a more personal beginning

I've been worrying that the style in which I'm trying to write my Bio of H.E. is too scholastic, and not gnostic or eccentric or personal enough. So I am thinking of beginnning something more like this.

...

I was in my second year of college, in the town of S., a long time ago, hen I first came down with what I know now is a sort of disease: the want of a desire to want. I was living in a furnished apartment above a garage full of old photographs. The garage was attached to a mansion inhabited by an eccentric and presumably wealthy couple, although I only had any relations with the wife, Mrs. M., a former CIA agent and photograph enthusiast (hence, the piles of old darkroom equipment and boxes of photographs in the garage, along with a very old and never driven Bentley

I was happy with the furnishings, and especially with Mrs. M.’s choice of firehouse red as the predominant color in the kitchen (stove, table, chairs, and even tea kettle). Then my father came by one day – they lived twenty miles outside of S. – and gave me a television.

Up until this point, I’d had no trouble with television. One of my first purchases, from my first job as a teenager, had been a small portable tv. This allowed me to watch tv in my bedroom, my own shows rather than those of my parents or brothers and sisters when they had dibs on the big tv in the downstairs room which was all set up for it – the couch and the chairs turned towards it even when they were empty and the set was off, as if the room was somehow asleep. But as I tried to find a place for the tv my father gave me, I suddenly felt that I didn’t really want it.

Up until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me not to want the wantable things that America is so full of. Looking back, this rather trivial moment was like the first symptom, the first black buboe that signifies that you have the plague. Because, as my life unfolded, I discovered I didn’t want almost any of the major wantable things. I didn’t want a car. I didn’t want a home. I didn’t want a boat, or a stereo system, or a credit card, or a closet full of clothes. I didn’t even want a couch. It wasn’t even that I was infected with a hippie Puritanism that meant that I wanted other people not to want these things; it was simply that I never, well, felt the urge to go out and buy them.

The significance of the PC and the Internet for me was that, in the nineties, I finally wanted something. But I didn’t want the latest things, even there: I was quite content with, say, Windows95 long after that software had been rendered obsolete. I only gradually and grudgingly have been pulled along by the trendy currents of personal computing design. Plus, my job, as a free lancer, depends on the computer.

I would not have a problem with the want of wanting if I didn’t have pretensions far above my station – for even when I was perched in my firehouse red kitchen in the town of S., I planned on being a writer. I planned on writing novels, in fact. I didn’t plan on poor thin narratives, but thick ones, fat cultural steaks full of the greases and hamburger of the America I saw around me, all its idiocies and splendeurs in my – and its - ephemeral moment. The most fabulously wealthy country of all time! My idea of the novel was on the lines of those of Balzac, whose Human Comedy – if considered as one novel, on the order of, say, In Search of Lost Time – is at the top of my list of great novels. Balzac not only wrote of people wanting lots in the restoration France of his time, but he himself was a tremendous and unmanageable wanter, which is how he went through fortunes as a sort of industrial plant of best sellers and still managed, most years, to remain well in debt. He wanted houses, he wanted art, he wanted excellent food and wine, he wanted women, he wanted clothes. In the letters to his future wife, Madame Hanska, who was as beautiful as a portrait and, more to the point, beautifully wealthy, plus being geographically distant on her Ukranian estates – where she couldn’t poke her nose too much into Balzac’s Parisian business - Balzac would heap up in great lists the things he wanted – the houses that they would both live in, jewels, objects of art - in a sort of fireworks of mad accounting and mad connoisseurship, while at the same time he would keep her advised of his schemes for liquidating his debts, which by 1844 amounted to, on his account, about 150,000 francs.

