Monstrously Unpositable: Primitive Accumulation and the Aesthetic Arc of Capital

In the preface to the first edition of Capital, Marx describes the methodology of the volume. Capital commences, he tells us, with an analysis of the commodity-form, despite the fact that it would be simpler to begin by analyzing capitalism as a systemic whole: after all, he says, “the complete body … [would be] easier to study than its cells.”¹ But the easy route was never Marx’s. Indeed, the commodity—the “economic cell-form” of bourgeois society—is the focus of the opening sections of Capital precisely because of the dis-ease of its study; this is because the commodity-form is famously hiding something—a dialectical relationship between use and exchange value—that is impenetrable to bourgeois political economy and other such methodologies that address themselves to the phenomenal whole of the “complete body.” Marx’s entry point into capitalism and dialectics is thus through the language of the body dissected; and my question for this forum will thus be what can the monstrous lens of dissection tell us about Marx’s dialectical method?

The dissection of the “economic cell-form” loosely structures the entirety of Capital. This dissection, moreover, cannot be conducted empirically: “in the analysis of economic forms,” Marx insists, “neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance.”² The dissection of the commodity is thus the dissection of a body that both is and is not there—a body that recurs in different ghostly semblances throughout the text. First as the sheer abstraction of the forms of value (relative, expanded, general); next, conjured as modernity’s dearest phantom (the fetish); then as the product of labor, cast in the fires of the struggle over the working day; and finally in the break, forever unnarratable, from pre-capitalist formations to the onset of capitalism and the autonomization of the value-form (found in the sections on primitive accumulation). The genealogy of the commodity is multiple, scattered throughout the text, a dissection of parts unsuturable, forever in parallax.

Monstrosity and Epistemology

The prevalence in Marx of bodily metaphors and grotesquerie to describe the violence of capitalism is a topic that has received a great deal of attention. However, the perverse nature of this bodily figuration—the methodology of dissection for which a microscope (and all empirical technology) is useless—bears further thought.³ Dissection, as we know, was a favored figure for political economy long before Marx took it up; this much, David McNally has thoroughly charted in his recent work.⁴ The political economist most publicly smitten with dissection was, of course, Bernard Mandeville, whose An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Execution at Tyburn advocated for the dissection of perished vagrants and executed prisoners as a means to both advance science and disgrace criminals and the poor:⁵

I … shall endeavour to demonstrate, that the superstitious Reverence of the Vulgar for a Corpse, even of a Malefactor, and the strong Aversion they have against dissecting them, are prejudicial to the Publick; For as Health and sound Limbs are the most desirable of all Temporal Blessings, so we ought to encourage the Improvement of Physick and Surgery, wherever it is in our Power. The Knowledge of Anatomy is inseparable from the Studies of either; and it is almost impossible for a Man to understand the Inside of our Bodies, without having seen several of them skilfully dissected.⁶

Dissection’s terrors were well known throughout the eighteenth century. As the state came to deploy dissection as a means for disciplining, eroticizing, and controlling indigent bodies, the people fought to resist their own criminalization and the threat of subjection to the surgeon’s knife, as well as to develop forms of subsistence through satisfying the burgeoning black market for corpses. Correspondingly, the ruling classes generated increasingly elaborate means of evading grave robbers and the surgeon’s knife. Lead coffins, cemetery guards, and far-flung burials all served as means of avoiding the kinds of punitive after-death embodiments visited upon the poor. There is a politics to Marx’s seizing on dissection as a dialectical...