Capital Theory and the Real World

Of course, a critique of capital gets you no closer to the real than a novel by Emile Zola (perhaps L'Argent, 1891), or one by John Lanchester (especially Capital, 2012) which is also to affirm that if a novel bears the texture of life and living, then a critique of capital is the equal of its poetry (a key to the basic literariness in both Marx and Piketty's works on capital). This is a familiar answer to those who contend that theory wallows rather too deliberately in obscurantism and abstraction, and that cultural critique in particular assassinates art by thinking around rather than with the object of its interrogation. There is no space here to consider the many ways in which such statements are themselves both a proof of aesthetic difference while simultaneously being the truth of aesthetic ideology, that might substantiate all that is inadequate in theory as being adequate enough for abstract capital. To state that the abstractions of capital are no less real than the excesses of literary theory might add solace if not weight to the provocation (that the real begins in abstraction), yet the point lies elsewhere in the politics of reading, within which the pertinence of the literary burns. Is this the real world of the essay title, the foil that can be used to decry any and all acts of extravagance, including literary theory, and instead focuses on matter and matters that might actually matter? The aim here is not to rescue such false divisions, which are demonstrable, but merely to accentuate that theory begins in contradiction and that the real emerges in mediating its purchase on theorization. Theory does not "sell itself out" by becoming more real, just as it does not become less commodified simply by theorizing commodities. It is overdetermined by more than self-characterization, by either the theory or the theorist. The following is particularly concerned with capital theory, which can briefly be described here but would clearly necessitate elaboration in a longer study.

First, since capital is a relation, rather than a thing, and its real is not just a set of equivalences, as money must oscillate wildly between value and price, it is an abstraction that also exists in non-representation, for which we have a whole discourse of poetics to bridge. Second, capital is the relation that preternaturally misbehaves, as if driven by insatiable desire—we may call this desire "accumulation," which is the desire irrespective of the object or structures that might derive from it. Third, capital is mediatory, and what it mediates is value, not only as a marker of wealth, but as a sign of historically specific and socially necessary labor time. It is because of historical and material specificity that, dialectically, a space for theory opens up. We would not need capital theory if the subject of mediation were transhistorical: we could just read Marx's Capital, for instance, as is, as a dynamic at a standstill. Real time has an abstract non-equivalence. Fourth, capital has always degraded labor, but now labor itself, laboring labor, has degraded as relation. This is not just a shift in emphasis, or the three card Monte we now associate with some versions of the immateriality of materiality; nor is it simply the effulgence of technocentric automata, although this is certainly significant, of which more below. Laboring labor has often and is now actively being displaced which on the one hand reveals its dynamic character in mobility but on the other hand, also requires taking seriously the prospect of reductions in labor time over the actual reproductions of humans as labor potential. Here I differ from the theoretical distinctions made by Moishe Postone, for instance, where he wonders whether for Marx, the abolition of capitalism would not entail the self-realization of the proletariat, but its self-abolition. There is a double movement in Marx's conception of labor in which proletarian being is only realized at the moment of its sublation. There is no "but" in Marx's understanding about such transformation. This is precisely how value is distilled in revolution...