“I went out for the first time the day before yesterday. I bought a clock for our salon of an unheard of magnificence, and two pale blue garnet vases that are not less magnificent. All this for almost nothing. Great news! Rothschild wants my Florentine marbles. He is doubtless going to come to see them. I want fourteen thousand francs for them. Another piece of news! The Girardon Christ, bought for one hundred fifty francs, is estimated at five thousand francs, and twenty thousand francs with the frame [by Bustolone]. And you scold me, o louloup, for my dealings in the kingdom of Bricabrac-erie!” [ - my translation Lettres a l’etrangere, vol. 2, 446]

Balzac abundantly satisfied his love of bricabrac-erie in his novels, in which characters are always setting up apartments or houses with lavishly described furnishings – and it finally achieves its metaphysical form in Cousin Pons. Balzac’s reveling in such things as frames by Bustolone or boudoir figurines turned out by 18th century craftsmen had, as he well knew, a political sense: Balzac not only turned his negative capacity into a shopping catalogue, but he had a very high sense of the history behind the object and a genius for understanding how they were all connected. In the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the storehouse of goods that had been accumulated for centuries in noble estates and monarchial palaces, in churches and bourgeois hôtels, were swept away in the deluge (the deluge to which Louis XV had so famously referred), to reappear in the pawn shop, the cart of the dealer in curios at the foire, among dealers in old furniture located in shadowy side streets, or mysteriously present on the fireplace mantel of the provincial peasant who had enriched himself buying seized church lands.

diderot - nature and folly

In a letter to Sophie Volland on September 2, 1769, Diderot wrote:

I believe that I told you that I made a dialogue between D’Alembert and me. In re-reading it, I was taken with the fantasy of making a second and it was made. The interlocutors are D’Alembert who dreams, Bordeu and the friend of D’Alember, Mlle de l’Epinasse. It is entitled the Dream of D’Alembert. It isn’t possible to be more profound and more crazy [plus profound et plus fou]. [Diderot, OC 1875, II, 101. My translation.]

In the 18th century, depth and folly were normally dissociated. Yet Diderot, who viewed himself as, above all, a combatant on the philosophe side, saw them as allies. In the letter to Sophie Volland we quoted about the two Enlightenments, Diderot had already contemplated the idea that the world was a ‘stupidity’ – a ‘beautiful stupidity’. If this were so, then a problem, or rather a cognitive abyss, opens up before reason, and the rational man, going through that door, falls into it. The pit is this world.

Another name for the world is ‘nature’. In the seventeenth century, Boyle had already made the first foray against using the term nature vulgarly as a cause. I’ve already written a post about this, so let me quote it here:

“In 1686, Robert Boyle published the “Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature”. Michael Hunter and Edward Davis make the claim that this is one of the essential texts of the Scientific Revolution. In their essay on the making of the text, Hunter and Davis quote one of Boyle’s “protégés”, Scottish physician David Abercromby, who wrote: I therefore look upon this work as the new system of a new philosophy which fundamentally overthrows the foundation – namely, Nature – of all views hitherto held in philosophical matters.” [219] Others, of course, have cast doubt on the very idea that there was a Scientific Revolution. Myself, I prefer the term New Learning. Certainly there was an institutional revolution – no longer were the virtuosi independent players, like wandering minstrels and alchemists. The Universities were still stacked with Aristotelians and bloodletters, and the real action shifted to the Royal Society, or the semi Royal academies in France (although in France, this was supplemented by a correspondence culture which formally associated savants which doesn’t have a parallel in England).

We can go all the way back to the Cratylus to find distinctions being made between speakers of the same language. Among the humanists, the distinction between learned speech and vulgar speech was simply a reality – learning was published in Latin – or it referred to an occult jargon that supposedly could be attributed to traditions that went back to antiquity. Antiquity was the truthmaker, to use a fashionable term from contemporary analytic philosophy. But as the New Learning was about casting off the shackles of antique learning, this distinction would no longer do (although, of course, I am working with clear cut lines that were, in actuality, less clear cut than one could tell from the bravado of New Learning’s sages. Respect for the ancients was not so easily overcome as all that).

So when Boyle writes his enquiry, we are faced with a new set of coordinates for separating ordinary speech from “philosophical” speech. Since Boyle was, on his odd days, a corpuscularian, and a round promoter of the Royal society, one might think that he had a sneaking affection for Gassendi’s re-discovery of atomism. In fact, it is the use of ‘nature’ in the Epicurean sense – the vulgar chatter of the esprits forts – against which Boyle shoots many of his arrows.”

