> 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.
According to Marx, "commodities" objectify human labour in the specific form this labour takes in capitalism, a form different from the form it takes within other relations (which, as "internal relations," constitute "essence" and, hence, "meaning"). It's also capitalist relations (understood as "internal relations" in this sense) that consittute them as "commodities" i.e. as embodiments of "exchange value," the making and accumulating of which constitutes the specific form of capitalist "self-estrnagement".
Also according to Marx, these are aspects of the "essence" of capitalism knowable by a "subject" self-consciously aware of the internal relations that constitute reality (a conception of reality itself groundable in self-conscious awareness). These relations enable us to move from the "abstract" to the "concrete", from "appearance" to "essence", because the "abstract" "signifies" the "concrete" to which it is internally related. Having through "science" uncovered the "essence" through a "method" made possible by our direct awareness of internal relations we can then use language to "present" the essence the method has enabled us to discover. This is Marx's self-understanding of the "method" by which he claims to have come to know the "essence" of capitalism, an essence Capital is presenting in language. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ appx1.htm
So "labour" in capitalism has a particular relational "nature" and, hence, "meaning" different from the "nature" and "meaning" it has within other relations, where relations in general are conceived as "internal relations".
"The fact that the specific kind of labour is irrelevant presupposes a highly developed complex of actually existing kinds of labour, none of which is any more the all-important one. The most general abstractions arise on the whole only when concrete development is most profuse, so that a specific quality is seen to be common to many phenomena, or common to all. Then it is no longer perceived solely in a particular form. This abstraction of labour is, on the other hand, by no means simply the conceptual resultant of a variety of concrete types of labour. The fact that the particular kind of labour employed is immaterial is appropriate to a form of society in which individuals easily pass from one type of labour to another, the particular type of labour being accidental to them and therefore irrelevant. Labour, not only as a category but in reality, has become a means to create wealth in general, and has ceased to be tied as an attribute to a particular individual. This state of affairs is most pronounced in the United States, the most modern form of bourgeois society. The abstract category "labour", "labour as such", labour sans phrase, the point of departure of modern economics, thus becomes a practical fact only there. The simplest abstraction, which plays a decisive role in modem political economy, an abstraction which expresses an ancient relation existing in all social formations, nevertheless appears to be actually true in this abstract form only as a category of the most modern society. It might be said that phenomena which are historical products in the United States – e.g., the irrelevance of the particular type of labour – appear to be among the Russians, for instance, naturally developed predispositions. But in the first place, there is an enormous difference between barbarians having a predisposition which makes it possible to employ them in various tasks, and civilised people who apply themselves to various tasks. As regards the Russians, moreover, their indifference to the particular kind of labour performed is in practice matched by their traditional habit of clinging fast to a very definite kind of labour from which they are extricated only by external influences." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ appx1.htm
"The concrete concept is concrete because it is a synthesis of many definitions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects. It appears therefore in reasoning as a summing-up, a result, and not as the starting point, although it is the real point of origin, and thus also the point of origin of perception and imagination." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ appx1.htm
This is inconsitent with the ideas that language constructs reality in a way that makes it unknowable, that language is incapable of presenting any definite meaning, and that human thinking is irretrievably delusional and so incapable of being realistic even if the problems created by language undestood in the above way didn't exist.
Ted