Explaining the way in which postmodernism produced an “incredulity” towards Marxism that enabled post-Marxism, Stuart Sim quotes Lyotard:
We no longer want to correct Marx, to reread him or read him in the sense that the little Althusserians would like to “read Capital”: to interpret it according to “its truth.” We have no plan to be true, to give the truth of Marx, we wonder what there is of the libido in Marx, and “in Marx” means in his text or in his interpretations, mainly in practices. We will rather treat him as a “work of art.” (Libidinal Economy)
and adds: Read more↴
It took me a while to remember what it was that the visual style of The Hunger Games reminded me of. It was a second-hand paperback of H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come published some time in the 70s which, as these books usually do, featured a cover illustration which drew a little on the book itself and a lot on the trends in SF illustration of the time. That’s an appropriate style for the film, I think, a re-creation of 70s interpretations of WWII-era futurism, or, a taking-up of the science-fictional imaginations from two previous eras of austerity. And the film does look marvelous, with lots of little touches (some of which, such as the train we see near the beginning of the film, might be lost on an audience that doesn’t remember the existence of British Rail) that position it critically within the aesthetics of austerity nostalgia. Read more↴
There are few things that annoy me more in a reading of a text than the claim that the author “doesn’t mean” what the text “literally says.” Such a claim sounds like a sophisticated reading strategy, one which wouldn’t be fooled by a cunning author, but it is based on a naive belief that authors have intentions and texts have literal meanings. Worse, because this kind of reading depends on basically unknowable authorial intentions, the reader has a great deal of license to decide where the intention and the literal meaning diverge, and the tendency is for this to coincide with whatever the reader feels is least plausible in the text. So, this supposedly sophisticated method of reading ends up domesticating texts, turning a text which might challenge the reader into one which just reinforces their own beliefs (the king of this kind of reading is Leo Strauss, who managed to read his philosophy into the entire western canon).
I was thinking of this because I’ve been reading various interpretations of Capital that seek to find where Marx is being “ironic,” and so where his true belief is the opposite of the position he puts forward. Read more↴
W. is impressed by my stammer.—‘You stammer and stutter’, says W., ‘and you swallow half your words. What’s wrong with you?’ Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it’s mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would account for it.—‘You had one just there, didn’t you?’
Perhaps, W. muses, my stammering and stuttering is a sign of shame. W. says he never really thought I was capable of it, shame, but perhaps it’s there nonetheless.—‘Something inside you knows you talk rubbish’, he says. ‘Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth’. (Lars Iyer, Spurious)
Equality is a central term for Rancière, but it is quite a circumscribed equality, the equality specifically and only of speaking beings. Which immediately raises the question, what about non-speaking beings? Read more↴
A footnote in Capital:
In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find “worth” in the sense of value in use, and “value” in the sense of exchange value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflexion.
Marx misses a trick here by failing to point out why English has this strange dichotomy. Read more↴
On of the criticisms of object-oriented ontology which has some currency is the suggestion that it is a form of, or a philosophized alibi for, commodity fetishism. And this has a superficial plausibility; doesn’t the focus on objects enact the kind of reification that Marx criticizes. I don’t think this plausibility is more than superficial, though, because it misunderstands object-oriented ontology and, more importantly, misunderstands commodity fetishism. In fact, object-oriented philosophy might provide a useful way of analyzing commodity fetishism which we could use to provide a Marxist corrective to the banality of much leftist critique of reification (such as that of Axel Honneth). Read more↴