The arrow is tipped, feathered and shot from the first paragraphs of Boyle’s work:

“But farther whilst men indulge themselves so general and easy a way of solving difficulties as to attribute them to nature; shame will not reduce them to a more industrious search after the reasons of things, nor curiosity itself greatly move them to it. Thus the cause of the ascent of water in pumps and other phenomena of that kind had never been known if the moderns had acquiesced in that imaginary one that the world was gover’d by a watchful Being call’d nature, who abhors a Vacuum and consequently is always ready to do whatever is necessary to prevent it.”

But though Boyle and his colleagues of the Royal Society drove nature out of the language of natural philosophy, Nature, as is the way of all obsolete gods, made his way back to the surface of consciousness as a sort of daemonic instance, a guilty last resort.

And so it is that Diderot’s three dialogues with D’Alembert procede with a demonic glee to reveal profound things. It was the glee, the tone, as well as the indiscretion, that angered D’Alembert’s mistress, Mlle de L’Epinasse, who demanded the suppression of the dialogue.

“It is the highest extravagance, and at the same time the deepest philosophy. There is some cunning [addresse] in having put my ideas in the mouth of a man who dreams – it is often necessary to give to wisdom the air of folly, in order to procure for it its entries, that I would rather that they says, “but this isn’t as crazy as everyone believes, rather then, “listen to me, here are some very wise things.”

As is so often the case with Diderot, the work is caught up in a network of sacrifice – of smoke. I wish Derrida had referred to these these dialogues in his Given Time, where the question of the commodity of tobacco – that exemplary gift/gift – is intermixed with the question of smoke and dispersion, of non-return. Diderot claimed, and perhaps thought, that he had acceded to D’Alembert’s protest (driven by de L’Epinasse) and burnt them.

“The pleasure to have rendered an account to oneself for one’s opinions have produced them; the indiscretion of some persons had pulled them from obscurity; alarmed love desired their sacrifice; tyrannic friendship demanded it; and a too easy friendship consented: they were lacerated. You wanted me to gather up the fragments; I did so.”
TBC

the tableau method and historical consciousness

I’m not sure I want to explore this in my homo economicus book. But it fascinates me.

In Schumpeter’s history of economic analysis, he devotes a section to the excellencies of the tableau as a tool.

1. “First of all, the tableau method achieves a tremendous simplification. Actually the economic life of a nonsocialist society consists of millions of relations or flows between individual firms and households. We can establish certain theorems about them, but we can never observe all of them. But if we replace them by relations between classes or by flows of class (or other) aggregates, the unmanageable number of variables in the economic problem suddenly reduces to a few which are easy to handle and follow up.”
2. “Second, the simplification of the analytic pattern achieved by the tableau method opens up great possibilities for numerical theory. Quesnay was more alive to these possibilities than had been Cantillon and, in this particular respect, he carried the latter's work much further. He troubled himself about statistical data and actually tried to estimate the values of annual output and other aggregates.”
3. “Third and most important, the Cantillon-Quesnay tableau was the first method ever devised in order to convey an explicit conception of the nature of economic equilibrium… Now Cantillon and Quesnay had this conception of the general interdependence of all sectors and all elements of the economic process in which—so Dupont actually put it—nothing stands alone and all things hang together. And their distinctive merit—shared, to some extent, by Boisguillebert—was that, without realizing the possibilities of the method later on adumbrated by Isnard, they made that conception explicit in a way of their own, namely, by the tableau method: while the idea of representing the pure logic of the economic process by a system of simultaneous equations was quite outside their range of vision, they represented it by a picture. In a sense, this method was primitive and lacking in rigor—which is, in fact, why it fell out of the running and why analysis historically developed on the other line. But in one respect it was superior to the logically more satisfactory method; it visualized the (stationary) economic process as a circuit flow that in each period returns upon itself. This is not only a method of conveying the fact that the economic process is logically self-contained, a distinct thing that is complete in itself, but it is also a method of conveying features of it—definite sequences in particular—that do not stand out equally well in a system of simultaneous equations.”

Indeed, on Schumpeter’s account, class consciousness finds its privileged tool in the tableau method.

