<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <html><head><style type="text/css"></style><title>Hillis Miller on de Man, Marx, & the Internet</title></head><body> <div>It is indeed puzzling that the value of commodities can be expressed without affect as a pure quantity; is universally shared by them so that whatever their natural or physical or cultural differences they can be made equivalent or identical and hence exchangeable in determinate proportions; appears as a primary or secondary property of things themselves;  has a real gravitational force such that prices orbit values even  in the face of price controls (which is why the theory of the market is essentially the theory of the black market, as any deconstructionist would expect); yet can change abruptly; and yet still  can only be expressed or seen by way of a mirror.</div> <div><br></div> <div>These are some of the enigmas of value, and if value just is labor time,  why can't producers simply receive an official certificate of the abstract labor time  expended in production? Marx can only be understood in terms of the critique of Proudhon. Did he carry grudge for twenty years against the other socialist?</div> <div><br></div> <div>I enjoyed this piece by Miller; a few minor quibbles.</div> <div><br></div> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">So many yards of linen can be substituted for one coat, and so</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">on, just as one word can be substituted for another in a metaphorical</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">exchange or transfer.</font></blockquote> <div><br> <br> </div> <div>Yet the specific  use values of goods do figure in Marx's theory.</div> <div><br></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">The problem is already solved by a performative enunciation that</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">declares the objectivity of the linen as use-value is fundamentally</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">different from its ghostly objectivity (gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit) as</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">exchange value or as abstract value as so much incarnated human labor.</font></blockquote> <div><br> <br> </div> <div>The problem that is solved here is money, and Marx's point is that the value</div> <div>of a commodity only appears as the use value of another commodity. We know that linen has</div> <div>value because the coat does keep us warm.  Many steps here. Once we see the answer in this simple form then we have already hit on the answer to the glittering quality of  the one commodity gold which has a monopoly on direct exchangeability.. Which is not simply the ghostly objectivity of value but the relational nature of value and its paradoxical appearance in the natural form of only one commodity. Money is the quarry here.</div> <div><br></div> <div> </div> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">Both are ironic writers</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">through and through.</font></blockquote> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">No mention here of Robert Paul Wolff Mr Moneybags Must be So Lucky? perhaps the most sustained discussion of irony in Marx's Capital. Sure to disappoint a literary theorist however with its introductory understandings of metaphor and irony, though I enjoyed and learned from the book. But Wolff did insist on reading Marx as a literary critic.</font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">Within the capitalist system men</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">and women do not themselves speak decisively nor do they make the</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">messianic promise of the end of labor's alienation that is the central</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">message of Marxism... It is not a prosopopoeia ascribing speech to<br> something inanimate. It is the literal truth. The linen speaks.</font><br> <font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"></font></blockquote> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">Im Anfang War Das Wort. But now objects  speak in terms of their price. It's an impersonal language of value, free of affect. In this sense the language of commodities is not a language at all; it is information communicated through numbers. </font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">I don't see how it's the literal truth that the linen speaks. Not just because I am not an animist. Marx is marking the degradation of the word in the marketplace, the absence of language in the fundamental aspects of our social relations of production, the erosion of communicative action. The language of commodities is an ironic expression, no?</font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"> "Transactions that proceed through the medium of exchange value fall outside of the intersubjectivity of reaching  understanding through language...anonymous valorization processes encroach upon his lifeworld and destroy the ethical order of communicatively established intersubjectivity by turning social relations into purely instrumental relations."  Habermas</font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">Of each getting the best price for the value.</font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">But no one would want to say that Habermas has understood Marx better than Derrida?! The latter is more important as a critic of Marx than as an exegete.</font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">This likeness, however, is not just a</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">similarity but an identity, though one may be substituted for the other, as</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000">in metaphor. All this the linen says, speaking the language of commodities.</font></blockquote> <div><br> <br> </div> <div>Not an identity in the sense that the relative and general forms are not reflexive. A=B, but B does not equal A. Why this is is the key to the fetishism of money.</div> <div><br></div> <div>Rakesh</div> <div><br></div> <div>ps would like to return to the slavery and technology debate at some point.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div> </body> </html>