Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One
Fredric Jameson
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 1844674541
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson’s first book-length engagement with Marx’s magnum opus, is a unique work of scholarship that records the progression of Marx’s thought as if it were a musical score. The textual landscape that emerges is the setting for paradoxes and contradictions that struggle toward resolution, giving rise to new antinomies and a new forward movement. These immense segments overlap each other to combine and develop on new levels in the same way that capital itself does, stumbling against obstacles that it overcomes by progressive expansions, which are in themselves so many leaps into the unknown.
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Productivity of capitalism. It is a somber conclusion which will later on, as we shall see, be reformulated in well-nigh ontological fashion. For the moment, however, we are referred back to another duality we had neglected in Part Three in our onrushing movement toward that first concrete form of temporality called the working day. It was the seemingly terminological distinction between constant and variable capital, in which we had hitherto seen only the intensifying rate of exploitation of the.
Definition as such is unacceptable. Social class cannot be defined, it can only be provisionally approached in a kind of parallax, which locates it in the absent center of a multiple set of incompatible approaches. How much the more so will this be when it is a question of capitalism itself as the totality of which social class is now a function? Yet the conclusion to draw here is not that, since it is unrepresentable, capitalism is ineffable and a kind of mystery beyond language or thought; but.
Agency. The resources of the term "separation" are already richly exploited in the 1844 manuscripts—the theory of alienation is explicidy articulated by way of the fourfold "separation" of the worker from tools, from object, from other workers, and from species-being as such, or in other words from that productive activity that makes the human animal human. Indeed, at this stage in the research, separation can be a spatial or a temporal concept indifferently. The alienation in question is a.
Capitalism, are not merely all spatial explorations; they all mark the space of subjectivity and even of sentiment, of a potentially humanistic effusion (the associations with Dickens 114 REPRESENTING CAPITAL have become a commonplace). The capitalists were mere allegorical figures, mere bearers, or Trager, of structure and of system (save for a few memorable cameos: the sycophantic Senior, the abominable Duchess of Southerland, the unhappy Mr. Peel): these can safely be abandoned to Marx's.
Into that of class struggle is only intermittently visible in Capital: in the analysis of the commodity, for example, or in those moments in which Marx reminds the workers that they have themselves forged their own "golden chains," that they have themselves produced capital and all its accumulations. The Utopia of the "free producers" also suggests as much, with its 91 Karl Korsch, Karl Marx, op. cit., pp. 228-9. POLITICAL CONCLUSIONS 143 implication that a different mode of production would.