The opening up of a whole new textual space might have come about – I’d speculate furiously - from two separate lines of descent. The first line, as one might expect, is double entry book-keeping. The second line is more complex, and slithers through the visual arts. Kosseleck, in the first chapter of Future’s Past, uses a historical painting by Albrecht Altdorfer, Alexanderschlacht, as an iconic correlate to his thesis concerning the construction of historical time in different epochs. Altdorfer’s 1528 painting depicts the Battle of Issus – in which Alexander defeated the Persians. As is well known in philosophy, the battle is a model event – the stoics used it as such, the Bhagavad-gita uses it as such, novelists (Stendhal, Tolstoy) depict the confusing there-ness and non-there-ness of the battle, Deleuze remarks upon it in Logique du Sens – and Altdorfer is no different.

“Careful examination of the painting enables us to reconstruct the entire course of the battle. For Altdorfer had in this image delineated a history, in the way that Historie at that time could mean both image and narrative (Geschichte). To be as accurate as possible, the artist, or rather the court historiographer
advising him, had consulted Curtius Rufus so as to ascertain the (supposedly) exact number of combatants, the dead and those taken prisoner. These figures can be found inscribed upon the banners of the relevant
armies, including the number of dead, who remain in the painting among the living, perhaps even bearing the banner under which they are about to fall, mortally wounded. Altdorfer made conscious use of anachronism so that he could faithfully represent the course of the completed battle.”

Altdorfer’s ability to “portray” the diachronic axis – not the battle at some one instant, but the battle as a continuous event across its entire temporal length – is due to the synthesis of a late medieval representational style – which would temporalize the pictorial space according to some rule that would, for instance, put foreground figures in an earlier ‘moment’ than background figures – and the rules of perspective. The tableau is, in a sense, the heir of this synthesis. Marx made the tableau method dialectical in the same way that the perspectivally supplied artist was able to unfold an event in terms of a panorama. I wonder if the tableau is not the tool hidden behind Hegel’s Phenomenology and the Logic. Rather than the panorama of a battle scene that enfolds the entire event in a fictitious there-ness, the tableau allowed the physiocrats to enfold the entire economy in a fictitious thereness that, as Schumpeter saw, bears a name – a name we could inscribe on a banner: equilibrium. That impossible moment of the event in the event.

the bourgeois economists and the equilibrium

The figure of the homo economicus is first used in economics as a model for building a truly mathematized ‘social physics’ in the 1890s, which is also the decade in which Freud laid the foundation of psychoanalysis. These may seem like coincident moments in the intellectual history of two disciplines, but I wonder…

The marginalist ‘advance’ towards an economics that imitated the models of physics – that is, the breakthrough to the kind of ‘social physics’dreamt of by Bagehot - divorced value from production in order to grasp what, from the marginalist point of view, was the outstanding feature of the modern economy – the price system. It is a well known story: in economics, it is the age in which the insights of the classical economists were finally systematized as a science by leaving aside the labour theory of value. The theory, not being able to provide a direct explanation of prices, was, according to Jevons, Walras and Menger, incoherent. In its place, the marginalists advanced the idea of demand as the great mover of the system. Demand, however, or tastes, a subjective quality, could be appropriated by the mathematician in terms of units of utility – which would no longer be tied to the old 18th century psychology of pleasure and pain, laid out discretely like Newton’s corpuscles. Instead, one would use Newtonian calculus, the mathematics of limits, to produce a description of demand as a curve tending towards indifference.

At the same time, Freud was producing an image of the consciousness led by the demands of the libido – in a code that did not possess an endogenous no.

Let me leave the coincidence there to fester a bit. What we also see, in this era – the era of the great depression for the workers, and the gilded age for the rich, from the 1880s-1890s – is a further advance in the remove from production – that is, the creation of ever more links populated by circulation agents – and, at the same time, the technological spread of the aesthetic domain through gramophones, photographs, and the beginning of moving pictures.

These are the circumstances into which homo economicus was formally born.

These are also the circumstances in which the idea of the equilibrium is seized as the entry point for understanding the economy, what Schumpeter called the “Magna Carta of economic theory as an autonomous science.” To find the conditions, or equations, of equilibrium is to find the ideal moment in which the economy reveals itself as a totality. In Schumpeter’s words, it is the moment in which the static and the dynamic dimensions of the economy interlock – which is to economics what the synchronic and diachronic are to Saussurian linguistics.

