Nature as Surplus — The Work of the Text in Marx

103 zuckerman Phyllis Zuckerman NATURE AS SURPLUSTHE WORK OF THE TEXT IN MARX Le pli est à la fois la virginité, ce qui la viole, et le pli qui n'étant ni l'un ni l'autre et les deux à la fois, indécidable, reste comme text, irréductible à aucun de ses deux sens. Jacques Derrida, "La Double Séance" Marx's entire theory of surplus-value is based on a conception of nature as identical to itself, outside the production of value which characterizes a human economic system: "A thing can be a use-value without being value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not mediated through labour. Air, virgin soil, natural meadows, unplanted forests, etc., fall into this categoy."1 It is man's transformation of nature through labor that creates value, surplus-value, and the system of exchange that forms the basis for an economy. Yet even as Marx remains within the classical oppositions of the Western metaphysical tradition —opposing history, economy, production, and value to nature, identity , presence, and the virgin— he displaces the premises ofthat tradition, suggesting ways in which nature is always in a relation of surplus with respect to itself, that nature is governed by an "original" structure of "supplementarity" for which we derive the quantities we refer to as value and surplus-value. Marx partially recognizes the contribution of nature to an economic system. Yet he does so in terms of an analogy which assimilates the family to nature. Labor is the father of material wealth, nature its mother. Thus the term which appears to be identical to itself, prior to the differentiations that form the basis for the production of value, is already marked by a family structure which seems to organize the other oppositions in the system, between economy and nature, form and matter, value and virgin soil, surplus and its absence. Nature is like a virgin, untouched , intact, yet this very notion of intactness implies that a system of exchange is already in operation at the place where it seems not yet to have come into existence. On the one hand, we find the earth, nature, matter, bodies, the virgin, and the mother; on the other, value, surplusvalue , cloth, clothing, labor, form, and the father. The labor of women is recognized then erased from calculations of the production of value just as the surplus already inherent in nature— it capacity to engender the difference between the sexes— is passed in silence: 104 the minnesota review Use-value like coats, linen, etc., in short, the physical bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature and labour. If we sub- (ract the total amount of useful labour of different kinds which is contained in the coat, the linen, etc., a material substratum is always left. The substratum furnished by nature without human intervention. When man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself, i.e. he can only change the form of the materials. Furthermore , even in this work of modification he is constantly helped by natural forces. Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the use-values it produces . As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother. Nature seems to be like the virgin and the mother, outside of the production of value, yet nature is that which, different from itself from the very beginning, allows value to be "engendered." Nature does not produce value because it is the possibility of distinguishing between value and its absence that sets an economy of exchange in motion. Nature functions as a plenitude in contrast to which useful labor can create a system of value, but it fulfills this function within a cultural tradition, a system of exchange and prohibitions that has been passed on for so long that it has come to seem necessary and thus "natural." Implied in the analogy between the woman and nature is another comparison , between nature and the body. It is the difference between the sexes, situated at the articulation of nature and culture, which makes it possible for Marx to assimilate...