Carrol
De Man wrote his essays in longhand, as did Marx. So far as I know de Man never touched a computer. Both de Man and Marx still belonged to the age of handwriting and print. Nevertheless I claim that de Man's politico-economico-literary theory applies just as well to digital "texts" as to printed ones. As for Marx, it is sometimes said that Marx's deconstructive analysis or "critique" of capitalist economy is no longer relevant, has become hopelessly old-fashioned and inapplicable, because he was describing an early stage of industrialism, of capitalism, and of Western imperialism. Our present information age, the age of the internet and of what Derrida calls the new regime of telecommunications, is no longer governed by the manufacture and distribution of physical commodities, like coats and linen (Marx's examples), but by the generation, storage, retrieval, and circulation of information, including literature and money, as well as music, oral and written speech, digitized images, stocks and bonds--all dwelling on the same plane of digital existence. I answer that Marx, as I have shown, already saw commodities as, insofar as they embody exchange value, disembodied. They are just so much socially generated "value," that is, they are forms of information communicated by impersonal speech, as when that linen speaks or when that table dances and expresses the metaphysical subtleties embodied in its wooden brain. As Werner Hamacher correctly says, and I have already stressed, those are not projected personifications or prosopopoeias. They are literal descriptions. The cloth does literally speak, but in the language of commodities, just as the computer speaks in the language of zeroes and ones. Both Marx's system of exchangeable commodities leading to the money system and then to advanced capitalism and our worldwide cyberspace information system have, after all, a material embodiment or base. The linen, the coat, the paper on which money is printed, the computer's hard drive or the modulations of electrical or optical currents necessary to transmit information are all material bases for the [End Page 19] disembodied sign systems they sustain. Marx's analysis of capitalism prepares prophetically for the information age and applies to it perfectly well, though whether he would have rejoiced in that as showing how right he was, or would have seen our information age as an ultimate form of alienation and as just putting off even further the happy day of the Marxist millenium, is another question, one not all that easy to answer.