Equilibrium gets us over a fundamental antinomy in bourgeois economics: the antinomy between the individual, who is theoretically the foundation to which all social practices reduce, and the aggregate, which is what, in actuality, economics always studies. Though the economic agent’s tastes are subjective, the formal elements in which those tastes are expressed are objective – they have a systematic form. That form comes out using Walras’s method, which pares away blocking contingencies to get to the structure of the ideal equilibrium between those tastes and the supply of goods and services – an equilibrium that is continually displaced. As Pareto puts it in the Course on Political Economics: “The principle object of our study is economic equilibrium. We will soon see that this equilibrium results from the opposition which exists between the tastes of men and the obstacles to their satisfaction. Our study thus comprehends thee distinct parts: the study of tastes; the study of the obstacle; and the study of the way in which these two elements combine in order to arrive at an equilibrium.”

the enlightenment of strategy vs. the enlightenment of the Absolute

In 1822, Stendhal’s master, Destutt de Tracy, published Condorcet’s notes on the 29th book of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. Condorcet’s objections to Montesquieu voice the protest emitted by the revolutionaries at the end of the Enlightenment period against the first Enlightenment generation. Within intellectual history, the French revolution was mounted not simply against what the revolutionaries called ‘feudalism’, but also against the first Enlightenment generation, those who were celebrated, later, in Michelet’s history of the Regency. The revolutionary generation was already thinking in terms of the universalism for which the codex was The Phenomenology of the Spirit. The force of Condorcet’s objections are summed up in the comment on Chapter IV, The laws which shock the views of the legislator: “How is it that in The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu never speaks of the justice or injustice of the laws that he cites, but only of the motives that he attributes to these laws? Whiy doesn’t he establish any principle for distinguishing, among the laws emitted by a legitimate power, those which are unjust and those which are in conformity to justice? Why, in the spirit of the laws, is there never any question of the nature of the right to property, of its consequences, its extension, its limits?” (281 – my translation)

What Condorcet is complaining about is what I would call the Enlightenment of strategy – for the relativism of the Enlightenment thinkers (Condorcet goes on to blast the conclusions Montesquieu draws from the history of a ‘few Greek villages”) is a strategist’s relativism. In one sense, one can draw a line (unexpectedly enough) from Montesquieu to Foucault, and gather the same type of criticism of the latter as the former – where are the absolutes? Where are the universals?

Where does this strategic thought come from? In Montesquieu’s case, one wants to say, obviously Machiavelli. But I have an idea that, more broadly, the analysis of law as strategy is connected to the Leibnizian idea of the best of all possible worlds.

The image in the Theodicee is striking. In a letter to Sophie Volland in which Diderot describes an evening he spent with Grimm and the Abbe Galiani (the repartee of which he describes in the letter – “dear friend, I think that our babbling besides the fireplace is something that always amuses you, and so I followed it”), the three began to speak of original sin and whether man merits the pain he suffers in the world.

“On these occasions, what is the party of good sense? This, my friend, which we took. Whatever the optimists say, if the world could not exist without sensible beings, nor the sensible beings without pain, it had only to remain at rest. It could have gone on an eternity without committing that stupidity.

The world, a stupidity? Oh, my friend, a beautiful stupidity nonetheless! It is, according to the inhabitants of Malabar, one of the seventy four comedies that the Eternal amuses itself with.

