Rough Theory

4 responses to “Indirection”

1. Lewis Deane January 20, 2011 at 12:52 pm

   I’m so glad that people like you are still thinking:

   It’s so easy to stop what is not really your own.
   As we sow up the veil that will hide our small
   But ever grinding parts. Ha! Think you into a world
   Of spare parts. A limb that drives a limb. A womb
   That drives a womb. Everything like a steam train
   Or going down into Hell and being hoisted back up.
   We can not except it.

   Hence Marx. Hence stupidity.

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2. Lewis Deane January 20, 2011 at 1:53 pm

   I agree with your theses – that Capital begins with a kind of stupifieyng poetry , ironicaly, that Marx wishes people to unfold – [I also think that Marx was one of the great romantics, that, at least, the first volume is that epic he decries in the Grundisse we have lost – very much after the phenomenolgy. A man desperate for poetry who wrote poetry out of poverty] For, perfectly clear, because I’d read a lot of Marx and the best Marx before. Look, forget this, I’m drunk, as a poet, I can’t be intellectual, all I can say is I’m grateful that people like you still exist and I can read your wonderful words. Sorry. What abumb – I am the lumpenprolatariat that Marx despised.

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3. N Pepperell January 20, 2011 at 3:55 pm

   Hi Lewis – sorry you were held in moderation – should only happen the first time you comment. Thanks for the kind thoughts… 🙂

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4. Lewis Deane January 21, 2011 at 5:07 am

   Sorry, Mate, my drunken enthusiasm got the better of me. It’s strange that, as a poet, the most superficial of animals, I can follow quite easily the subtleties of your argument but when it comes to expressing myself, I’m like a babbling child. I read Capital almost exactly as your thesis expresses him. Perhaps because, nervous of trying that ‘great light on the hill’, I began, first, with the penguin volume of Marx’s Early works. What ineluctable intellectual pleasure. And then I began haunting the ‘obsolete’ marxist book shop on Tottenham Court road. Progress publishers was my friend – The German Ideology, Poverty of Philosophy ( how wicked! What fun! ), The Critique of Political Economy (What extraordinary joy, I remember, when I had that in my hand) and so forth. And from that perspective I was able to read Capital, of course, without distinguishing the aesthetics from the ‘substance’, the style from the tale as told. I can’t articulate clearly here – but I intuitively understood the irony, the contra Hegelian Hegelianism that Marx intended – that ‘deflationism’ that you want to point too.
   So what a joy it is, to come across a site, that in my clumsy searching for something of substance (in avoidance of reading Kant properly but again – ow!) I came across you. From what I see you’re always very busy but I hope you can still write your blog and stimulate us, the great unwashed.

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