. In a footnote to the same passage, Marx impishly provides an example of a commodity quite capable of carrying itself to market – and, while it is there, negotiating its own price and terms of sale: a prostitute. On the other hand, even this commodity, once sold – or, in the case of the prostitute, rented for a fixed duration of time – belongs to its purchaser who can, as the main text has just said, use force if the prostitute is unwilling to consummate the sale. This image of the prostitute who has been forced to service the buyer haunts the discussion in the main text. It prefigures the plight of the wage labourers whose existence has not yet been explicitly acknowledged in the text.

The main text carries on, describing the performative stances that commodity owners assume towards each other, in the process of exchanging their wares:

In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in these objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent. The guardians therefore recognise each other as owners of private property. (178)

The text thus describes two different performative stances whose joint performance enacts a social actor as a commodity owner. The first performative stance involves enacting the commodity as an external thing that, as an expression of its owner’s will, can be “objectified” and treated instrumentally – if the commodity resists, the owner is allowed to take possession by force. The second performative stance involves enacting other commodity owners as fellow subjects who cannot be engaged instrumentally – their commodities cannot simply be appropriated by force because the first commodity owner desires them – but instead must be engaged through processes of mutual recognition and consent.

The discussion of mutual recognition amongst commodity owners, and objectification of commodities themselves, reacts back on the dialectical discussion of commodities from the third section of Capital’s opening chapter. In that section, commodities were presented as engaging in social interactions that involved mutual recognition. In this section, by contrast, these forms of interactions have been displaced from commodities to their owners, and the commodities have been repositioned as the objects of instrumental action. The contrast subtly destabilises the notion that the “definitional” claims put forward in either of the opening chapters of Capital could be read as fixed ontological distinctions, by drawing attention to the continuous redetermination of the ontological status of the persons and objects described, depending on the social perspective from which they are viewed.