Leibniz, the founder of optimism, also as great as a poet as he was deep as a philosopher, recounts somewhere that there was in a temple in Memphis a high pyramid made of globes stacked one on the other; and that a preacher, questioned by a traveler about this pyramid and the globes, responded that this was all the worlds possible, and that the most perfect was at the summit. And that the traveler, curious to see up close the most perfect of worlds, mounted to the height of the pyramid, and that the first thing that struck his eyes, glued to the top globe, was Tarquin raping Lucretia.” (my translation, 271)

In the perfect world of the strategic Enlightenment, there was, cosmically, no Pareto optimum outcome. Perfection was entirely a principle of construction. The wedding of optimism and horror – repulsive to the romantics – was, for the Enlightenment strategists, the principle that Condorcet failed to see in Montesquieu – with the latter’s penchant for anthropological anecdotes.

on the image of revolution

In the introduction to the history of the Regent’s reign that forms the 14th volume of his History of France, Michelet writes:

“The regency is a whole century in eight years. It lead to three things at once: a revelation, a revolution, a creation.
I. It is the sudden revelation of a world arranged and masked for fifty years. The death of the King [Louis XIV] is a coup de théâtre. What was underneath becomes what is on top. The roofs are lifted up, and one sees everything. There never was a society so open to the light of day. A rare good fortune for the curious observer of human nature.
II. And it is not only the light that returns; it is movement. The regency is an economic and social revolution, the greatest that we had before 1789.
III. It seems to have aborted, and not less did it remain enormously fecund. The regency is the creation of a thousand things (the great roads, the circulation from province to province, free education, the bank account, etc.). The charming arts were born, all those which make for the easiness and agreement of private life. But, this was even more great, a new spirit began, against the barbarous spirit, the bigoted inquisition of the preceeding reign, a large spirit, soft and humane.”

The trope of the ‘roofs being lifted up’ is used in another, individualistic sense by Emerson in his essay, Experience:

“Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, `What's the news?' as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count in society? how many actions? how many opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.”

There is something sensational – revolutionary, apocalyptic – that is crystallized in the image of the roof being lifted off the house. It is a disaster, a blind strike by nature that crushes all human intentionality - and yet it has the exhilarating scope of an escape, of the dissolution of the congealed, dead labor of intention that bears down on the living like a nightmare. Louis XIV’s masked world of bigotry and Emerson’s reference to the world of narrowed experience that results from the routine irresistibly enforced by respectability and endless labor, under the system of moneymaking – both are eminently roofed worlds. The mask complements the roof to the extent that both disguise the naked human, face or body. Both conceal secrets. But the roof, unlike the mask, thrusts us back to the forest floor from whence we came, the treetop canopies that sheltered our monkeyness, and in this it seems the most useful of things. The mask is made to be removable – the roof, not.

When both are removed, we see the misery of the world. The deluges of lethe, the slow, grinding torture of the court.

Still, for all the exhilaration when the roof is lifted off, when man becomes earthquake to man, we realize that we can’t live in that moment. We must have roofs. The revolution cannot be permanent. The problem for the revolutionary imagination is that if the revolution finds a stop – if an equilibrium is established around which a new order assembles – if the roofs are generally nailed on again – we necessarily re-establish the conditions that lead, at the very least, to deluge of lethe, to the class system of claustrophobia.

But something changes.

In Michelet’s preface, the change that is brought about by the temporary rooflessness is that France, for the first time, consciously joins the global system. Michelet, like many French historians, conflates France and Europe, ignoring, for instance, the Spanish and Portugese experience. Yet he does point to a social fact – the new sense of the global order that we see in the first wave of the enlightenment. This social fact is, as well, a new sense of the domestic order. The economic experiments of the Regency also penetrate the household of the peasant, Michelet claims.

In a wonderful passage about the ruin of Law’s system, he writes:

“In this misfortune, yet note one thing: the old bankruptcies, the violent reduction of Mazarin or Colbert or Desmarets’ rents was without any consolation, a dead and sterile series of facts. But Law’s catastrophe was of a wholly other type of import. It had the singular effects of a sudden illumination. France knew itself.
Massew who had been immobile and ignorant up to this point, like the bottom of the Ocean, having never known tempests, the class that was not moved by either the Fronde or the Revocation, lifted up their heads this time, inquiring about the public treasure – and thus of the state and the kingdom, of war, of peace, of neighboring kingdoms, of Europe.
The distant enterprises of Law, his colonializations, the razzias that were made for the Mississippi, obliged the coldest among them to dream of the other hemisphere, of unknown lands, as one said, of the isles. In the cafes which opened by the thousands, the talk was only of the Two Indies. The seventeenth century saw Versaille. The eighteenth saw the Earth.”

Michelet is writing after Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto, and he might even have known that paen to the world economy.

This is, of course, the other side of the melancholy of the clerks. Do not think that the ichor in the veins of homo economicus is absolutely cursed – he, too, is a dialectical figure.

Marx and the two removes

Last year, I did a rather hasty reading of the chapter on circulation work in Capital, Chapter six. In thinking about homo economicus, I’ve returned to chapters five through seven and thought more seriously about Marx’s analysis – his counter-magic - here. For Marx, in writing these chapters, is taking aim at an idea that took root in Mill and has now blossomed, abundantly, in every apology for the insane incomes of CEOs that one finds strewn across the pages of the mainstream economists today. Marx, in one of those dense/light passages in which he specialized (in which the heavy machinery of his concepts seems, at the same time, to be making the moves like Fred Astaire showboating), wrote, in Chapter 5:

The circulation time [Umlaufszeit – orbital time] of Capital thus puts limits overall on its production time, and thus its valorization process. And actually it puts these limits on the latter in relation to its own duration. [-R:that is, the duration of circulation time] This can vary a lot, either increasing or decreasing, and thus limit in very different degrees the production time of capital. But what the political economy sees is that which appears, namely the effect of the circulation time on the valorization process of capital in general. It grasps this negative affect as positive, because its consequences are positive. It insists even more on this semblence as it seems to deliver the proof that capital possess a independent mystical source of self-valorization apart from the exploitation of labor, that flows to it out of the circulation process. We will later see how even the scientific economists can be deluded by this semblence. It is, as will be shown, strengthened through various phenomena: a. the capitalistic mode of calculating profits, wherein the negative ground figures as positive, since for capitals in different spheres of investment, where the circulation time only functions differently, as longer circulation times serve as the ground of the elevation of prices, in short, as one of the grounds for the equalization of profits; 2. the circulation time constitutes only one moment in the circulation time, as the lateer includes the production time or reproduction time. What is due to the latter, seems due to the circulation time. 3. The conversion of commodities into variable capital (workers wages) is conditioned through its previous metamorphosis into money. By capital accumulation the conversion into additional variable capital occurs in the circulation sphere, or during the circulation time. The accumulation thus resulting seems to be owing to the latter.”

My translation, I should say.

As always, in Marx, the moment of demystification is the moment in which the images in the camera obscura of ideology are reversed – this is Marx’s deep connection to Michelet’s witch, who reverses the sacred verses in order to find the material truth about society.

Marx’s distinction between the two spheres starts an analytic process by which a new definition of value, or a new way of seeing value, is slyly introduced. In Chapter 6, as we will see, there is a fleeting reference to the difference between value for – or from the perspective of – society and value for the capitalist. The circulation worker, as Marx will make clear, is formally exploited like the production worker – her time is exploited – but not in terms of the surplus value she produces. She produces an instrumental value in terms of the sphere of circulation, but – as circulation produces no value – she cannot produce surplus value.

I will go more into that in another post. But let me hastily draw some large conclusions. I think we can find, here, the basis for a model of modernization that moves forward in “two removes” – the remove from nature and the remove from production. When Peter Drucker, in the sixties, began to popularize the idea that capitalist economy had entered a new phase with the domination of the ‘knowledge worker’, there was a core of truth in his idea, even if it was the realization of conditions that had long been the case: in modernization, the sphere of production is not only the sphere in which value is produced, but it is also marked down for shrinkage – like agriculture – as it becomes occluded by the sphere of circulation. The importance of clerk literature – Gogol’s discovery of the banal – comes about as the sociological and existential consequence of the fact that the supposed duality between culture and nature is really a threefold matter, which the circulation worker feels in his or her bones – not only does ‘culture’ block nature, but so does production. The sense that the movement of paper – or bytes – is removed from value sinks, of course, to the bottom of the collective consciousness – it is a much repressed truth – and yet it continually returns. It is in these sociological and existential conditions that homo economicus is introjected into the developed economies, and, in as much as they represent the iron and inalterable path in which all parts of the world market are moving, the destiny for the populations of all developed countries, who are not only on the treadmill of production, but that of circulation as well.